With potential cuts to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s weapons program looming, the Obama Administration isn’t doing enough to advocate for its own nuclear weapons modernization plan, Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) said yesterday. Senate and House appropriators have cut between $400 and $500 million from the NNSA’s weapons program, and while Republicans on both sides of the Capitol have worked to restore those reductions, an added boost from the Administration hasn’t materialized, according to Turner, the chairman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee. “With those cuts in place as we look to the prospect of an omnibus or a minibus we are all very concerned that there will not be additional dollars that were added [for modernization],” Turner said at a American Foreign Policy Center event. “We continue on the House side to advocate. In doing so we need to do that with a loud voice from the Administration, and we have not heard that voice. Their complicity in the reduction I think complicates the ability of any advocates on the House side or the Senate side to get that money restored. It certainly is a very bad pattern to be just here in the beginning stages [of the modernization plan] to have the funds being cut.”
Turner suggested that the outcome of the debate on NNSA funding would impact how much he fights for language in the FY2012 Defense Authorization Act tying current and future nuclear reductions to the modernization plan. That language, which appears in the House version of the bill but not the Senate, would be a reminder that this was a “long- term commitment when in fact in a very, very short time we’re seeing a pullback.”
Meanwhile, at the same time yesterday, U.S. Strategic Command chief Gen. Robert Kehler offered his own push for a restoration of funding for the B61 life extension program. Senate appropriators cut $43.6 million from the Administration’s $223.6 million request for the program while the House added $55 million, but both chambers have expressed concern about balancing how much work is done on the weapon in a constrained budget environment. The Nuclear Weapons Council met last week to authorize a path forward for what could be a $4 billion-or-more refurbishment, but postponed a decision pending further analytical work on options that it is considering. “We need to do the B61 life extension,” Kehler told reporters on a conference call. “It is the weapon that arms the bomber deterrent and we think that will be one of the weapons that will take us into the future. So we need to do it. The question is balancing where Congress might put us in terms of their budget marks and how we will go forward if we have to exist under those kinds of budget constraints.”
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