Testing the No-New-Nuclear-Weapons Pledge

Defense Professionals ^ | 3/09/2010 | Hans M. Kristensen

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

One of the important tests of Obama Administration’s nuclear non-proliferation policy will be whether the long-delayed Nuclear Posture Review will approve new nuclear weapons.

During his election campaign, Barack Obama promised not to build new nuclear weapons, a pledge that recently has been reiterated by the administration.

Yet the Air Force’s budget request for 2011 includes several projects that, if approved, would contradict the pledge.

The “No New” Pledge

During the presidential election campaign, Barack Obama pledge to “stop the development of new nuclear weapons” if elected president. The pledged lived on for the first few months after the election on the Obama administration’s White House foreign policy web page, but disappeared when the page was reorganized at the time of the Prague speech in April 2009.

Since, the president has, to my knowledge, not repeated the pledge. But Under Secretary of State Ellen Tauscher echoed the election pledge last month when she explained that the Pentagon says it does “not need new nuclear weapons capabilities. They just want to be confident in what we have,” she said and declared: “We are not in the business of seeking new nuclear capabilities. They are not needed to preserve a strong, credible deterrent.”

New Nuclear Weapons

Yet “new” seems to be an elusive term. Even though Tauscher promised that the “RRW is dead and is not coming back,” the Air Force nuclear weapons support program includes “Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) Studies & Analysis” in both 2010 and 2011. Perhaps she meant RRW as it was known rather than ruling out future replacement warheads.

[DontTreadOnMe2009]

The Marxist agenda advances ...

again ...

and again....

Need any F-22s ———— no, the took 25 years to design

and our President threw them away as fast as he could.

Thanks Big O

We are now defenseless in one more area

(780 planned 187 bought to date ——— Obama cancels all as soon as he could and no one shouts or protests; not even McCain).

[ATX 1985]

I think we shouldn’t be surprised with a lot of what we see economically, but Obama could be much worst militarily.

He has only grown the Defense budget, his Administration has owned the drone program and it is one of our most successful tools in the fight against al-qaeda, he escalated forces in Afghanistan, he has stuck to the Bush Administration’s plans in Iraq and could be open to leaving more there past the deadline, he signed extensions to the PATRIOT Act and it looks like he has even done some waffling on nukes.

This is from the OP:

“Another apparent contradiction with the administration’s no new nuclear weapons pledge is a new nuclear cruise missile to replace the current Air Launched Cruise Missile (ALCM) that expires in 2030. The new weapon is known as the Enhanced Cruise Missile (ECM), and development of nuclear weapons requirements documents are planned for 2010 and 2011, along with a Phase 6.2 Study, also known as a Feasibility Study and Option Down Select study.”

The articles says here what the debate might turn out to be:

“Does a new “weapon” refer to the warhead on the missile or the delivery vehicle itself or both? And how new must a weapon be to be considered “new” – does it require an entirely new design or can a modified design be considered a “new” weapon?

Government officials have to be crystal clear when they present the results of the NPR to make sure the administration’s non-proliferation policy doesn’t get stuck in the mud of misunderstandings and contradictions about what constitutes a “new” nuclear weapon. A lot is at stake.”

I don’t think there is much need to modify the warhead, how much more power do we need? The importance in the 21st century will be detection and delivery of nuclear warheads.