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SENA
ENATOR
JACK
REED
In the fiscal year 2003 budget request, the administration proposed to begin a three-year effort design a robust
nuclear earth penetrator, RNEP, to use against hard and deeply buried targets. The RNEP would modify an
existing large-yield nuclear device to penetrate a hard surface, such as rock, survive, and then detonate. Senate
Democrats were able to delay spending money on the RNEP for six months by requiring a report identifying the
types of targets that this weapon is designed to hold at risk and the employment policy for such an RNEP. Notwithstanding
the fact that there is no clear military requirement for an RNEP, the administration is forging ahead. In its
fiscal year 2004 budget request, the administration proposed a second year of funding for the RNEP.
Also integral to the administration’s strategy of preemption is the desire for new precision small nuclear
weapons with yields of less than five kilotons. The administration’s first step towards this goal was to propose the
repeal of Section 3136 of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1994, which prohibits the secretary
of Energy from conducting any research and development which could lead to the production by the United States
of new low-yield nuclear weapons including a precision low-yield warhead.
In 2003 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Ambassador Linton Brooks, acting director of
the National Nuclear Security Administration, did not suggest that the new nuclear weapons work is needed to
meet a new military requirement. Instead, he argued that, in his words, “We are seeking to free ourselves from
intellectual prohibitions against exploring a full range of technical options.” Pressed further, Brooks provided a
more telling explanation of the administration’s motives, saying, “I have a bias in favor of something that is the
minimum destruction. That means I have a bias in favor of things that might be usable.” Despite strong Democratic
opposition, the ban was repealed and $6 million was authorized for this research. Proponents of this new nuclear
policy, with its bias in favor of things that are usable, argue that arms control and nonproliferation have failed and
therefore new nuclear weapons, concepts, and weapons are needed. They cite a litany of states that have acquired
nuclear weapons since the adoption of the [nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty] NPT in 1968: India, Israel, Pakistan,
South Africa, and apparently North Korea.
Arms control and nonproliferation strategies, however, succeeded in ensuring that far fewer states acquired
nuclear weapons and established a global norm against the possession and use of nuclear weapons. Forty years
ago, when the original nuclear powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China—had a
monopoly on nuclear weapons, it was routinely assumed that proliferation would be rapid and irreversible.
President Kennedy predicted in the early 1960s that an additional 25 countries might develop nuclear weapons
within 10 years. This dire prediction did not come true because of efforts at arm control exemplified by the NPT.
Moreover, of the five states that have acquired nuclear weapons since 1968, three—Israel, India, and Pakistan—
never signed onto the NPT. South Africa gave up its nuclear weapons and joined the regime as a non-possessor
state. That leaves the very special case of North Korea, which joined the NPT in 1985 and has been caught on at
least two occasions violating its obligations before its announced repudiation of the treaty.
Critics of the nonproliferation regime frequently fail also to acknowledge that Argentina, Brazil, South Korea,
and Taiwan cease their suspected nuclear programs in part because of the international norms represented by the
NPT. Similarly, with the demise of the Soviet Union, the newly independent states of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and
Ukraine, found themselves in possession of nuclear weapons. All of them voluntarily relinquished their weapons
in favor of joining the NPT. Their decision, at the urging of the United States and others, reaffirmed the norm of
nonproliferation. At the time, Ukraine and Kazakhstan were respectively the third and fourth largest nuclear
powers in the world.
Despite its successes, however, the arms control regime is under stress. Today, nonproliferation is being
advocated by the United States as do what I say, not do what I do. Unfortunately, the United States is more often
imitated rather than obeyed. The goals of the nuclear posture review, the national security strategy, and the national
strategy to combat weapons of mass destruction are reflected in congressional action authorizing new
nuclear weapons research and repealing the ban on low-yield nuclear weapons research.
Unfortunately, these policies and actions will begin to take the United States in a dangerous new direction
that marks a major shift in American policy, which is inconsistent with our long-standing commitment under the
nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to end the nuclear arms race, and which makes a mockery of our argument to other
countries around the world that they should not develop or test nuclear weapons.
The Bush administration, through a series of actions taken over the past three years, is quietly moving to
change the longstanding bipartisan consensus on nuclear weapons to make nuclear weapons more usable and to
see them as just another option, or as a May 2003 article by Bill Keller in the New York Times Magazine suggests to
make the unthinkable thinkable.
The United States must reverse the course we now seem to be taking. Our nation must pursue comprehensive
and practical efforts to deal with the shortcomings and unfinished parts of the global nuclear, chemical, and
biological weapons arms control regime in order to adapt to the new threats and the new technologies of the post-
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