Vice President Kamala Harris’ (D) positions on nuclear weapons, when she’s taken any at all, hew closely to Democratic orthodoxies of support for the Iran nuclear deal and denuclearization of North Korea.
Harris, fast becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for President following President Joe Biden’s (D) July withdrawal from the race, visited the Korean demilitarized zone as vice president. During the visit, according to prepared remarks covered by C-Span, she called for the “complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.”
But as a sitting executive, Harris has otherwise said little publicly about issues affecting defense and civilian nuclear programs at the Department of Energy.
What record there is of her positions consists mostly of her votes as a U.S. Senator from California, and from remarks she made in 2019, when she was running for the Democratic presidential nomination for the first time.
Old remarks about Iran put her on a different footing from the Biden administration in which she now serves.
In a town hall style meeting in 2019, Harris said that then-President Donald Trump’s (R) decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal “was a huge, huge misstep and mistake,” according to a video posted online that year by the dovish Union of Concerned Scientists group.
The nuclear deal, a political agreement the Barack Obama administration struck with Iran in 2015, curbed some U.S. sanctions against Tehran in exchange for a voluntary slowdown in the Islamic Republic’s drive to enrich uranium to levels potent enough for use in a nuclear weapon.
Trump called off the agreement in 2018. The Biden administration explored the possibility of a new deal with Iran but ultimately abandoned the efforts.
