A United Nations treaty that seeks to ban nuclear weapons is legally unsound and would make the world less safe, a senior White House nuclear-security official said Tuesday during an unapologetically blunt address to domestic and international policy wonks at a Washington think-tank.
The United Nations voted July 7 to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which not a single nuclear-armed member supported. Several U.S. allies without nuclear arsenals also withheld support well before the Donald Trump administration blasted the proposed ban here Tuesday. The treaty is open for signatures beginning Sept. 20 and must garner 50 to enter into force.
The White House worries the treaty would prohibit governments that ratify it from having a “security relationship” with any country that relies even in part on nuclear weapons for national defense, Christopher Ford, senior director for weapons of mass destruction and counterproliferation at the National Security Council, said in prepared remarks at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Treaty signatories might also have to prohibit businesses within their borders from dealing with nuclear-armed nations and their allies, Ford said.
The senior Trump administration adviser called the treaty hastily and shoddily written, and blasted the document as sanctimonious “anti-nuclear virtue signaling” that would “actually work against international peace and security.”
“Advocates of the ban are fundamentally unserious about addressing the real challenges of maintaining peace and security in a complicated and dangerous world,” Ford said.
The former George W. Bush administration State Department official also took issue with what he said was the accord’s “pernicious false equivalency” between the U.S. and its allies, and nondemocratic nuclear-armed nations “that seek to upend the global order.”
Ford did not say which nations he was talking about, though North Korea falls safely into that description.
Asked by multiple audience members about the tone of his remarks Tuesday, Ford said, “I thought it was useful to be clear and blunt.” He added, “As you’ve probably noticed, we’re not all that focused on how well-liked we are around the world.”
The Trump administration is in the middle of a Nuclear Posture Review expected to wrap up in December. Amid the wide-ranging look at U.S. nuclear forces, the White House requested better than a 7-percent year-over-year budget increase in 2018 for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) that maintains the nation’s stockpile of nuclear-weapons materials.
A House spending bill would grant most of that request, while Senate appropriators recommended a 5-percent funding increase for the NNSA. With less than a month of legislative work days left before the Oct. 1 start of fiscal 2018, it remains possible that Congress will have to extend 2017 spending levels into next year as it puts the finishing touches on new spending bills.
