The chair of the House Armed Services Committee quoted chapter-and-verse from his bible of nuclear weapon policies this week in a chat with the D.C.-based Reagan Institute, during which he advocated for trimming the defense budget by preventing particular crises rather than gearing up to win an all-out war.
“I think that we can have a more conservative approach and we can have a deterrent approach,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said Tuesday in a one-on-one chat with Roger Zakheim, the Reagan Institute’s Washington Director and former general counsel and deputy staff director of the House Armed Services Committee. “This is my argument about the nuclear arsenal.”
Smith spoke a few days after the Biden administration said it would seek a 16% boost in non-defense spending in fiscal year 2022 to some $769 billion while upping defense spending by a little more than 1.5%, to roughly $753 million.
The Seattle-area congressman has shown less appetite than progressives in his caucus for drastically cutting the nuclear weapons budget, but more appetite for at least trimming the arsenal than the majority of Armed Services Democrats flashed last year while marking up the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act.
A little over a year ago, when that defense authorization bill was working its way through the House, Smith was one of the few senior Democrats on the committee to vote for an amendment — ultimately defeated — to study extending the life of the nuclear-armed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile, rather than continuing without interruption on procurement of the planned successor missile, the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent.
“We have to have a nuclear deterrent,” Smith said Tuesday. “But does that deterrent need to be the 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 nuclear weapons that we keep talking about? Or does it need to be a deterrent that is so large that nobody even thinks about launching a weapon because of the unacceptable attack on them?
“I just think that we can get to deterrent value with our nuclear arsenal for less than people are talking about,” Smith said, sticking closely to the message he’s been spreading in Washington since the weeks after election day.
The Biden administration’s budget preview, which some call the skinny budget, did not contain specific proposals for nuclear-weapon spending at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. The White House said only that “[t]he discretionary request maintains a strong, credible nuclear deterrent for the security of the Nation and U.S. allies.”
At deadline, the administration had not released a detailed 2022 spending proposal.
