The disarmament advocating Ploughshares Fund was set to host the speaker of the House, the chair of the House Armed Services Committee and the principal deputy national security advisor for a live, webcast podcast recording on Thursday.
The event, Press the Button Live, was scheduled to begin at 2 p.m. Eastern time. Jon Finer, President Joe Biden’s principal deputy national security advisor, was slated to be the featured interview.
House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was also scheduled to attend, as was Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the Armed Services chair and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a member of the progressive caucus and the Armed Services Committee who has repeatedly advocated for trimming the nuclear arsenal, particularly the intercontinental ballistic missile fleet.
Smith is a regular feature at Ploughshares events, where he often reminds attendees that he is open to revisiting the size and composition of the nuclear arsenal — something that places him in the minority even among members of the House Democratic caucus — but opposed to giving up nuclear weapons.
Pelosi is also making a return of sorts to the disarmament group. In 2020, she provided a recorded welcome address to an election-season Ploughshares event called Chain Reaction: Securing Our Future.
Smith will face the room as Congress considers appropriations and authorization bills that provide essentially everything the Biden administration requested for Department of Energy and Department of Defense nuclear weapons programs. The request was, by and large, in line with what the Donald Trump administration believed would be necessary in the 2022 fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
The House Appropriations Committee denied funding to begin work on the proposed W93 submarine launched ballistic missile warhead and also provided less than requested to build a plutonium pit factory in South Carolina. the House Armed Services Committee, in its 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, nixed the administration’s request to spool up a life-extension program for the megaton-class B83 gravity bomb.
Although the government is currently funded under a short-term stopgap budget set to expire in December, the House has cleared all of its defense authorization and spending bills for 2022. The Senate still needs to get its bills across the floor. Media reported this week that Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) wants the upper chamber’s authorization bill on the floor around Thanksgiving. That timetable, however, could change depending on Democrats’ progress with Biden’s domestic agenda.
