WASHINGTON -- With the release yesterday of an independent assessment of U.S. nuclear security spending, officials and experts of various political stripes have launched debate over how big the incoming Obama administration's atomic weapons budget should be and where its priorities should lie (see GSN, Jan. 12).
(Jan. 13) -
A Ground-based missile interceptor launches during a December test. A report released yesterday questions U.S. spending priorities regarding missile defense and threat reduction programs (U.S. Missile Defense Agency photo).
The new report -- written by Stephen Schwartz and Deepti Choubey for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace -- presents an aggregate view of $52.4 billion in unclassified nuclear weapon-related expenditures across the fiscal 2008 federal budget.
The figure includes funds spent by the Defense, Energy, State and Homeland Security departments for a wide range programs in five categories: $29 billion for nuclear forces and operational support; $9.2 billion for missile defense; $8.3 billion for deferred environmental and health costs; $5.2 billion for nuclear threat reduction; and $700 million for nuclear incident management.
The authors recommend that President-elect Barack Obama rebalance priorities in his upcoming annual nuclear weapons budgets to give greater weight to preventing proliferation and eliminating the threat of attack, efforts that now account for just one-tenth of total nuclear spending.
"Greater fiscal and programmatic emphasis should be placed on programs that seek to secure and prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, weapons materials and technical knowledge, and to eliminate threats posed by such weapons, materials and knowledge," Schwartz and Choubey wrote.
Schwartz is editor of the Nonproliferation Review at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Choubey is deputy director of Carnegie's Nonproliferation Program.
Efforts by the Defense, Energy and State departments to secure and eliminate nuclear weapons and materials in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere around the globe "have a demonstrated record of success, are proactive, are more cost-effective than technology-driven efforts such as missile defenses," according to the report.
"There is a clear imbalance between the amount of money the U.S. is spending to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons into the hands of terrorists and the amount we spend on our existing arsenal," agreed John Isaacs, executive director of the Council for a Livable World. "Almost two decades after the end of the Cold War, the United States, along with Russia, can dramatically reduce their nuclear weapons stockpiles and ultimately save money -- money that could be used in part to prevent nuclear terrorism."
Overall, the more than $52 billion spent in the nuclear weapons arena surpassed the dollars made available for several other national priorities, such as international relations, the environment, or science and technology, according to the new report.
For example, "the 2008 nuclear weapons and weapons-related 'budget' exceeds all anticipated government expenditures on international diplomacy and foreign assistance," which totaled $39.5 billion, the assessment states. The authors stopped short of calling for specific funding shifts, though, saying they would leave such decisions to policy-makers.
"This exercise today -- and what we're calling for the government to do -- is not about singling out programs for intense criticism or tremendous praise," Schwartz said at a Carnegie event held yesterday to debut the report. "That will happen regardless. That's just going to be a natural outgrowth of this."
The Carnegie-sponsored effort is drawing criticism in some quarters for centering its analysis on budget figures, rather than focusing on the value offered by the various facets of the U.S. nuclear program in preventing proliferation or war.
"The report sets up a false dichotomy between spending on nuclear forces and spending on other priorities like diplomacy, foreign assistance and energy research, suggesting that U.S. priorities are out of balance," David Trachtenberg, a former Pentagon official during the Bush administration, told Global Security Newswire yesterday. "Yet it is silent on how shifting the balance from spending on nuclear forces to these other programs would be more effective in preventing nuclear attack, which, after all, is a major reason we have a nuclear arsenal in the first place."
In this view -- also articulated by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in an October policy speech -- maintaining a viable nuclear arsenal is a crucial aspect of preventing attacks against the United States. A well-maintained and modern nuclear force also helps "extend" deterrence to U.S. allies, making it unnecessary for nations like South Korea or Japan to develop their own atomic weapons, according to this perspective.
Trachtenberg also criticized the report authors for taking a "political" approach to their analysis by omitting reference to legitimate debate over various alternatives for preventing nuclear attacks most effectively.
"Numbers don't always tell the whole story and the cost of a program doesn't always equate to its value," he said. "By comparing apples to oranges and without providing useful context, a reader of this report could come away with the misinformed and erroneous impression that the U.S. is more interested in fighting a nuclear war than in preventing one."
"There's a reason why this mission has kind of atrophied" over the past several years, a setback in nuclear management recently documented by a Pentagon advisory panel led by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, Schwartz said yesterday (see GSN, Jan. 8). "I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing."
Other nuclear arms experts said the United States could spend less on operating and maintaining its arsenal and still preserve a strong and credible deterrent.
