U.S. Democratic lawmakers reacted coolly to Defense Secretary Robert Gates' call last week for support to build a new nuclear warhead, Congressional Quarterly reported (see GSN, Oct. 29).
"While we have a long-term goal of abolishing nuclear weapons once and for all, given the world in which we live, we have to be realistic about that proposition," Gates said in a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The program would reinvigorate and rebuild our infrastructure and expertise, and it could potentially allow us to reduce aging stockpiles by balancing the risk between a smaller number of warheads and an industrial complex that could produce new weapons if the need arose."
Lawmakers for the last two years have rejected Bush administration efforts to fund the new weapon, the Reliable Replacement Warhead; many Democrats said Gates' speech had not changed their skepticism, although they said they were keeping open minds.
"I oppose RRW because after a number of classified briefings, I have come to the conclusion that it is essentially the production of a new nuclear weapon," said Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). "My views are not inviolate, but we know that the Bush administration's goal was to reopen the nuclear door."
"If we are going to maintain a smaller level of weapons as we work toward their elimination, and we have the opportunity to make them safer and more secure without testing, that is a proposal worth exploring," added Representative Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), who chairs the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee (Josh Rogin, Congressional Quarterly, Oct. 30).
Meanwhile, two RRW critics panned Gates' speech as "the opposite of visionary."
Ivan Oelrich and Hans Kristensen, both of the Federation of American Scientists, questioned Gates' rationale for keeping thousands of nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile.
"Just as we don't respond to roadside bombs with our own roadside bombs, nor would we respond to chemical attack with chemical weapons or biological attack with biological weapons. We might respond to nuclear attack with nuclear weapons but we should not allow this to be an unstated assumption," they said on the FAS Strategic Security Blog.
They also criticized the argument that U.S. nuclear weapons are aging and therefore need to be modernized.
"With a budget of billions of dollars, we can't duplicate parts that we could make twenty years ago?" they said, arguing that current stockpile designs would perform as needed into the future (Federation of American Scientists release, Oct. 30).