HOUSE GOP MEMBERS RAISE CONCERNS ABOUT POTENTIAL NUKE REDUCTIONS

Republicans on the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee sparred with the co-founder of the Global Zero nuclear abolition movement during a hearing yesterday on nuclear deterrence requirements that evolved into a debate over potential nuclear reductions. Bruce Blair, the co-founder of Global Zero and the president of the World Security Institute, was one of the authors of a Global Zero report that recommended that the U.S. reduce the total size of its nuclear arsenal to 900 warheads and eliminate the ICBM leg of the nuclear triad. The report has gained notoriety in recent months because one of its authors is Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, but it has drawn criticism from Republicans and has not been endorsed by top active military leaders. Blair, however, stood by the report and Global Zero’s goals during yesterday’s hearing, even as he faced tough questioning from GOP members of the subcommittee. “The goal of Global Zero is through phased, verifiable, proportional reductions that in due course within our lifetime we move to zero,” Blair said. “And most people I think these days in the mainstream believe that the U.S. would be more secure living in a world without nuclear weapons than it is living in the world today.” Blair’s comments, however, drew a pointed response from an incredulous Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.). “We might all feel more secure if we lived on some distant fairy land planet, too,” Franks said. “The notion is that unfortunately other people don’t always do what we like for them to do. It’s a dangerous world.”

Former Bush Administration Defense Department official Keith Payne, the director of the National Institute for Public Policy, suggested that the Obama Administration should not move to cut the size of the stockpile or tinker with the nuclear triad. “The question is whether you can you deter next year, the year after that, and 10 years from now,” Payne said. “The need for flexibility and resilience in the arsenal comes exactly from the need to be able to deter over the next two decades and those characteristics of the arsenal are directly related to its size and its diversity.” Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the chairman of the subcommittee, said he is concerned that the financial pressure facing the government would lead the Obama Administration to further reductions. “I worry that in the long-term, this situation will allow the President to further walk back on his commitments to modernize and maintain the deterrent,” Rogers said in his opening statement, adding: “Our nuclear deterrent is the most cost-effective and proven means of promoting peace for the American people and their allies, but we have not been investing in it in a responsible way.”