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Supporters of our bloated Pentagon budget are not taking this fight lying down. The defense industry has launched a massive lobbying campaign, dubbed “Second to None,” urging people to oppose cuts to the military budget. Super committee member Sen. Jon Kyl threw a temper tantrum and threatened to quit if military budget cuts were even on the table. Everyone from members of Congress to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta are making unfounded claims about doomsday scenarios that would occur if the military budget decreases.

We need to push back. Click here to tell the super committee to protect our real priorities by cutting wasteful military and nuclear spending.

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In a previous post (Nuclear 18 Wheelers; Yee Haw!!! , Sept. 6, 2009) I wrote about the government’s “Safeguards Transporters”, those big rigs that travel the nation’s highways and byways, delivering nukes to naval and air force bases, and who knows where else.

As an Occupational and Environmental Health professional I spent a great deal of time dealing with risk assessment and risk management. Bottom line: Everything entails some level of risk, no matter how small. Of course we have to look at not only the probability that something might happen (accident), but what would be the severity of the outcome(s).

We all know that the outcomes from messing around with (let alone using) nuclear weapons are not pretty. Whether it be an accident involving the handling or a warhead, or losing track of one, we’re dealing with potentially serious outcomes. Of course we should expect that the folks transporting nuclear weapons are the best of the best, right???

Think again!!! Read the beginning of the November 22, 2010 Associated Press article, Report: Nuclear weapon drivers sometimes got drunk.

Federal agents hired to transport nuclear weapons and components sometimes got drunk while on convoy missions, a government watchdog said Monday. In an incident last year, police detained two agents who went to a bar during an assignment.

The Energy Department’s assistant inspector general, Sandra D. Bruce, said her office reviewed 16 alcohol-related incidents involving agents, candidate-agents and others from the government’s Office of Secure Transportation between 2007 through 2009. Nearly 600 federal agents ship nuclear weapons, weapon components and special nuclear material across the U.S.

Two incidents in particular raised red flags, the report said, because they happened during secure transportation missions while agents checked into local hotels while on extended missions. In these cases, the vehicles were placed in “safe harbor,” meaning they were moved to secure locations.

In one case, in 2007, an agent was arrested for public intoxication. The other occurred last year, when police handcuffed and temporarily detained two agents after an incident at a bar.

“Alcohol incidents such as these, as infrequent as they may be, indicate a potential
vulnerability in OST’s critical national security mission,” the report warns.

So much for the government’s Office of [IN]Secure Transportation!!!
You can read the whole report yourself, but when taken along with other documented incidents in the overall care and handling of nuclear weapons – whether it be loading nuclear armed Cruise missiles on a bomber by “mistake”, putting a ladder through a Trident missile nose cone or transporting nuclear weapons while drunk – it should make us ask the question, “Is all this worth the risk for weapons that can never be used unless we want to commit mass murder (or omnicide)?”

National Nuclear Security Administration spokesman Damien LaVera responded to the report: “NNSA’s Office of Secure Transportation maintains a highly trained, highly professional force that has safely and securely transported nuclear materials more than 100 million miles without a single fatal accident or any release of radiation.”

That should give us all great comfort, right? Wrong. It only takes one accident, and there is no such thing as absolute safety. And in this case the stakes are too high. It’s just a matter of time. And speaking of time, it is most definitely time for our government to take its disarmament responsibility seriously.

Peace,

Leonard

P.S. – The Office of Secure Transportation is currently accepting applications (according to their Website. I certainly hope they are tightening up their hiring practices.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) gazes adoringly at a nuclear weapon

While the media was obsessed with its favorite kidnapping story, they have failed to notice that Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) has been holding our security hostage by using partisan tactics to delay ratification of New START in exchange for $10 billion in ransom money for the nuclear weapons complex.

From the beginning, we knew that false claims about the need to “modernize” our nuclear arsenal (read: build new nuclear weapons) would enter into the debate around New START and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Despite scientific evidence that current programs in place can safely maintain our arsenal as we reduce its size, Jon Kyl and other members of Congress are trying to argue that the exorbitant amount of money the Obama administration is allocating to the nuclear weapons complex is insufficient.

In an example of what I would consider an unwise negotiating strategy, the Obama administration anticipated these arguments and increased the budget for the nuclear weapons complex by 10% (while declaring a spending freeze on critical domestic funding no less) prior to any debate on New START.  While the Obama administration’s Nuclear Posture Review states that they have no intention of building new nuclear weapons, they are setting the stage for future weapons development by increasing the US’s capacity to build weapons.  New weapons production could quickly and easily be ramped up by a president who does not share President Obama’s commitment to nuclear nonproliferation (or as one of my colleagues puts it when arguing against this increase, President Palin. Shudder).  While many viewed this investment in the nuclear weapons complex, along with a ten year modernization plan promising $180 billion for the complex and delivery vehicles, as a way to isolate Kyl in the debate around nuclear weapons treaties, quite the opposite has happened.  While only two senators have stated their intention to vote against New START, many are waiting to hear that Kyl is satisfied before they are willing to throw in their support.  Kyl is slowing down the entire process, and has far more power than he should in this debate, not less.

New START is a modest but important treaty.  Similar arms agreements have passed by large bipartisan margins.  As of today, it has been 252 days since the previous START agreement expired, meaning 252 days without on-site monitoring and verification of Russia’s arsenal.  Reinstating that verification and demonstrating a US commitment to reducing nuclear weapons are critical to US national security, but Sen. Kyl is hijacking the process for $10 billion in unneeded nuclear weapons pork.

