Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
3/07/2014
Timed just before the Obama Administration released its Fiscal Year 2015 budget request this week, Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) reintroduced legislation late last week that would cut $100 billion in nuclear weapons spending over the next decade. Markey first introduced the “Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures (SANE) Act” when he was in the House in 2012. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) introduced a similar bill, the “Reduce Expenditures in Nuclear Investments Now (REIN-IN) Act,” in the House of Representatives. “America faces a real choice: spend billions on nuclear weapons we no longer need or fund programs that educate our children and help find cures to deadly diseases. The security of our nation’s future will be ensured by investing in education not nuclear annihilation,” Markey said in a statement. “We need to stop pouring billions into the nuclear weapons programs of the past and instead prioritize our nation’s pressing needs.”
The SANE Act would limit the cost of the B61 life extension program to $5 billion, down from the $8 billion the National Nuclear Security Administration currently says it would cost, and would cancel the W78 life extension program. It would also cancel the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility and the Uranium Processing Facility as well as reduce the number of nuclear ballistic missile submarines from 14 to eight, saving $16 billion, and defer the development of new ICBMs. The bill would also cut the nuclear mission from the F35 and delay the new long range bomber, saving $32 billion.
The bill gained no traction when it was previously introduced, and isn’t expected to find a foothold this year, either. But Markey, Merkley and Blumenauer have continued to push the legislation as a way to raise awareness of the costs of maintaining a nuclear deterrent. “We cannot afford these weapon systems and we don’t need them,” Blumenauer said in a statement. “They are dangerous and costly to store and maintain. As we’ve seen in recent stories, the human beings who control them can be unreliable. We can make the world, and our country, safer by reducing spending on these programs that we haven’t used in 69 years and are better suited for the Cold War than the strategic challenges we face today.”
