Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) said Tuesday she wants the next Department of Energy budget bill to prohibit spending that contributes in any way to nuclear-explosive tests.
Titus made the request during the House Appropriations Committee’s annual member day hearing, which gives congresspeople a few minutes to publicly discuss measures they want in the various spending bills for federal agencies. The panel conducted the hearing online this year amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
“I would ask you and this committee to work with me to help mandate that no federal funds may be set aside or used for this dangerous experiment that would dangerously put Nevadans and all Americans in danger and restart the Cold War … nuclear arms race,” Titus, who represents the Las Vegas region, told committee Chairwoman Nina Lowey (D-N.Y.).
Titus has already produced legislative language that would do just that, as part of a bill she drafted with Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), whose congressional district includes the Nevada National Security Site.
The House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee is scheduled to mark up its fiscal 2021 budget bill on July 7. However, the biggest funding fights could come the following Monday, July 10, when the full Appropriations Committee is scheduled to consider the legislation. Politico reported the dates, citing a Dear Colleagues letter from Lowey.
Energy and water appropriations acts provide funds for nuclear weapons programs managed by DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and for the cleanup of shuttered nuclear-weapon production sites managed by the department’s Office of Environmental Management.
The Washington Post in May reported that some in the Donald Trump administration supported a rapid nuclear-explosive test as a means of inducing Russia and China to negotiate a trilateral nuclear arms control pact. The Post said officials discussed the idea during a meeting with Trump, attended by representatives of the National Nuclear Security Administration.
The Senate version of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would authorize $10 million to “carry out projects related to reducing the time required to execute a nuclear test if necessary.”
The then-Nevada Test Site was through 1992 used for hundreds of atmospheric and underground explosive tests to verify the continued functioning of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Testing has been connected to increased cancer rates among “downwinders” in several statees.
The United States since 1992 has maintained a voluntary moratorium on such tests, and DOE and the NNSA have not formally sought permission to resume explosive or lower-yield tests. The NNSA has for decades instead used subcritical experiments — explosive plutonium tests that do not produce a sustained nuclear yield — and supercomputer simulations fed with data from old nuclear explosive tests to certify that U.S. nuclear weapons retain their full destructive potential.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), chair of the Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, also during the meeting decried any potential resumption of testing.
Kaptur has already said she will not provide the $20 billion in funding the NNSA seeks for fiscal 2021, which begins Oct.1. The subcommittee chair has said the agency could not spend such a sum in a year even if the House provides it. She has also said the NNSA has large amounts of unspent appropriations from prior years that it could use to shore up the weapons modernization and infrastructure projects that the agency says are underfunded.
NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty has objected to that idea, saying the carryover funding is already targeted for ongoing construction projects or reserved for international nonproliferation programs.
Markey Pushes for Test Prohibition in Senate
As he attempts to fend off a primary challenge from a young congressman, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) has belted out a salvo of arms control legislation, including a new bill last week that would make it U.S. policy to extend the New START nuclear treaty with Russia.
Markey filed the Hastening Arms Limitation Talks (HALT) Act on June 18, before U.S. and Russian officials met today in Vienna, Austria, to discuss a potential follow-up treaty to New START — an effort officials say is near and dear to President Donald Trump’s heart, but which critics say is a long shot at best that should not prevent extending New START for five years.
Markey is among the most consistent of those voices. Aside from making it U.S. policy to extend New START for five years, his new bill would — if passed by the GOP-controlled Senate and then signed by a president who has so far disagreed with the policy the bill seeks to advance — prohibit any funds for nuclear-explosive testing, and require the United States to attempt to “[n]egotiate a verifiable Fissile Material Treaty or Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty in the United Nations (UN) Conference on Disarmament or another international forum.”
Markey, a first-term senator and former congressman of nearly 40 years, faces a primary challenge from Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.). Polling is sparse in the race, but what polls there are show Kennedy leading. At various points, Kennedy has led by well more than the margin of error.
New START will expire in February unless the U.S. and Russian presidents agree to extend it for up to a half-decade. The Trump administration seeks to replace New START with a trilateral arms control treaty that also constrains China’s nuclear arsenal, but Beijing has resisted overtures to discuss such an agreement.
Russian and U.S. officials this week met to discuss a New START extension in Vienna. China did not participate in the talks. The U.S., without China’s permission, put apparently incorrectly printed Chinese flags near empty seats at a table and chided Beijing for not joining the discussions, which adjourned without any definitive agreement to extend New START, which expires in around eight months.
The U.S. and Russia informally agreed to continue talks, media reported.
