The Nuclear Weapons Budget Enters The Spin Cycle

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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Shades of Grey: "Grading" the Obama Administration on Biological Threats

Originally published here.

There’s a saying in journalism: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

The saying traditionally applies to crime reporting, but can be expanded to describe how the traditional media and many blogs approach any story they perceive as “dramatic”, or better yet, “dangerous”.

Last week’s national security headlines were a classic example of drama triumphing over careful, in-depth reporting. I’m talking about this particular headline, and all the variations thereof, describing a “report card” issued to the Obama administration:

US gets ‘F’ in preparation for threat of biological terrorism, report concludes

The Washington Post outlines what sounds like a dire situation:

More than eight years after the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, the United States is still unprepared to respond to the threat of large-scale bioterrorism, a congressionally appointed commission said Tuesday in a report that gave the government mixed grades overall for how it has protected Americans from weapons of mass destruction.

The report, which measured the government’s performance in 17 key areas, gave the White House and Congress “F” grades for not building a rapid-response capability for dealing with disease outbreaks from bioterrorism, or providing adequate oversight of security and intelligence agencies.

Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it?

The problem is, that article, and many others, are misleading in a number of ways; their superficial, black-and-white treatment of a very important subject misses some critical points that really need to be highlighted.

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