The Budget and the Bomb

Today's top nuclear policy stories, with excerpts in bullet form.

Stories we're following today: Thursday, August 4, 2011.

GOP Candidates, What Do You Say About Savings in Military Budget? - Greg Thielmann in the Des Moines Register [link]

  • ... even as [Republican presidential candidates] call for ever deeper budget cuts, they have been reluctant to look at trimming the $27 billion annual cost of operating and maintaining our bloated Cold War nuclear arsenal and the $125 billion planned for building new weapons in the decade ahead.
  • The potential impact of fiscal policy on defense programs was highlighted last year by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when he said, “the single biggest threat to our national security is our debt.”
  • Candidates who aspire to lead the nation need to be able to explain the connection between fiscal and security challenges.

Why Defense Spending Should Be Cut - Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post [link]

  • Most experts estimate that the defense budget would lose $600 billion to $700 billion over the next 10 years [from the debt deal]. If so, let the guillotine fall. It would be a much-needed adjustment to an out-of-control military-industrial complex.
  • Lawrence Korb, who worked at the Pentagon for Ronald Reagan, believes that a $1 trillion cut over 10 to 12 years is feasible without compromising national security.
  • Defense budget cuts would also force a healthy rebalancing of American foreign policy [between military and non-military programs].

The March Toward a Nuclear Iran - Ray Takeyh in The Washington Post [link]

  • Iran’s scientific infrastructure has grown in sophistication and capability in the past two decades.
  • Iran’s scientists have emerged as strong nationalists determined to transcend fractious politics and provide their country the full spectrum of technological discovery, including advances in nuclear science … and, in the process, provide the mullahs with the means of building the bomb.
  • An aggressive theocracy armed with the bomb will cast a dangerous shadow over the region’s political transition, but the consequences will not be limited to the Middle East … neither the turbulent order of the Middle East nor the partisan politics of Washington can afford an Islamic Republic armed with nuclear weapons.

Iran Claims Progress Speeding Nuclear Program - Jay Solomon in The Wall Streeet Journal [link]

  • ... the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran has notified United Nations inspectors that it has begun deploying what are described as second- and third-generation centrifuges at its uranium-enrichment facility in the city of Natanz
  • The more-advanced centrifuges, called IR-2Ms and IR-4s, are believed to be capable of enriching uranium at rates three times as fast as those Tehran currently uses, the IR-1s.
  • Tehran has also said that it plans to set up these advanced machines at an underground uranium-enrichment site...near the holy city of Qom
  • "[Iran] like[s] to give the impression that they've made more advances than they have," said a senior U.S. official. "I think the progress they are making is more rhetorical than real."

World Is Learning: No Nuclear Is Safe Nuclear - Ray Cunnington in The Hamilton Spectator [link]

  • As … Desmond Tutu says: “The nuclear power crisis in Japan’s Fukushima power plant has served as a dreadful reminder that events thought unlikely can and do happen. But it must not take another Hiroshima or Nagasaki … before (some leaders) finally wake up and recognize the urgent necessity of nuclear disarmament.”
  • … nuclear catastrophes, through accident, miscalculation or terrorism, cannot be eliminated without recognizing that nuclear power reactors have a close connection to atomic weapons.
  • It is an inconvenient truth about physics that the splitting of the atom inside a nuclear reactor not only creates heat, but also produces plutonium, which … can be used to build bombs.