REP. TURNER TO INTRODUCE NUCLEAR MODERNIZATION BILL TODAY

By ExchangeMonitor

Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio), the chairman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, will formally introduce a bill today to tie progress on modernizing the nation’s nuclear weapons complex and arsenal to current and future reductions to the nation’s nuclear stockpile. Turner’s “Maintaining the President’s Commitment to our Nuclear Deterrent and National Security Act of 2012” is largely expected to mirror the “New START Implementation Act” he introduced last year. Portions of that bill linking modernization with stockpile reductions were included in the House version of the Fiscal Year 2012 Defense Authorization Act, but the language was watered down after conference negotiations with the Democrat-controlled Senate, producing only a “sense of Congress” on the link between modernization and reductions and reporting requirements involved with the issue.

Turner is hoping that there could be more support for the bill this time around due to cutbacks in the Administration’s modernization plan that were unveiled as part of its FY2012 budget request. “We will push to codify the President’s promises and we will build on the important legislative checks we enacted in last year’s Defense Authorization Act,” Turner said in a speech at the Nuclear Deterrence Summit last month. “For example, that bill requires the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command to assess, before any Presidential decisions to lower U.S. nuclear forces are implemented, whether those reductions are in the U.S. national security interest. And it establishes U.S. policy regarding tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. I expect more bicameral support this year in view of what one of my colleagues called the ‘reckless lunacy’ of instructing the military to plan for an 80 percent reduction in the U.S. nuclear deterrent—coupled with the now apparent total abandonment of the President’s modernization promises.”

Comments are closed.