Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
8/1/2014
A new report from Harvard University’s Belfer Center criticizes the Obama Administration for backing off its nuclear nonproliferation plans and calls on Congress to restore at least $100 million in nonproliferation cuts in Fiscal Year 2015. The report, “Cutting Too Deep: The Obama Administration’s Proposals for Nuclear Security Spending Reductions,” notes that the NNSA requested a $399 million cut to nonproliferation spending while boosting its funding request for the NNSA’s weapons program by $534 million.
The report suggests spreading the $100 million in restored cuts evenly between the International Material Protection and Cooperation program and the Global Threat Reduction Initiative. “The U.S. government should not allow nuclear security progress to be slowed by lack of funds,” the report said. “Given the immense consequences of a nuclear terrorist attack and the modest costs of nuclear security, the basic U.S. policy should be that no effort that shows promise of being able to make a significant and lasting reduction in the risk of nuclear terrorism should be delayed for lack of money.”
Report Calls for Strategic Plan, Significant Funding Boost in FY 2016
Other nonproliferation programs could also benefit from increases, the report said. “Even a cursory examination of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) nonproliferation budget suggests that larger budgets would offer opportunities for faster progress toward key objectives, such as strengthening efforts to control dangerous technology exports and interdict illicit technology transfers around the world or developing enhanced technologies for nuclear verification,” the report said.
The report also recommended the Obama Administration draft a “strategic, prioritized” plan for quickly securing nuclear weapons and nuclear material around the world, and to support it with significant budget increases in FY 2016. “Nuclear security is both affordable and a smart investment, even in a time of stringent budgets,” the report said. “Throughout the four-year effort, the budgets for nuclear security averaged less than two parts in a thousand of U.S. defense spending, for an effort to address what President Obama and President Bush before him identified as the single greatest threat to U.S. national security. This is an enormous return on a low-cost investment.”
Senate Appropriators Boosted Nonprolif. Funding by $422.8 Million
Senate appropriators already took action to boost the NNSA’s nonproliferation work, providing $1.98 billion for its nonproliferation account, a $422.8 million increase over the Administration’s $1.55 billion FY15 request. In contrast, the House-passed version of the FY 2015 Energy and Water Appropriations Act matched the Administration’s request.
In the report accompanying its version of the bill, the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee said it was concerned that NNSA had not made nonproliferation a top priority, allowing critical milestones to slip. Notably, it said that shutting down or converting 200 research reactors from using highly enriched uranium would be pushed back by five years to 2035. “The Committee believes significant quantities of nuclear and radiological materials are still unsecure and vulnerable to theft,” the appropriators said. “More than 1,000 kilograms of highly enriched uranium are still sitting in a handful of countries, large quantities of plutonium are still at risk, and over a hundred reactors still need to be converted to low enriched uranium or shut down. Further, thousands of radiological sources at medical facilities in the United States and overseas are not well protected and could be used for radiological dispersal devices, which could cause serious economic, psychological, and social disruption.”
White House Ignored NNSA Plan
Also this week, a report by the Center for Public Integrity said the Administration ignored a May 2013 NNSA plan to increase nonproliferation activities in the wake of President Obama’s four-year goal to secure the most vulnerable nuclear material around the world. According to the center, the previously unreleased report noted that two tons of highly enriched uranium remained in research reactors around the world, and worldwide stocks of plutonium were growing at a pace of 740 bombs’ worth of material a year. According to the report, the NNSA plan called the four-year effort a success but said there are “still serious threats that require urgent attention.”
