The outlines of a far-right Republican foreign policy are emerging. This week in the Washington Times the heads of conservative think tanks, as well as former Attorney General Ed Meese now of Heritage, penned an oped – it was actually more like 10 disconnected far-right talking points – intended to provide an easy script for far right candidates on foreign policy. Pat Barry deconstructs their “peace through strength” tag line, but what jumped out at me was the priority given to nuclear testing. It is their second talking point:

2. A robust defense posture including a safe, reliable, effective nuclear deterrent, which requires its modernization and testing

That’s right, after nearly two decades of not testing nuclear weapons, these six far-right influencers want the GOP to start blowing up nuclear weapons again. Think these six wingers are just shouting on the sidelines? Think again. Jon Kyl, the second ranking Senate Republican, is fully on board with nuclear testing. He even wrote an oped in the Wall Street Journal last fall arguing why we need nuclear testing.

The far right’s reasoning is that in order to “modernize” the US nuclear arsenal, we must build new nuclear weapons, and if we build new nuclear weapons we must explosively test them. But this is way off base. We can modernize our nuclear arsenal without building brand new nuclear weapons from scratch. This is exactly what we are doing and studies have shown that it’s effective. The US nuclear arsenal is in fine shape and as long as the US continues to adequately fund programs that maintain the nuclear arsenal (the Obama administration has dramatically increased funding), we have zero need to build new nuclear weapons and zero need to test existing ones. Yet the right is not only opposed to cutting nuclear weapons, they actually want to build more. If you build more, you need to test them.

And for those thinking nuclear testing is safe and reliable, the LA Times reported last November on “Nevada’s hidden ocean of radiation.” It noted that:

Over 41 years, the federal government detonated 921 nuclear warheads underground at the Nevada Test Site, 75 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Each explosion deposited a toxic load of radioactivity into the ground and, in some cases, directly into aquifers… In a study for Nye County, where the nuclear test site lies, Buqo estimated that the underground tests polluted 1.6 trillion gallons of water. That is as much water as Nevada is allowed to withdraw from the Colorado River in 16 years — enough to fill a lake 300 miles long, a mile wide and 25 feet deep.

The US has not explosively tested a nuclear weapon since 1992. We have a moratorium on testing as do Russia, China, UK, and France and in the last decade there have been just two nuclear tests (both by North Korea). The Obama administration has pledged to push for the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would bring into force a world wide ban on nuclear testing. Yet the right is vehemently opposed to the treaty. Instead, of ratifying a test ban which would make it much more difficult for countries to develop nuclear weapons, the right wants to put the US in the same company with North Korea as the only country in the 21st century to test a nuclear weapon.

Testing nuclear weapons is militarily and scientifically unnecessary. Doing so will only destroy US credibility internationally, prompt other countries to resume testing and developing nuclear weapons, and lead to further ecological disaster. Should the right-wing take control post November, Nevadans opposed to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository may soon be getting not just a nuclear waste dump in their backyard but nuclear explosions.

In an important speech yesterday Vice President Biden pushed for rapid action on the President’s nuclear agenda. Biden spoke at the National Defense University and was introduced by Secretary of Defense Gates, sending a strong message that the military is firmly in support of moving full speed ahead on the President’s nuclear agenda. As Biden put it, “we are all on the same page” and that “even with deep nuclear reductions, we will remain undeniably strong.”

Biden laid out an ambitious agenda, which notably called for the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The Vice President also emphasized that there is clear bipartisan support among foreign policy experts for this agenda:

Our goal of a world without nuclear weapons has been endorsed by leading voices in both parties. These include two former Secretaries of State from Republican administrations, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz…During the 2008 Presidential campaign, both the President and Senator McCain supported the same objective. We will continue to build support for this emerging bipartisan consensus like the one around containment of Soviet expansionism that George Kennan inspired. Toward that end, we have worked tirelessly to implement the President’s Prague agenda.

On CTBT, Biden explained that “explosive testing damaged our health, disrupted our environment and set back our non-proliferation goals” and he affirmed that the past concerns that prevented ratification of the treaty in 1999 have been addressed, as technological advances make testing unnecessary. Biden explained:

Our labs know more about our arsenal today than when we used to explode our weapons on a regular basis. With our support, the labs can anticipate potential problems and reduce their impact on our arsenal. Unfortunately, during the last decade, our nuclear complex and experts were neglected and underfunded… That’s why earlier this month we announced a new budget that reverses the last decade’s dangerous decline. It devotes $7 billion to maintaining our nuclear stockpile and modernizing our nuclear infrastructure.