Given Kyl’s obstinacy on this key national security issue, I was struck by the irony of his position regarding President Obama’s immigration policy:

Last month, Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona accused the administration of holding the Southwest border “hostage” by using border security as an immigration-reform bargaining chip.

Apparently using security as a bargaining chip is only OK when Jon Kyl does it. Kyl and other Republican senators who are delaying consideration of New START need to stop playing politics with nuclear security and accept the scientific evidence that the nuclear weapons stockpile is safe and reliable.  If they don’t, the Obama administration and their fellow senators need to call them on their obstruction, and force them to choose in a floor vote on New START if they are really going to oppose a treaty that every reasonable foreign policy expert supports.

One of the most egregious arguments peddled by New START proponents is that no reasonable arms control expert is opposed to New START. That is blatantly false. Americans deserve honesty in this debate…

The graph speaks for itself. They also offered this brief analysis:

Over Seventy former high-level government officials and senior military officers have come out in support of New START.  In addition, every administration official supported the treaty, from Hillary Clinton, to Bob Gates, and, representing the entire uniformed military, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen.

Heritage rounded up six – five George W. Bush appointees and a former Senator.

The scoreboard overwhelmingly favors New START.  The policy debate has been settled.  It’s time for the Senate to ratify this treaty so that the United States can reap the national security benefits that the treaty provides.

The treaty calls for reductions in the sizes of US and Russian nuclear arsenals, as well as an increase in information sharing between the two nations. The original START expired last December, along with the framework it provided for verifying that each nation was in keeping with the agreement. The new agreement will replace the expired one, and the verification measures have provided a backdrop of urgency in ensuring the treaty passes. Since December, there have been no “boots on the ground” inspecting Russian arsenals. Sen. Dick Lugar, a leading Republican in favor of the treaty, had this to say:

Some skeptics have pointed out that Russia may not be in total compliance with its obligations under START. Others have expressed opposition to the START Treaty on the basis that no arms control agreement is 100-percent verifiable. But such concerns fail to appreciate how much information is provided through the exchange of data mandated by the Treaty, on-site inspections, and national technical means. Our experiences over many years have proven the effectiveness of the Treaty’s verification provisions and served to build a basis for confidence between the two countries when doubts arose. The bottom line is that the United States is far safer as a result of those 600 START inspections than we would be without them.

In early April both nations’ leaders signed the document in Prague. It’s currently being considered by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which will likely vote to send it to the full Senate in the next few weeks. The real hurdles will be getting a successful vote on the treaty in the full Senate as soon as possible.

This is not a radical treaty. For one, its reductions are fairly modest. Normally this treaty would garner strong bipartisan support. The Senate approved George W. Bush’s Moscow Treaty 95-0 in 2003 and George H. W. Bush’s START agreement 93-6 in 1992. But many in the GOP are keen to deny the Democrats a foreign policy victory just before the November elections and are holding up the process to try to extract concessions to bulk up the already bloated nuclear weapons complex. The Obama administration has offered a whopping $180 billion 10-year increase to funding for nuclear weapons, and it’s unclear exactly how that funding would be used. So some GOP are still looking for funding that is clearly for new nuclear weapons programs, something eschewed in the president’s nuclear posture review, and a development that would contradict the leadership-by-example message the US might send with this treaty.

So the administration has been pulling out the stops to push for the 7 or so votes that hang in the balance for ratification. Secretary Gates and Clinton have both testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in support for the treaty, as has Energy Secretary Chu and Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If that wasn’t convincing enough, even Cold Warrior Henry Kissinger came before the committee and had this to say :

In deciding on ratification, the concerns need to be measured against the consequences of non-ratification, particularly interrupting a [bilateral arms control] process that has been going on for decades, the relationship to the NPT, and to the attempt to achieve a strategic coherence. And so, for all these reasons, I recommend ratification of this treaty…

In short, this committee’s decision will affect the prospects for peace for a decade or more. It is, by definition, not a bipartisan, but a nonpartisan, challenge…

This START treaty is an evolution of treaties that have been negotiated in previous administrations of both parties. And its principal provisions are an elaboration or a continuation of existing agreements. Therefore, a rejection of them would indicate that a new period of American policy had started that might rely largely on the unilateral reliance of its nuclear weapons, and would therefore create an element of uncertainty in the calculations of both adversaries and allies. And therefore, I think it would have an unsettling impact on the international environment.

One of the red herrings the Republicans are using in the debate is concern that the treaty might reduce US missile defense capabilities. I don’t think it’d be such a bad thing to save a few billion dollars on a missile defense program that still, to this day, shows no promise of working, or even being relevant to our real security concerns. Still, members of the administration and Pentagon officials have been swearing up and down that this treaty won’t limit our plans for missile defense.

During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last Thursday, leading US officials including Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton discussed the importance of ratifying the START treaty and refuted claims that the new treaty will “limit” U.S. missile defense deployment.

According to Defense Secretary Robert Gates :

We are discussing missile defense cooperation with Russia, which we believe is in the interests of both nations… but such talks have nothing to do with imposing any limitations on our programs or deployment plans.

The Obama administration hopes to ratify START before the November Congressional elections, though some think the vote could occur in a lame duck session after the November election. The Senate could vote as early as August, but it will take real momentum to make sure that happens.

Rebecca Glass contributed to this post.