[billbears]

Spending money to help another government to rid themselves of nuclear weapons that they may or may not use on these United States is not money spent on defense. You might as well say Bush gave 500 million for AIDS in the hopes that those nations do not become our enemies. What? Pre-emptive defense spending now? An ounce of prevention and all that? Why did the USSR(at the time) build the nuclear weapons? For defense against weapons built here. And now we have to pay to help them disable their weapons along with paying for disabling our weapons? The winner of the Cold War pays for everything? No, this is another example of this nation playing the world's 'police force' and overstepping our bounds

[Jorge]

Spending money to help another government to rid themselves of nuclear weapons that they may or may not use on these United States is not money spent on defense.

Sure it is. Unless of course you prefer to wait until a few hundred thousand Americans are killed by nukes or chemical weapons after they fall into the wrong hands...to THEN decide to get rid of the source of weapons is important.