Despite Congress cutting funds for the US nuclear programme, it appears that George W Bush has found a way of circumventing that decision by claiming that his new programme is about the renewal of old stock rather than the introduction of a new programme. An article in Open Democracy argues that at a time when the US is attempting to stop any nuclear ambitions by Iran, it is itself pursuing a new programme of its own. The US administration argues that they stopped producing entirely new nuclear weapons at least fifteen years ago, many of the warheads in its current stockpile are far older than that, and there is no guarantee that they will work if they have to be used. But Open Democracy comments,
Arms-control experts, by contrast, claim that the US’s nuclear stockpile is sufficiently up-to-date in design terms, could be reduced much further, and has no need of a new bout of modernisation. Daryl G Kimball, executive director of prominent Washington-based group the Arms Control Association, comments:
“The existing stockpile is safe and reliable by all standards, so to design a new warhead that is even more robust is a redundant activity that could be a pretext for designing a weapon that has a new military mission.”
This is the crux of the matter – that the Bush administration seems to have found a way of circumventing Congress’s decision to cut funding for what were clearly intended to be major new nuclear weapons programmes.
So what is the impact on this of any goal of no nuclear proliferation? How can the US administration’s attitude to this be squared with their attitude to Iran? The Open Democracy article is very clear about that.
The Bush administration wants to build a coalition for countering Iranian nuclear ambitions. This means it needs to avoid giving the impression of furthering its own nuclear developments. The Congressional decision in November helped serve that purpose. The more recent reports on what is actually happening in terms of US nuclear developments do not. They lend support to those analysts who believe that the United States will take a singularly hardline stance at the NPT review conference. This may be typical of the unilateralist tendencies of the Bush administration, but will certainly not further the control of nuclear proliferation through international cooperation.
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