test_pdf.pdf

SENA
ENATOR
JACK
REED
power will lighten the labors of mankind and increase the standards of living all over the world.”
For more than 50 years, the United States has been in the vanguard in ensuring that President Truman’s first
alternative never becomes a reality. The United States has both urged and acted to de-legitimize the use of nuclear
weapons and other weapons of mass destruction through the earliest Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the Intermediate
Nuclear Forces Treaty, the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, presidential nuclear reduction initiatives, the
Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, various nuclear weapons testing limitation treaties, and bilateral diplomatic
efforts to encourage other states to forswear nuclear weapons. The United States, under both Democratic and
Republican administrations, has worked to reduce the possibility of devastation.
Today, however, the Bush administration is implementing a departure from this decades-long bipartisan
policy of arms control and risk reduction. President [George W.] Bush has neither reduced the size of the U.S.
nuclear weapons arsenal, nor decreased the nation’s reliance on nuclear weapons. Instead, he has pushed Congress
to adopt measures that may actually lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. These new nuclear
weapons policies are being implemented as part of a broader national security strategy that increasingly relies on
pre-emptive military action to compel states concerned not to pursue weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, the
Bush administration has not substantially increased efforts to reduce the risk associated with the former Soviet
Union’s Cold War weapons and material. On the contrary, the Bush administration initially cut these programs.
Recognizing their importance, Congress restored the funding, but notwithstanding statements of support for these
programs, the president has failed in his budget to fund these programs at levels commensurate with their importance.
The administration is pursuing an agenda which promotes nuclear weapons during a time when the need to
de-legitimize and stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons and weapons-related technologies is as important as
ever. Revelations about the capabilities of the Iraqi nuclear program prior to the 1991 Gulf War, the North Korean,
Iranian, and Libyan nuclear programs, as well as the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests of 1998, have demonstrated
that nuclear weapons remain highly sought after.
In practical terms, however, North Korean and other tough WMD proliferation cases defy quick military
solutions. Military pre-emption alone cannot replace a comprehensive and preventive arms control and nonproliferation
strategy. Nonproliferation rules and standards of behavior establish the legal, political, and moral basis for
organizing U.S. and international pressure to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials to
states or to terrorist groups. New proliferation dangers and changing threats to our national security continue to
require nonproliferation strategies. These strategies must change as the threats change to remain effective.
Changing, strengthening, and adapting, not abandoning, preventive diplomacy in arms control should
remain at the heart of U.S. national security policy. The Bush administration, however, has set a different course. It
has clearly shown its distaste for treaties. Administration officials may argue that it did conclude the Moscow
Treaty with Russia. Unfortunately, this treaty is arms control in name only. It does not actually require the elimination
of any nuclear weapon. There is not timetable for compliance, no definition of deployment, and it does not
provide for additional verification mechanisms. Under the Moscow Treaty, the reductions in deployed nuclear
weapons do not have to be achieved until December 31, 2012, and can be fully reversed on January 1, 2013. The
Moscow treaty is not an effective adaptation of arms control. The trend toward abandoning, not adapting, arms
control is evident in the administration’s passive neglect of treaties and in its aggressive actions to revitalize the
role of nuclear weapons.
In December of 2001, the Bush administration completed its Nuclear Posture Review [NPR]. The NPR supported
budget requests to fund the production of hundreds of new plutonium pits per year—a necessary component
of a nuclear weapon—to support the design of new weapons, and to shorten the time necessary to plan and
conduct a nuclear test. These initiatives strongly suggest that the resumption of nuclear weapons testing is the
desired goal, not as the last resort to maintain the existing stockpile—as contemplated under the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty—but to support the development of new, smaller, or otherwise more usable nuclear weapons.
The NPR also indicates for the first time that the United States is prepared to use nuclear weapons against
non-nuclear nations that are not aligned with a nuclear power, including the possibility of first-use and a preemptive
strike. The Bush nuclear posture review combines and thus blurs the traditional distinction between nuclear
and non-nuclear offensive strikes. Instead of deterring an attack by a nuclear power—the Cold War deterrence
approach—the Bush NPR makes nuclear weapons just one more tool in our toolkit, one more option to exercise.
The president’s intentions became clearer in September 2002 when the president issued his national security
strategy and in December 2002 when he issued his strategy to combat weapons of mass destruction. Each document
lays out a clear strategy of preemption as an option regardless of the immediacy of the threat. These documents,
coupled with the administration’s budget request, set forth the administration’s desire to have a nuclear
weapon that could be used in a first-strike preemptive fashion against a non-nuclear or a nuclear state.
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