Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who brandished her arms-control and anti-nuclear bonafides throughout 2018, announced Monday she might run for president in 2020.
Warren said she has formed an exploratory committee for a presidential bid, fulfilling long-circulating rumors that she would seek the Democratic Party’s nomination in the next general election.
Warren did not mention the military, let alone nuclear weapons, in a four-and-a-half minute video posted online Monday to announce her aspirations. However, Warren has already crystallized her feelings about nuclear weapons in general, and the ongoing U.S. nuclear modernization program in particular.
In a late November speech at American University, Warren laid down three nuclear policy pillars: legally bar the U.S. from a nuclear first strike; build no new nuclear weapons, including the low-yield W76-2 warhead called for in the Donald Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review and funded by Congress last year; and preserve hard caps on U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons by extending the bilateral New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty into 2026.
These are essentially the opposite of the initiatives put in place by the Trump administration, which has pledged to continue and augment the 30-year refurbishment of the nuclear deterrent the Barack Obama administration started in 2016.
Warren threw down a few markers in the 115th Congress that support some of her positions.
In late November, Warren pressed William Bookless, nominated to be the No. 2 official at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), to admit he would “lean towards extending” New START. Early that month, Warren co-sponsored a bill that would prohibit the United States from acquiring missiles that operate in the range prohibited by the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty — a U.S.-Russian pact from which the Trump administration plans to withdraw in February.
Warren is slated to remain on the Senate Armed Services Committee in the 116th Congress set to gavel in Thursday. If her presidential bid evolves beyond the just-announced exploratory phase, she could be spending less time in committee fine-tuning her nuclear policy message and more time on the campaign trail; pundits predict a protracted competition amid a crowded field for the Democrats’ 2020 nomination.
