Zombie Nuke Finally Dead?

Military programs are harder to kill than zombies. But for now, at least, the administration's plan to build a new nuclear weapon appears to be dead. In a not-so-unexpected move, theHouse appropriations committee pulled the president's recommended funding for the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program from next year's defense budget. This is the last of the four congressional committees to have weighed in on the topic, effectively driving a stake through the program's heart - again. New Mexico's Rep. Heather Wilson and Sen. Pete Domenici took a break from hassling U.S. attorneys to voice their disappointment that the nuclear laboratories in their district will be shorted.

Overall, the House bill reduced President Bush's budget request for nuclear weapons programs by $632 million, to $5.9 billion. At the same time, it raised by $491 million, or 75 percent, the amount available for nonproliferation activities. In giving his support to the measure, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey (D-Wis.) emphasized that the weapons program cuts were made "because there's been no strategy for post-Cold War nuclear weapons."

Meanwhile, two advocates of the RRW program, Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.) and Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), spoke out against the House action. Two of the nation's three nuclear weapons laboratories, Los Alamos and Sandia, are in their state.

Wilson, during the House floor debate, described the action as "the most radical shift in U.S. policy on nuclear weapons that I've seen at least since the mid-1990s." At that time, during the Clinton administration, the decision was made to create a stockpile stewardship program that, with the aid of billions of dollars in new scientific equipment, could keep nuclear weapons reliable without testing them by refurbishing their nonnuclear parts.

Wilson added: "The decisions imbedded in this legislation will lead us either to return to nuclear testing or to abandon nuclear deterrence because we will stop maintaining the stockpile."

Domenici, in a Senate floor speech, said the House bill would "send American nuclear deterrence strategy in a new and absolutely unknown direction." He agreed that the RRW program deserved study but said it "must involve far greater resources than those involved in the House report language." He also said the House reductions do "irreparable harm" to the stockpile stewardship program by cutting funds for some needed facilities.

I believe that Obey's comment about lacking a post-Cold War nuclear weapons strategy also applies to the Defense Department's Chemical and Biological (CB) defense program. As Rupert Smith's The Utility of Force points out, we aren't in an era of industrial warfare (as he terms it) any more. Yet, we have the Department of Defense locked into a particular direction on both nuclear weapons strategy and CB defense, a direction that was set in the 1970s and has never changed.

We still have CB detectors, protective masks and suits, shelter systems, and decontamination devices being developed to Cold
War concepts and overly-ambitious technical requirements. We still have leadership who envisions the Fulda Gap scenario (Scuds drenching us with agent) rather than the much smaller and distinctly different CB
weapon-armed adversaries who we face today.

Although we've had the Quadrennial Defense Reviews and discussions about "net-centric warfare," all that has been done to the military over the past six years are minor tweaks around the edges of a massive and slow-moving industrial war model. The real transformation -
a transformation of concepts and organization - hasn't taken place yet, and it's seen by the Pentagon's reluctance to change its old concepts of how we ought to employ - and combat - weapons of mass destruction. I know why the CB defense community has failed to change - a very distinct lack of conceptual thinkers and a history of being treated as the second cousin at the family table - but the nuclear weapons community has no such shortfalls, and so the lack of their ability to think about the future "combating WMD" situation and what our military needs is just that much more surprising.

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-- Jason Sigger, cross-posted at Armchair Generalist

__ALSO: __

* Congress Nukes New Warhead
* California's Nuclear "Prize"
* Dazed and Confused by RRW (1, 2, 3, 4)