Vice President Joseph Biden will begin the first push for congressional ratification of the United Nations nuclear test-ban treaty since the Clinton presidency, with a speech Thursday saying the Obama administration's large funding request for monitoring will make tests obsolete.
The speech at the National Defense University here will challenge liberal arms-control advocates to embrace a $624 million increase in nuclear-weapons funding, most of which would go to nuclear-weapons scientists to monitor the nation's aging stockpile without testing.
The White House budget seeks a 13.4% increase for the National Nuclear Security Administration, one of the largest increases in the 2011 budget, and $5 billion in additional nuclear-weapons spending over five years.
The 67 votes needed in the Senate to ratify the test-ban treaty, adopted by the U.N. in 1996, are still a ways off, but the administration's challenge to the left is intended to pull key Republican senators on board. At the same time, the vice president will push the case to Republicans that two decades without a nuclear test and a maturing scientific program to keep weapons safe without testing have proven that testing is obsolete, according to White House aides.
The Obama administration's carefully choreographed effort to advance nuclear-arms control is already off schedule. President Barack Obama had intended to negotiate a new nuclear-arms reduction accord with Russia by early December and move it toward ratification before a planned nuclear-proliferation summit at the White House in April.
The White House also wanted to make progress on test-ban ratification ahead of a U.N. summit in May to strengthen the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Mr. Obama wanted to make the case that the nuclear powers were living up to disarmament promises, so non-nuclear countries, especially Iran, had to stick to their obligations to renounce nuclear weapons.
But the U.S.-Russia accord, although close, is still not at hand. White House officials hoped Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would be a key ally on the broader nuclear agenda, but he wants any push on the test ban put off until the next Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia is completed and ratified.
"The focus should be on getting the START treaty signed and ratified, building some arms-control confidence, then perhaps reviewing [the test-ban treaty] at a later date," said Andy Fisher, a senior Lugar adviser. "The safety of our weapons is still in question without testing."
Some liberal anti-nuclear activists say the 4.7% increase for infrastructure spending at nuclear-weapons facilities such as New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Y-12 nuclear complex in Tennessee won't buy GOP support for arms-control treaties. But Mr. Biden will make the case that the government must spend money on its aging nuclear-weapons laboratories and plants even as it pursues arms reduction.
"We don't have the luxury of doing just one thing at a time," said Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, an arms-control advocacy group. "These problems are so serious, you've got to move them at several levels all at once."
