WASHINGTON — The aspiring chair of the House Armed Services Committee wants to scrap the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, whip up a multilateral Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces-style treaty, and take a run a making no-first-use the nuclear law of the land.
Speaking here Wednesday at the Ploughshares Fund’s “Future of U.S. Nuclear Policy” conference, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) enumerated a three-point nuclear policy plan for the 116th Congress set to gavel in on Jan. 3:
“Totally redo the Nuclear Posture Review is number one,” Smith said from the podium, just over a week after Democrats won a House majority. “Number two is the importance of multilateral arms deals. We need more multilateralism. We should work with China and Russia to redo the INF treaty. We should certainly make sure that we maintain New START. The other thing is to avoid the miscalculation of stumbling into nuclear war. This is where I think the no-first-use bill … is incredibly important.”
After his speech, Smith told reporters that paring back the ongoing intercontinental ballistic-missile (ICBM) modernization programs at the Department of Energy and the Pentagon “would be one way” of furthering his nuclear policy aims.
New ICBMs — designs for which Boeing and Northrop Grumman are maturing under 2017 Pentagon contracts worth a combined $2 billion or so over four-and-a-half years — will require new plutonium nuclear-warhead cores DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plans to build at expanded facilities in New Mexico, and new facilities in South Carolina. The upgrades at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico alone will cost more than $1 billion over the next five years.
Smith also reiterated his opposition to the low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead the GOP-controlled Congress funded this year at President Donald Trump’s request. “We’re going to stop the use of low-yield nuclear weapons,” Smith said. “It makes no sense for us to build low-yield nuclear weapons [and] I think we’ve got an opportunity in this session to reset.”