Watch it:

The speech presents a clear challenge to conservatives in the Senate. There is steadfast support from the military and widespread bipartisan support among serious foreign policy officials and experts (including Secretary of States for Reagan, Nixon, and George W. Bush) in support of eliminating nuclear weapons. Yet conservatives in the Senate, led by Senator Jon Kyl, appear determined to torpedo this effort, with Kyl even advocating for nuclear testing and building more nuclear weapons.

The key question is whether conservatives in the Senate motivated by an obstructionist political strategy and an extremist foreign policy vision are able to unite their party around blocking this agenda. In other words, this will demonstrate if they are the party of Powell or Palin.

Vice President Biden has an important op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal. In it, Biden firmly addresses one of the main arguments used by conservatives to oppose arms-control efforts, namely that the US nuclear stockpile is too unreliable to make further reductions. In response, Biden says the Administration is committed to reverse the previous decade of funding shortfalls in nuclear stockpile maintenance and will dramatically increase the budget for these programs:

Among the many challenges our administration inherited was the slow but steady decline in support for our nuclear stockpile and infrastructure, and for our highly trained nuclear work force. … For almost a decade, our laboratories and facilities have been underfunded and undervalued. … The budget we will submit to Congress on Monday both reverses this decline and enables us to implement the president’s nuclear-security agenda. To achieve these goals, our budget devotes $7 billion for maintaining our nuclear-weapons stockpile and complex, and for related efforts. This commitment is $600 million more than Congress approved last year. And over the next five years we intend to boost funding for these important activities by more than $5 billion.

This should address the stated concerns of conservative GOP Senators who wrote a letter last month worrying about the state of the nuclear stockpile in the face of future cuts in the nuclear arsenal. In other words, conservatives argue, reasonably enough, that if you have fewer nukes then we have to be sure that the remaining nuclear weapons are good to go. The problem however, is that instead of focusing on expanding resources to programs that maintain the reliability of our remaining nuclear weapons, prominent conservatives in the Senate stamp their feet demanding that we start building new nuclear weapons. This is like instead of taking your perfectly fine car to get a tune-up, you just decide to buy an entirely new one. It’s wasteful and unnecessary.

Numerous studies have pointed out that there is no need to build a new nuclear warhead or test nuclear weapons as long as there is adequate funding to maintain the nuclear stockpile. Biden’s increase in funding will ensure that, as the Arms Control Association notes, “the United States can continue maintain a reliable arsenal without resuming nuclear testing or building newly-designed nuclear warheads.”

Yet many conservatives prefer just to pretend these studies don’t exist. Senators like Jon Kyl (R-AZ), want to build new nuclear weapons and want to conduct new nuclear tests and pledge to fight tooth and nail against ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Many are predicting that because of this opposition, CTBT will go nowhere in the Senate, as it needs 67 votes. But with still 59 Democrats, and with Republican non-proliferation advocates like Senator Dick Lugar, not to mention the Senators from Utah and Nevada that have a strong opposition to ever testing nukes again, there is a fighting chance that this treaty could get passed. Importantly, Biden didn’t walk away from it and included CTBT ratification as part of the Administration’s core nuclear security agenda in his op-ed:

Our budget request is just one of several closely related and equally important initiatives giving life to the president’s Prague agenda. Others include…and pursuing ratification and entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Instead of shirking from the fight, the Administration should plow forward and push the CTBT, because as former Republican Senator from Utah, Jake Garn, wrote today in the Deseret News, “Ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty will make our country safer.”

Health care and nuclear proliferation seem to have little to do with each other. But right now the President’s ambitious nuclear non-proliferation agenda – the issue for which he received the Nobel Prize – is hanging in the balance.

Should congress fall into a state of paralysis or drastically scale back its ambition; should the health care bill get broken up and therefore eat up more of the legislative calendar; should Republican Senators continue to utilize the politics of obstruction with no political cost; and should Democrats cower in the face of this opposition – the President’s nuclear agenda, along with many other progressive priorities, will be in deep trouble. Strobe Talbott, the President of the Brookings Institution, said at a panel yesterday:

You might say what could Massachusetts possibly have to do with the arms control agenda? I think actually quite a bit. In so far as there is a partisan square-off on a lot the issues of President Obama’s agenda … the defensiveness of the Administration with regard to say health care is likely to tie over into additional difficulty with regard to other pieces of legislation, including the ratification of treaties.

