Senate Republicans continued to press the Administration on its commitment to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons complex and arsenal yesterday, this time taking their complaints to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing yesterday, Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Jim Risch (R-Idaho) accused the Administration of reneging on modernization-related promises made during debate on the New START Treaty. Clinton offered a slightly different take on Administration’s lower-than-anticipated funding request, which has previously been explained by Administration officials as a reflection of across-the-government fiscal belt tightening. The Administration requested $11.5 billion overall for the agency, and $7.58 billion for the NNSA’s weapons program, approximately $370 million less than it had projected a year ago, and Clinton suggested the reasons for the budget pullback were as much practical as fiscal. “As I understand it, it is what the experts who will be doing the work at the labs and elsewhere believe can be effectively spent in a year,” Clinton said during an exchange with Corker before noting the budget constraints facing the Administration. “I really want to say that I think that, given the budget, that the President and the Administration is meeting the assurances that were given to you and others. It is tough in a time of budget restraint.”
She suggested that financial commitments to modernization would continue into the future. “$11.5 billion that will be this year’s investment will be followed by more which will be followed by more because, I mean, if you gave the NNSA a hundred billion dollars they couldn’t physically do the work,” she said. “So I believe that we’re on the right track but let me take that and get the Department of Energy to respond.” Corker, who voted for the treaty, questioned whether the budgetary pullback created a “kind of integrity issue” and suggested it created uncertainty for future agreements.
He also suggested that it could have an immediate impact on the New START Treaty itself, which caps the strategic deployed nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and Russia at 1,550 warheads. “If we are not going to modernize as was laid out by everybody involved as being very important, including our chairman, should we consider reducing, slowing the commitment on the [New] START Treaty since we’re not really living up to the modernization component that was so talked about in such detail with such commitment by all involved?” Corker asked. In separate comments to Clinton, Risch suggested that “there are a good number of people on my side of the aisle that feel that the promises are not being kept.” Clinton responded by saying that the Administration made the promises intending to keep them. “We took our obligations seriously and we are fulfilling them,” she said. “There may be debate about, you know, how fast we’re going, where we’re doing it. That I don’t have any expertise on. But I want to reassure you that certainly I acted in good faith.”
