By Emelie Rutherford
A leading House authorizer voiced support yesterday for the initial concept behind the Bush administration’s beleaguered Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) effort, and said the next Congress will likely debate the fundamental idea of improving warheads in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Yet Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), chair of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee, said she does not support the RRW proposal in its current form, and that she wants the name to be changed. She said she looks forward to debating the basic idea behind RRW–of upgrading the nuclear arsenal for safety and environmental reasons–while acknowledging the benefits will have to be explained to some decision-makers.
“I think that if I espoused a plan to go to zero on weapons, but said that I need to keep a smaller stockpile, I need it to be more reliable, and more safe, and more environmentally friendly–for the people that work on it and for everybody else–I think that in the short term people would go for that,” Tauscher said during a question-and-answer period after a speech at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington.
She described benefits of working to eliminate nuclear weapons while also improving those still in the stockpile–by getting “rid of the…hedge (weapons), the expense that it took to maintain them and turn those energies to something more productive.”
“That is originally, three years ago, what lab directors and other people talked to me about,” she said. “It became RRW for reasons that only this administration can explain. And it deserves the ugly death it got.”
Yet she said she’s “still for” continuing to pursue an effort to improve some of the existing warheads. She talked of seeking “more security in the weapon, and (taking) beryllium and some really nasty, nasty, nasty stuff out of the weapon.” This doesn’t mean changing the weapon, but “refurbishing it,” she said.
“I think we can do that, but it’s going to take a big national conversation,” she said. “Because I think first and foremost we have to have the CTBT (Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty) ratified, we have to come into compliance with of the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) things, we have to reform and rejuvenate the nonproliferation treaty.” She talked of persuading countries with weapons that not part of the NPT to join.
She said the debate about dramatically lowering the number of weapons while making the existing ones safer and more environmentally sound is “a debate I look forward to.”
“That’s a debate I think we need to describe a little bit better,” she said. “And now that we have Democrats running the table I think that we have a better chance to make that conversation something that people understand.”
Tauscher told reporters after her speech: “As far as I’m concerned the debate is not about RRW.”
“We need to have a thorough (nuclear nonproliferation) review, everything on the table, and a decision to have common language and common goals, and to articulate exactly where we’re going, and then make plans from that,” she said.
Tauscher’s panel holds great sway over RRW, and her district includes the Sandia and Livermore national laboratories.
Lawmakers in the fiscal year 2009 defense appropriations act zeroed the administration’s $23 million request for design work on RRW. Though Congress has not passed a FY ’09 energy appropriation bill, House and Senate lawmakers had agreed to cut the $10 million request in it for RRW.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates lamented last month that Congress has not funded RRW beyond the conceptual phase, saying the program “is about the future credibility of our strategic deterrent and it deserves urgent attention.”
“The program would reinvigorate and rebuild our infrastructure and expertise, and it could potentially allow us to reduce aging stockpiles by balancing the risk between a smaller number of warheads and an industrial complex that could produce new weapons if the need arose,” Gates said Oct. 28 at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
He blamed Congress’ lack of support for RRW on “a deep-seated and quite justifiable aversion to nuclear weapons, in doing anything that might be perceived as lowering the threshold for using them or as creating new nuclear capabilities.” Gates insisted the RRW program is not about new capabilities but about “safety, security and reliability.”
On the campaign trail, President-elect Barack Obama did not signal complete support of or opposition to RRW (Defense Daily, July 3).
Congressional critics such as Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Energy and Water subcommittee, said the White House had not adequately justified the need for what those lawmakers see as a new nuclear weapons program. Supporters including Sen. Peter Domenici (R-N.M.)–the ranking member of the same subcommittee, who is retiring this year–argue lawmakers would support the program if they better understood it.