"The U.S. should be able to spend half as much within a few years to maintain a minimum deterrent force of 1,000 nuclear weapons or even fewer," Isaacs said.
"The Chinese have proved that a very small nuclear force [of] about two dozen nuclear weapons serves as an effective deterrent force against both Russia and the United States," he added. "The United States has something to learn from the Chinese on this issue."
The United States has an estimated 5,200 nuclear weapons, 2,800 of which have global range and stand ready to launch, according to Hans Kristensen, who directs the Federation of American Scientists' Nuclear Information Project. He served on the Carnegie report's 15-member advisory committee.
Isaacs said the report places "a huge bull's-eye on nuclear weapons for the Obama administration and Congress, which are desperately looking for funds for other programs."
"The point is to have effective oversight, which we can't do right now" because the government does not review nuclear spending as a whole, Schwartz said. "If there was ever a time to start doing it, it's now. The United States doesn't have unlimited resources."
The Carnegie report recommends that Congress pass legislation requiring that the executive branch compile and submit to Capitol Hill a classified and unclassified accounting of its nuclear weapons-related expenditures for the prior, current and next fiscal years.
In addition, the White House should oversee a process to devise nuclear spending projections for the next five to six years as part of its Future Years Defense Program, the authors suggested.
"If we had this on an ongoing basis, you could begin to track" nuclear sector expenditures, Schwartz said. "You could see it going up or down. And you could have metrics and say, 'OK, well, we spent this much this year. Here's what we achieved.' ... But we have no way of doing that now because there aren't any numbers on an ongoing basis to be able to compare things with."
Retired Army National Guard Brig. Gen. David McGinnis, who was among Obama's military advisers during last year's presidential campaign, applauded the recommendation.
"Fiscal transparency within the defense budget is essential to our economic recovery and the nuclear piece is symbolic of this need," he told GSN. "The first element of national power is the economy."
Within the overall nuclear weapons budget, a rebalanced investment could more effectively prevent nuclear war in the long term, according to national security analyst Micah Zenko. He echoed the Carnegie report's central recommendation that funds for missile defense be shifted into securing or eliminating weapons of mass destruction abroad.
In an e-mail message yesterday, Zenko cited a CIA finding that a WMD attack against the United States is more likely to be delivered by "nonmissile" means -- such as container ships, automobiles or aircraft -- than by missiles.
"The U.S. spends almost twice as much per year on R&D of untested missile defenses as it does on efforts to reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism," said Zenko, a former research associate at Harvard University's Project on Managing the Atom. "More funding across the range of U.S. programs responsible for securing fissile material, nuclear weapons and weapons-related components would help."
Speaking yesterday, Schwartz said he would like to see the United States "deal with the threats on the ground rather than waiting for somebody to build a missile and fire it at you, and then turn on the system and use it for the first time and hope that it actually works pretty well. I would feel much safer and I think we'd all be better off financially as a country."
Randall Larsen, a homeland security expert who also sat on the Carnegie report's advisory committee, looked to missile defense as a potential source of funds to boost the budget for nuclear crisis response.
"Today, the [Environmental Protection Agency] spends less than $1 million a year on research for cleanup" in the event that a radiological "dirty bomb" detonates in a U.S. city, said Larsen, national security adviser to the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. "We [also] need more funding in R&D and operations for medical and public health responses to an [improvised nuclear device]. Reduced spending on [national missile defense] will more than pay for other programs, such as these, that will have far better returns on investment."
However, Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Defense Department's Missile Defense Agency, said his organization continues to play a unique and vital role in protecting the nation from nuclear attack.
"Once a hostile missile is in the air and heading towards its target armed with a nuclear weapon, the only way to stop it is with an active missile defense," Lehner told GSN.
"The National Missile Defense Act of 1999 -- signed into law by President Clinton and approved by the Senate with a vote of 97-3 -- mandates that the U.S. deploy a missile defense to defend the United States against a missile attack as soon as technologically feasible," he added. "The law hasn't been changed."
Other federal agency spokesmen have also pushed back on the report's findings.
The Energy Department and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration spent $2.7 billion in fiscal 2008 on nuclear threat reduction, an effort that NNSA spokesman John Broehm said was accelerated under the Bush administration.
At the same time, he termed the $6.6 billion his organization also expended on maintaining nuclear weapons without underground explosive testing "a good deal for the taxpayer." That investment not only helps ensure the nuclear arsenal's viability, but also contributes to the agency's nonproliferation and nuclear incident response capabilities, he said.
"Our nonproliferation work and emergency response work would not be possible without the weapons program," Broehm said. "We rely on weapons program expertise and infrastructure for this work."