Originally published here.

Over the past couple of years, the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages have become a full-blown nuclear policy battleground. We’ve seen editorials written by the “Four Statesmen” (Shultz, Perry, Nunn, and Kissinger) advocating for elimination of nuclear weapons; we’ve seen Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) call for new nuclear tests. We’ve even seen Kyl team up with crusty old neoconservatives like Richard Perle to repeat gross inaccuracies and well-worn talking points about our nuclear arsenal being “ineffective” because it’s “decaying”, and that we need new nuclear weapons (refuted here).

Last week, Vice President Biden threw down the gauntlet with a Wall Street Journal op-ed of his own, in which he gave a preview of what was going to be in the FY2011 budget:

Among the many challenges our administration inherited was the slow but steady decline in support for our nuclear stockpile and infrastructure, and for our highly trained nuclear work force…

[snip]

The budget we will submit to Congress on Monday both reverses this decline and enables us to implement the president’s nuclear-security agenda. These goals are intertwined. The same skilled nuclear experts who maintain our arsenal play a key role in guaranteeing our country’s security now and for the future. State-of-the art facilities, and highly trained and motivated people, allow us to maintain our arsenal without testing. They will help meet the president’s goal of securing vulnerable nuclear materials world-wide in the coming years, and enable us to track and thwart nuclear trafficking, verify weapons reductions, and to develop tomorrow’s cutting-edge technologies for our security and prosperity.

To achieve these goals, our budget devotes $7 billion for maintaining our nuclear-weapons stockpile and complex, and for related efforts. This commitment is $600 million more than Congress approved last year. And over the next five years we intend to boost funding for these important activities by more than $5 billion. Even in a time of tough budget decisions, these are investments we must make for our security. We are committed to working with Congress to ensure these budget increases are approved.

Obama’s vision of the decreasing role of nuclear weapons in US policy has always been accompanied by the caveat that the elimination of these weapons would most likely not occur in his lifetime, and that:

…[A]s long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary…

Yet despite this fact, Biden’s editorial was met by plenty of spin, including accusations of “broken promises“, and implications that there are perhaps plans in the works for the production of new nuclear warheads.

Both of these ideas are inaccurate, as well as an extreme oversimplification of what is actually a rather complex budget proposal.

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