The treaties that Talbott is referring to are a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with the Russians and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Both of these treaties are critical to non-proliferation efforts not just on their merits, but also because these treaties demonstrate America’s seriousness about nuclear proliferation and arms reductions. 2010 is critical for the nuclear agenda, as there are two major international conferences in April and May at which the President will seek to convince other countries to do more to combat nuclear proliferation. But getting others to do more, requires the United States to actually take action and lead by example.

It is not just that the world won’t become safer if these conferences are unsuccessful, it is that the world could get a whole lot less safe. The great danger is that an unsuccessful NPT review conference, which happens every 5 years and will take place in May, could further erode states’ confidence in the non-proliferation regime, putting us closer to a cascade of nuclear proliferation. In other words, failing to act on these treaties could have really dangerous consequences.

It has long been clear that the CTBT would be particularly hard, since many GOP Senators remain bizarrely committed to the explosive testing of nuclear weapons (yes you read that write). Yet the expectation has been that ratifying a new START treaty would be relatively uncontroversial. A new START treaty has had significant bipartisan support, since it is after all an advancement of the original treaty negotiated under Ronald Reagan.

However, ratifying a new treaty would be the biggest tangible foreign policy accomplishment of President Obama’s tenure – a fact that may mobilize the Senate GOP to attempt to block any new agreement. Senate Republicans led by Jon Kyl have been making quite a bit of noise already and have been throwing out disingenuous arguments to undercut the Administration’s efforts. This seems to indicate that Senate ideologues like Kyl are looking for reasons to oppose a new deal. While there are Republican Senators, like Richard Lugar, that will in all likelihood support a START treaty, treaties need 67 votes.

Should Senate Republicans conclude that continuing to pursue a politics of obstruction and therefore blocking these critical treaties will have little if any political cost – and would alternatively offer some political gain by hurting the President – they will go nowhere and as a result so will the President’s nuclear agenda.

The “four horsemen” were back today. Former Secretaries of State George Schultz (Reagan) and Henry Kissinger (Nixon and Ford), former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry (Clinton), and former Senator Sam Nunn (Sen. D-GA) have an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal reaffirming their past calls to eliminate nuclear weapons. They write today:

The four of us have come together, now joined by many others, to support a global effort to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons, to prevent their spread into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately to end them as a threat to the world.

These four national security leaders – two Republicans and two Democrats – have been four of the most prominent and vocal advocates of eliminating nuclear weapons and their efforts have significantly influenced President Obama and the global nuclear debate.

Their op-ed today importantly does not support one of the key arguments made by conservatives like Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), that the US needs to build new nuclear warheads because existing ones are “deteriorating.” The four statesmen conclude that:

Our recommendations for maintaining a safe, secure and reliable nuclear arsenal are consistent with the findings of a recently completed technical study commissioned by the National Nuclear Security Administration in the Department of Energy. This study was performed by JASON, an independent defense advisory group of senior scientists who had full access to the pertinent classified information. The JASON study found that the “[l]ifetimes of today’s nuclear warheads could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss in confidence, by using approaches similar to those employed in Life Extension Programs to date.”

By supporting the findings of the JASON study, Schultz, Perry, Kissinger, and Nunn are in no way supporting the construction of a new nuclear warhead, since the study found that as long as current maintenance programs are in place, building a new nuclear warhead is simply unnecessary. While the op-ed calls for maintaining the efficacy of nuclear labs and for ensuring proper funding for nuclear programs relevant to maintaining the nuclear force, this is something that the Administration and arms-control advocates support as well and in no way conflicts with the effort to work toward eliminating nuclear weapons.

The op-ed also notably rejects Senator Kyl’s clamoring for testing new nuclear weapons. Kyl wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in October titled “why we need to test nuclear weapons” that also opposed the effort to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The four statesmen pour cold water on Kyl’s desire to explode more nuclear weapons, noting that work at US nuclear labs have:

led to important advances in the scientific understanding of nuclear explosions and obviated the need for underground nuclear explosive tests.

While the common view in the US and among our media is that Obama got the prize for not being Bush, in fact the major reason he received it was for his work on nonproliferation, namely his dramatic speech last April in Prague where he laid out his vision for a world free of nuclear weapons. For the leader of a country that has nearly half of all the world’s nuclear weapons to declare that he desires a world without these weapons is actually a very big deal. As President Obama said in his speech today in Oslo:

One urgent example is the effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and to seek a world without them. In the middle of the last century, nations agreed to be bound by a treaty whose bargain is clear: All will have access to peaceful nuclear power; those without nuclear weapons will forsake them; and those with nuclear weapons will work toward disarmament. I am committed to upholding this treaty. It is a centerpiece of my foreign policy. And I am working with President Medvedev to reduce America and Russia’s nuclear stockpiles.

