House Committee Votes to Hamstring New START Reductions

Today's top nuclear policy stories, events, and analysis with excerpts in bullet form.

Stories we're following today - Thursday, May 12, 2011:

House Panel Approves Limits on Complying with Arms Pact with Russia - Walter Pincus and Greg Jaffe in The Washington Post [link]

• The House Armed Services Committee approved an amendment Wednesday that could limit presidential authority to comply with [the New START Treaty].
• Under the amendment...none of those reductions could be made through 2017 without a certification to Congress from the secretaries of Defense and Energythat costly modernization plans for the U.S. nuclear weapons complex were being carried out. The Obama administration agreed to those plans last year.
• A second element in the amendment would prohibit any reductions outside the treaty...before the energy secretary certifies two new weapons-production facilities as operational.
• Rep. Rick Larsen (D-WA), who led opposition to the measure, said the amendment is an attempt to rewrite the treaty or at least tie the hands of President Obama or future presidents in managing the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

House Panel Authorizes Nearly $700 Billion in Defense Spending - John T. Bennett for The Hill [link]

• The panel approved a baseline Pentagon spending level of $553 billion, matching the Obama administration's request.
• It also authorized the Energy Department to spend $18 billion on nuclear weapons projects, and cleared the military to spend $118 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• The House Armed Services panel approved several amendments that would require presidential notification if specific aspects of the nation's nuclear targeting strategy are changed and keep "forward-deployed nuclear forces ... based in Europe."

HASC In A Parallel Budgetary Universe - Gordon Adams in The Will and the Wallet [link]

• From a budget perspective, the House Armed Services Committee is clearly living in a parallel, and very unreal, universe.
• Looks like the budget committee in the Senate, maybe the Gang of Six, and the appropriators are going to have to deal with the HASC’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” A lot of what is getting authorized today is going to get a relook when the realists take over the budget process.
  

Obama Administration Stays the Course on Test Ban - Paul Carroll for Ploughshares Fund [link]

• [On Tuesday] Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Ellen Tauscher, gave a speech in which she stated the U.S. government’s intent to move ahead with ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).
• Ratification of the CTBT would be another key step to improving U.S. and international security...It will also strengthen the international norm against nuclear testing, cap the arms race in Southeast Asia and improve our ability to detect and deter nuclear tests by rogue states.
• These benefits can be realized without hurting our own defenses. There is broad technical agreement that we do not need to conduct nuclear tests to ensure that our remaining weapons are safe or reliable.

EVENT: Inescapable, Unanswerable Contradictions: Five Fundamental Challenges to Nuclear Weapon Orthodoxy

• Ward Wilson of the Monterey Institute
• 2:00-3:30 p.m., Center for Strategic International Studies, 1800 K St., N.W., Washington, D.C., 4th Floor Conference Room
• RSVP to tspitzer-hobeika@csis.org

U.N. Says Iran Violated Arms Ban - Joe Lauria for The Wall Street Journal [link]

• Tehran has shipped conventional weapons to Syria in violation of a U.N. arms-export ban, according to a new U.N. report, which also concludes that U.N. sanctions are constraining Iran's pursuit of materiel for nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
• The report, reviewed Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal, says sanctions are working because nations are "taking a more active role" in implementing them at ports and customs points and through financial and regulatory bodies.
• The report makes a series of recommendations including the names of new individuals and companies to be put on the U.N.'s sanction list and to make available on the Internet the proscribed items so that nations may more easily monitor their transport.
  

Ad for radioactive soil to increase crop-yields, 1948 - Boing Boing [link]

• The August, 1948 issue of Sunset magazine advertised "a truly radioactive soil" for your crops...