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(32,139 posts) Wed Apr 24, 2013, 11:33 AM Apr 2013

President's budget cuts nuclear nonproliferation programs, beefs up US nuclear stockpile

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/obama-budget-nuclear-nonproliferation-stockpile%20

The president's budget boosts spending on our atomic arsenal while cutting money to stop the spread of nukes.
—By Erika Eichelberger and Dana Liebelson, MotherJones | Tue Apr. 23, 2013 3:00 AM

In the winter of 2012, President Obama stood on a podium at the National Defense University to honor the 20th anniversary of a program that successfully dismantled nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union, declaring, "We simply cannot allow the 21st century to be darkened by the worst weapons of the 20th century." He reaffirmed his commitment to continue investing in nonproliferation, because "our national security depends on it." But his administration's recently released budget proposal reflects the opposite agenda: It makes big cuts to nuclear nonproliferation programs while beefing up funding for the United States' nuclear-weapons stockpile.

"I'm baffled as to why they would do that," says Barry Watts, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a national-security policy think tank, said of the Obama administration. "Nonproliferation goes straight to the heart of their policy." Obama's budget proposal for 2014 would cut $400 million from nonproliferation programs while spending an additional $560 million on extending the life of our atomic arsenal (compared to the fiscal 2012 budget).

Experts say the most consequential cuts to nonproliferation efforts in Obama's budget—some $79 million—are slated to come from a program called the Global Threat Reduction Initiative. GTRI takes highly enriched uranium from other countries and sends it to the United States or Russia to be converted into non-weapons-grade material. The program also protects vulnerable nuclear materials at civilian energy and research sites around the world. Since 2009, GTRI has removed more than 3,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium and plutonium, enough to make dozens of nuclear weapons.

The Global Threat Reduction Initiative is a "core material security program to ensure that terrorists can't their hands on nuclear weapons-usable material," explains Kingston Reif, director of nonproliferation programs at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. In 2012, the administration projected that it would spend $630 million on the GTRI in 2014. Obama's current budget proposal requests $424 million. Obama's 2013 budget proposal for GTRI was so low that Congress voted to increase funding by $35 million beyond the level that the administration requested. "We are hoping for the same thing this year," Reif says.

Other nonproliferation programs are slated for cuts too...