Tauscher Signals Leftward Shift on Arms Control, Differs Sharply From Bolton

[babylonsister]

Tauscher Signals Leftward Shift on Arms Control
Seven-Term Congresswoman Differs Sharply From Bolton
By Spencer Ackerman 3/20/09 6:00 AM


Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)


The appointment of Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) to an important State Department post is being greeted by progressive experts as indicating a shift to the left on arms control, heralding a return to negotiated disarmament accords and strengthened international norms on nuclear proliferation.

Tauscher, a seven-term veteran congresswoman, announced Wednesday that she will give up her seat to become undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, making her the most senior official in the Obama administration to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction. A former Clinton administration nonproliferation official, Robert Einhorn, was slated to get the job, but reportedly asked to be removed from consideration for what the Washington Post said were personal reasons. While Tauscher has a profile as a conservative Democrat — she headed the pro-business New Democrat Coalition in the House and voted to invade Iraq — liberal observers give her high marks for her longtime interest in disarmament and nonproliferation issues.

“She is universally respected as one of the best thinkers on strategic and nonproliferation policies in the Congress,” said Andrew Grotto, a proliferation expert at the Center for American Progress. Jessica Tuchman Mathews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that Tauscher’s appointment and the political climate that generated it indicate that the administration is “absolutely” prepared to cut the United States’ stockpile of nuclear weapons. “The shift in emphasis” away from the Bush administration’s disdain for negotiated arms-control agreements, she said, will be “enormous.”

As ranking Democrat and later chair of the strategic forces subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, Tauscher has pushed for a thorough review of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, creating a commission, chaired by two respected former secretaries of defense, that has advocated “dismantl{ing} the deadly nuclear legacy of the Cold War,” as one of its chairmen recently said. Tauscher told an international security conference in Munich last month that the United States needed to recommit itself to — and in some cases rewrite — international treaties and compacts to strengthen global nonproliferation regimes. “The debate is therefore not about how nuclear powers can position themselves in a world indefinitely held captive nuclear weapons, but how we here can lead the world in a realistic effort to eliminate them,” she said.

more...

http://washingtonindependent.com/34879/tauscher-signals-leftward-shift-on-arms-control

[DCKit]

1. "...Differs sharply from Bolton."

The understatement of the week. Atilla the Hun was left of Bolton.

[babylonsister]

2. Yea, I know, but I'm still glad it's happening. nt

[bigtree]

3. I don't like or trust her rhetoric

She's a stalking horse for the nuclear 'Reliable Replacement Warhead' which she's looking to work into a modified non-proliferation treaty.

Certainly it's an improvement for someone to be acknowledging the treaty instead of just ignoring it like Bush did. But, I don't trust this woman to do what's right. I'm not going to just lay down and accept some sort of splitting of the nuclear baby just to compromise with neo-hawks like Tauscher.

Watch for it. Tauscher desperately wants to start fiddling with the nukes and her 'middle of the road' position on replacement warheads as the center of her work on the treaty will mesh well with the tendency for Pres. Obama to split the difference between his liberal ideals and the wishes of the military establishment.

(and I don't need to hear that we should just wait and see what this woman I've been watching closely for years does before passing judgment on her. Some things are just too important to just sit on my hands and wait for the rest of the community to get up to speed to oppose.)

The RRW is going to be presented as a compromise . . . a step down from the right-wing industry planned development of new nukes.

But the program is a stalking horse, intended to provide the infrastructure for an expansion of the nuclear weapons program; opening the door to new testing (which will require a further abrogation or change of the treaty Bush ignored), and providing the facilities and infrastructure for the 'next generation' nukes. The claims that the present arsenal is degrading and is at risk is refuted by many outside experts. That argument, however is being used to justify fiddling with the nukes and providing the foot in the door.



Subcommittee Chair Ellen Tauscher
Strategic Forces Subcommittee
Hearing on United States Nuclear Weapons Policy
July 18, 2007

“The Bush Administration has offered two major proposals to address these emerging challenges:

* The Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program, designed to modernize our weapons stockpile; and
* The “Complex 2030” modernization program, designed to transform the nuclear weapons complex that supports that stockpile.

These far-reaching proposals represent NNSA’s preferred future investment and policy strategy, but they also raise fundamental questions: How many nuclear weapons does the U.S. need to meet the President’s test of “the smallest number consistent with U.S. national security interests”? What sort of weapons complex do we need to ensure the safety and reliability of these weapons? How large should our stock of reserve weapons be, and how much would development of the RRW affect the answer? Is it possible to develop RRW without sending a signal to the rest of the world that we are investing in new nuclear weapons?

"I have called for extending the Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty and for negotiating a new, legally binding agreement that achieves greater, verifiable reductions in the U.S. and Russia’s nuclear forces, measures that the Bush Administration has not endorsed.

“In this spirit, as the Nonproliferation Treaty is under assault, and as this administration rejects the CTBT and does not negotiate a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, what is the role of arms control treaties in today’s world and how can they be made to be more effective?

“This is not a rhetorical question. Iran is on course to develop a military nuclear capability. I believe that its next step will be to withdraw from the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Instead of waiting for it to do so on its own terms I believe we need to rally all of our allies around and strengthen the NPT and make it clear that there are explicit penalties for leaving the treaty."

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/congress/2007_h/070718-tauscher.htm


As Walter Pincus reported in the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20... ) in December, U.S. Strategic Commander Air Force Gen. Kevin P. Chilton is calling for a rush to develop and produce RRW because of alleged surety problems--a topic of serious controversy within the nuclear scientific community. Also, in the January/February edition of Foreign Affairs, Sec. of Defense Robert Gates again heralded RRW, without addressing the fact that RRW's test pedigree will be much less extensive than that of the existing stockpile.

Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA), Chair of the House Armed Services subcommittee on Strategic Forces, appears to be in lock-step with Chilton. Because RRW has gotten a bad name, Tauscher is promoting the idea of renaming RRW to avoid all the opposition it has garnered in Congress and among the public. She has even started re-framing RRW to make it more palatable to the Congress by saying it will help with nonproliferation efforts. Hmmm. Does it slice toast too?

read: http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2008/12/message-to-the-new-doe-secretary-dont-believe-the-hype.html


Report: Reliable Replacement Warhead:
Another Unneeded Nuclear Weapon
http://www.fcnl.org/pdfs/nuclear/RRW_Fact_Sheet.pdf