Most don’t think very much about nukes anymore, but they were the preoccupation of the world for fifty years – a world that saw two powers feverishly build and build the capability to destroy the world and while the Cold War has ended the chance of nuclear attack has increased. Joe Cirincione noted the Nobel “is not about Obama… This is about 23,000 hydrogen bombs in the world ready to use.”

Now the President and his Administration have a long way to go. But they have begun taking steps to advance this vision and will face crucial tests in the coming months.

What has the Administration achieved thus far?

1) It has elevated the priority of arms-control on the international agenda. While the Bush administration basically rejected the concept of arms-control (like with Climate Change), this Administration has done a 180 and placed it square at the top of the international agenda. At the UN Security Council in September the President chaired a session on nonproliferation and reasserted US leadership on this issue. And Washington will host a Global Nuclear Security Summit next April that will focus on safeguarding nuclear materials and preventing nuclear terrorism.

2) The US has rebuilt relations with Russia and has worked with the Russians to cut nuclear weapons. This effort will be ongoing, but the first big step is just about complete, as negotiations over a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which further reduces US and Russian strategic nuclear weapons, are wrapping up.

What does the Administration hope to achieve in the coming months?

1) The Administration will release a new Nuclear Posture Review that will test whether the military is really ready to “reduce the role of nuclear weapons” in its strategic posture. This will perhaps be the most critical test, since the President has total control over this process and if the President is unable to tame his own bureaucracy’s reliance on nukes, than convincing the world of our seriousness will be impossible.

2) The White House must push the Senate to ratify the new START treaty, as well as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Senate ratification requires 67 votes and while analysts feel somewhat confident about START, CTBT will be a real political fight, despite the fact that the US hasn’t physically tested a nuclear weapon in 17 years and with advances in technology there is not, and will not be, any need to. The world will be highly skeptical of American intentions if we refuse to ratify a treaty that would prevent us from doing something that will will almost certainly never do.

3) The US must achieve progress at the Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference in May. This treaty is the bedrock of the nonproliferation regime and serves to prevent cascading proliferation of the nuclear bomb. Yet the treaty is under increasing strain and if the White House is unable to achieve progress on ratification of START or CTBT or if it fails to produce an NPR that is reflective of the President’s Prague speech the conference will in all likelihood fall well short.

A new congressionally commissioned report just stuck it to Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). Kyl is the leading advocate in the Senate for testing nuclear weapons and has led the charge against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) – a treaty that seeks to stop countries from testing nuclear weapons.

Obama has made ratifying the treaty a major priority and there are hopes that the Senate will bring it up next year, yet conservatives led by Kyl are looking to block it. One of Kyl’s main arguments against CTBT is that it would prevent the U.S. from physically exploding nuclear weapons, which he insists we need to do to ensure the effectiveness of the US nuclear arsenal. Writing an oped in the Wall Street Journal last month titled Why We Need To Test Nuclear Weapons, Kyl wrote that “a ban on testing nuclear weapons would jeopardize American national security.” He asserted that “concerns over aging and reliability have only grown” and insisted that “the reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons still cannot be guaranteed without testing them, despite more than a decade of investments in technological advancements.”

Unfortunately for Kyl, a new congressionally-commissioned study (pdf) conducted by a panel of independent scientists has proven him dead wrong. The study concluded that the current programs in place to maintain the effectiveness of the US nuclear arsenal – a program called the Life Extension Program (LEP) – have demonstrated that:

Lifetimes of today’s nuclear warheads could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss in confidence, by using approaches similar to those employed in LEPs to date.

In other words, there really is no need to ever test a nuclear weapon – something the US hasn’t done in the last 17 years – or build new replacement warheads. This study effectively undercuts one of the main arguments of CTBT opponents and should strengthen the push to ratify the treaty next year. As Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association concluded: “There is no technical or military reason to resume U.S. nuclear weapons testing, and it is in the U.S. national security interest to prevent nuclear testing by others. A growing list of bipartisan leaders agree that by ratifying the CTBT, the U.S. stands to gain an important constraint on the ability of other states to build new and more deadly nuclear weapons that could pose a threat to American security.”