Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor Vol. 22 No. 44
Visit Archives | Return to Issue
PDF
Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor
Article 1 of 11
November 16, 2018

Aspiring Dem HASC Chair Has Three-Point Plan for Nuke Policy

By Dan Leone

WASHINGTON — The aspiring chair of the House Armed Services Committee wants to scrap the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, whip up a multilateral Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces-style treaty, and take a run at making no-first-use the nuclear law of the land.

Speaking here Wednesday at the Ploughshares Fund’s “Future of U.S. Nuclear Policy” conference, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) enumerated a three-point nuclear policy plan for the 116th Congress set to gavel in on Jan. 3:

“Totally redo the Nuclear Posture Review is number one,” Smith said from the podium, just over a week after Democrats won a House majority. “Number two is the importance of multilateral arms deals. We need more multilateralism. We should work with China and Russia to redo the INF [Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces] treaty. We should certainly make sure that we maintain New START [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty].

“The other thing is to avoid the miscalculation of stumbling into nuclear war,” Smith said. “This is where I think the no-first-use bill … is incredibly important.”

After his speech, Smith told reporters that paring back the ongoing intercontinental ballistic-missile (ICBM) modernization programs at the Department of Energy and the Pentagon “would be one way” of furthering his nuclear policy aims.

New ICBMs — designs for which Boeing and Northrop Grumman are maturing under 2017 Pentagon contracts worth a combined $2 billion or so over four-and-a-half years — will require new plutonium warhead cores that the Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plans to build at expanded facilities in New Mexico, and new facilities in South Carolina.

The plutonium upgrades at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico alone will cost more than $1 billion over the next five years.

Smith also reiterated his opposition to the low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead the GOP-controlled Congress funded this year at President Donald Trump’s request.

“We’re going to stop the use of low-yield nuclear weapons,” Smith said. “It makes no sense for us to build low-yield nuclear weapons [and] I think we’ve got an opportunity in this session to reset.”

Some of the legislative grunt-work for that reset will be laid by Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), who spoke at the conference before Smith. Markey said he will refile legislation from the 115th Congress that would if passed forbid the United States from conducting a nuclear-first strike. Markey also said he would refile a bill from this session to ban the low-yield submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead. Smith is a co-sponsor on the low-yield bill, which will be null and void after the current Congress gavels out.

Aside from ICBMs and the low-yield warhead, Smith is opposed generally to the current, 30-year nuclear modernization program that the Barack Obama administration began in 2016, and which the Trump administration bolstered this year.

Smith said the U.S. cannot afford to spend more than $1 trillion over 30 years to upgrade and maintain the current nuclear arsenal and complex while also paying for upgrades to conventional weapon systems.

Meanwhile, Smith did not really dwell on the two keystone nuclear-arms treaties between Russia and the United States, the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty and the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

The Trump administration said in October it would withdraw from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty, which forbids the U.S. and Russia from deploying conventional- or nuclear-armed ground missiles with ranges between 500 kilometers and 5,500 kilometers (about 310 miles and 3,100 miles). The administration has complained the bi-lateral treaty allows China to build too many ground-based missiles in this range.

The administration has also been non-committal about extending the Obama-era New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which limits the U.S. and Russia to: 700 deployed intercontinental- and submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers; 1,550 fielded strategic warheads; and 800 deployed and nondeployed long-range launchers. The treaty expires Feb. 5, 2021, but could be extended into 2026.

In U.S. elections last week, Democrats won enough seats to return to the majority in the House of Representatives come Jan. 3. However, Trump has at least two more years in office, and the Senate will still be controlled by a GOP majority that has already lined up en bloc behind Trump’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review.

In that environment, Smith moved to temper expectations among the decidedly dovish audience here that a single Democrat-controlled chamber could make more than incremental progress trimming the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

“I would be being unbelievably dishonest with you if I said I have some vision, some plan, that’s going to eliminate nuclear weapons,” Smith said. “It’s a complicated, difficult world.”

A former staffer for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) made a similar point in a panel discussion after Smith’s speech.

In the 116th Congress, “it might be hard to build a consensus for cuts,” said Mieke Eoyang, onetime Kennedy staffer and current vice president for the national security program for the Washington-based Third Way nonprofit. “A divided government tends to push towards the status quo.”

Comments are closed.

Partner Content
Social Feed

Tweets by @EMPublications