Progressive leading lights in both houses of Congress led a letter-writing campaign urging President Joe Biden this week to use his imminent Nuclear Posture Review to cancel deployed and planned low-yield nukes.
Canceling the planned low-yield, sea-launched nuclear-tipped cruise missile and shelving the W76-2 low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead “would further signal that the United States believes that deterrence, not warfighting, is the sole purpose of nuclear weapons,” the 53 lawmakers wrote in a letter dated Wednesday.
In addition to canceling the two low-yield weapons, which constituted two of the three tweaks to the arsenal that the Donald Trump administration made to the Barack Obama administration’s nuclear posture, the letter-writers also told Biden they remained concerned that his administration had not commissioned a “a comprehensive, independent study of whether to pursue the new ground-based strategic deterrent” intercontinental ballistic missiles scheduled to start replacing the Minuteman III fleet beginning in 2030 or so.
Senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Reps. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) and Donald Beyer (D-Va.), the leaders of the bicameral Arms Control Working Group, organized the campaign.
Of the 53 lawmakers who signed the letter, all but Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who caucuses with Democrats, were Democrats. One was the District of Columbia’s non-voting Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton. One of the more senior lawmakers to sign the letter was Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the current chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Four of the signees serve on their chamber’s Armed Services Committee: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a primary challenger from the left to Biden in the 2020 election, and Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Sara Jacobs (D-Calif), and Andy Kim (D-N.J.).
The Biden administration has said the 46th President’s nuclear posture review would appear bundled with a national defense strategy required by law to appear in January.
By December, and continuing after New Year’s, disarmament advocates outside of government started to predict that Biden’s review would not substantially modify the posture established by the Obama administration and preserved, with few tweaks, by the Trump administration.
