Hiding Unilateral Disarmament Objectives

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Gatestone Institute:

What the Ploughshares Fund is actually doing with its proposed budget cuts, it appears, is trying to camouflage the objectives of permanently disarming America of key parts of its nuclear capability.

 

Describing the U.S. nuclear force structure as a "Cold War relic" says nothing about whether the force is still needed. Oddly, the nuclear cuts being proposed do not require any reciprocal Russian reductions.

 

Cutting $20 billion a year from the current U.S. nuclear deterrent would require killing all modernization, plus all the work of extending the life of nuclear warheads. In 20 years, the U.S. would be left with no effective nuclear deterrent, while China, Russia and North Korea are modernizing their nuclear deterrents across the board.

 

"You have to invent a 'Dragon' to slay." — U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, explaining how to kill defense programs.

 

In Washington, a delay often has the same impact as killing a program.

 

It has been 33 years since the U.S. last embarked on a nuclear modernization program.

 

Both the Secretary of the Navy and Secretary of Defense have called for a debate over what the future costs of the nuclear deterrent enterprise should be and what investment is needed to keep the peace and prevent nuclear war.

 

At issue is whether the United States can afford to spend 4% of its defense budget and 0.6% of all federal spending to modernize its nuclear deterrent over the next decade and beyond.