On the radar: Missileer complaints; Boomer bulge in budget; East Coast cash; Susan Rice gets corner office; Sen. Corker on sanctions; and Bushehr reportedly damaged from quakes.

June 5, 2013 | Edited by Benjamin Loehrke and Alyssa Demus

Missile malaise - Air Force officers assigned to the ICBM mission “are complaining to a wide array of morale-sapping pressures” including “poor leadership” and “dead-end careers,” reports AP.

--The complaints, expressed in an unpublished RAND study for the Air Force, suggest sagging morale for those in charge of the ICBM leg of the nuclear triad. This coincides with the Air Force’s recent benching of ICBM officers who failed readiness inspections, and a long-term shrinking of the role and size of the U.S. nuclear force.

--“You can’t take away the fact that the mission they sit and wait for” — to launch a nuclear attack — “is very unlikely to ever happen,” said Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists. “That affects career choices and morale because they talk to their other Air Force buddies who come home after flying B-52s over Afghanistan or Iraq and it’s very exciting to be in that part of the Air Force...[while the ICBM launch crews] sit in a hole in the Midwest and wait for nothing.” Full story here. http://bit.ly/12syiAE [1]

Subs sinking ships - Members of Congress are beginning to label the Navy’s shipbuilding plan as “unaffordable,” and the plan to buy 12 new ballistic missile submarines - at $6 billion per boat - has the bulk of the blame. The subs’ enormous costs “crowd out spending for other necessary ships,” according Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI).

--A simple solution: "Fewer SSBNs can do the job…The navy could easily cut the SSBN fleet from 14 to 12 boats now and reduce the requirement for the next-generation SSBN from 12 to 10 boats and save billions of dollars in the process,” notes Hans Kristensen. “The savings would give the Navy desperately needed flexibility in a shipbuilding budget...[and] allow the Navy to fully fund other ships better suited to the Asia pivot,” writes Benjamin Freedman in U.S. News. http://owl.li/lJDPm [2]

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Contentious amendment - An amendment to the House version of the defense authorization bill would direct $140 million for the procurement of new ground based missile interceptors on the East Coast. While the amendment will likely pass, Democrats - including Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) - oppose the new missile defense site which, critics note, the Pentagon has not requested. Jeremy Herb at The Hill has the story. http://owl.li/lJzcx [7]

Tweet - @markknoller [8]: Shakeup today in President's foreign policy team. Tom Donilon to step down as National Security Advisor. UN Amb. Susan Rice to take over.

Rice on nukes - “Susan Rice does not speak very often on nuclear policy, but behind the scenes she played a major role in shaping Barack Obama's nuclear weapons positions in the 2008 campaign.” Her contributions to the president’s nuclear policy is “enshrined” in the 2008 Democratic Party Platform.

--”America will seek a world with no nuclear weapons and take concrete actions to move in this direction...We will maintain a strong and reliable deterrent as long as nuclear weapons exist, but America will be safer in a world that is reducing reliance on nuclear weapons and ultimately eliminates all of them. We will make the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons worldwide a central element of U.S. nuclear weapons policy.”

--As National Security Advisor, Rice will join Secretaries Chuck Hagel and John Kerry as part of the president’s national security team - “a group dedicated to reinvigoraring President Obama’s nuclear efforts...Her appointment sets the stage perfectly for a major new presidential policy initiative,” writes Joe Cirincione in The Huffington Post. http://owl.li/lJIN5 [9]

Sen. Corker on sanctions - “We want to make sure the sanctions that we put in place work. We’re trying to time them and put as much pressure as we can to cause behavior change [within the Iranian regime]. At the same time, we don’t want to do things that are going to end up being ineffective or cause our coalition to break apart,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

--“I think that we need to focus on those more targeted sanctions towards those individuals who can most readily affect regime behavioral change…But I think we’re ending up sort of turning public opinion [in Iran] in a different way than we’d like, and yet not really affecting the actual behavior of the leaders that can actually change what’s happening.” http://1.usa.gov/14h0HaI [10]

Iran’s cracking safety standards - “Several countries monitoring Iran's nuclear program have picked up information that the country's only power-producing nuclear reactor was damaged by one or more of several recent earthquakes, with long cracks appearing in at least one section of the structure, two diplomats said Tuesday,” reports George Jahn of AP. http://huff.to/13FkGNW [11]

Speed reads -

--”Don't Discount the Iranian Election: The Surprising Tie Between the Vote and the Nuclear Negotiations” by Dennis Ross in Foreign Affairs. http://fam.ag/138R9Md [12]

--The Obama administration loosed Iran sanctions related to communications technology as a way to help the Iranian people. The New York Times calls it “A Smart Change in Iran Policy.” http://nyti.ms/1b4jsyj [13]

Events:

--”Ballistic Missile Defense- Technical, Strategic and Arms Control Challenges.” Discussion with Phil Coyle, George Lewis, Bruce MacDonald, Pierce Corden, and Charles Ferguson to moderate. June 6th from 4:45-7:00pm at AAAS, reception to follow. Details here. http://bit.ly/188gZ90 [14]

--”The Future of U.S.-Pakistan Relations,” Robert Lamb and Sadika Hameed. June 7 10:00 am- 12:00 pm @ CSIS 5th floor Conference Room.

--June 10th is the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s commencement address at American University, where he called for banning nuclear testing. http://bit.ly/18J6Ugk [15]

--”The Implications of the NPT Regime for Nonproliferation.” Speech by Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Countryman. June 18, 9:00 am @ Elliott School of International Affairs. RSVP and details here. http://owl.li/lH9Ks [16]