Without much Republican support, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week favorably reported the Joe Biden administration’s nominee for the State Department’s top arms control post to the Senate floor.
The Tuesday vote in the evenly divided committee was 12-10 on Bonnie Jenkins’ nomination for under secretary of state for arms control and international security. The full Senate had not scheduled a confirmation vote at deadline Friday.
Sen. James Risch (R-Id.), the committee’s ranking member, tipped his cap to Jenkins’ experience in arms control, but said he could not support her nomination because “she consistently refuses to recognize the inextricable link between full modernization of the nuclear triad and arms control agreements” and “refuses to specifically commit to full modernization” of nuclear weapons and the nuclear weapons production complex.
Since the Barack Obama administration essentially bartered a 30-year, $1-trillion nuclear modernization regimen for ratification of the New START nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, politicians on both sides of the aisle in Washington have argued that updates to the nuclear arsenal should be tethered to advanced in negotiations with other nuclear-armed countries.
Jenkins spent eight years in the Obama administration’s State Department as coordinator for threat reduction programs. She later founded the Women of Color Advancing Peace, Security and Conflict Transformation (WCAPS) nonprofit, which aims to advance “the leadership and professional development of women of color in the fields of international peace, security, and conflict transformation,” according to its website.
