Today, two deficit-cutting bills will be voted on in the House of Representatives. One bill, introduced by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) and fellow Republicans, would end all federal funding to National Public Radio (NPR). The other bill, sponsored by Reps. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and Walter Jones (R-NC) and being pushed largely by progressive Democrats, calls for setting a strict timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan that would mandate the end of combat operations in that country by the end of 2011.

Conservatives claim that defunding NPR would save taxpayers a great deal of money; former NPR employee Juan Williams even argued that NPR funding was taking away from “school breakfast programs [and] college scholarships.” Yet NPR receives only around 2 percent of its annual $161 million budget from federal grants, totaling approximately $3.2 million. Meanwhile, the FY2011 cost of the Afghan war has hit $113 billion.

Assuming that the costs of both the NPR funding and Afghan war would be the same for next year, that means that ending the Afghan war would save approximately 40,000 times more taxpayer dollars than defunding NPR’s grants from agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts and Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Additionally, as the National Priorities Project shows, ending the war could help free up money for countless domestic priorities, like hiring millions of teachers or funding health care for tens of millions of poor children. Here are just some of the alternatives that could be funded for the cost of one year of the Afghan war:

- Health Care For 55 Million Low Income Children

- 1.6 million Elementary School Teachers for One Year

- 1.9 million Firefighters for One Year

- 14.1 million Head Start Slots for Children for One Year

- 13.8 million Military Veterans Receiving VA Medical Care for One Year

- 1.6 million Police or Sheriff’s Patrol Officers for One Year

- 19.3 million Students receiving Pell Grants of $5550

- 13.6 million Scholarships for University Students for One Year

Americans recognize these truths about the relative costs of the Afghan war versus NPR. That’s why polling shows that only a quarter of Americans want to see cuts to funding for public broadcasting, while the vast majority of Americans no longer support the Afghan war and want a clear exit from that country. If Republicans really want to “listen to the American people,” as they pledged to do last fall during their campaign, they would support ending the war in Afghanistan and really saving taxpayers money, not endorsing gimmicks to please the more extreme members of their base.

A common refrain from those looking to oppose the START treaty, the newly released nuclear posture review, and more broadly Obama’s nuclear agenda, is that it is reckless to cut nuclear weapons when our nuclear arsenal is aging and deteriorating. Statements from Jon Kyl, John McCain, and Joe Lieberman all throw out this argument.

John Bolton and friends take this argument to the next level, asserting that Obama is leaving America exposed by not spending enough to maintain existing US nuclear weapons. Bolton wrote in the National Review that the administration is “drastically limiting programs to ensure the safety and reliablity (sic) of our existing nuclear stockpile, the president is risking our security and obtaining nothing in return.” It is a great talking point for conservatives – except that it is just not true.

First, the Obama administration announced massive funding increases to the nuclear infrastructure – a 10 percent increase over what the Bush administration spent. Biden wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

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. These goals are intertwined… 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.

Conservative’s newfound concerns about the state of the nuclear infrastructure reek of duplicity. The Obama administration is spending significantly more on maintaining nuclear weapons and labs than the Bush administration, especially compared to when John Bolton was Undersecretary for Arms Control. If Obama is “risking our security” than Bolton and the Bush administration were practically a second-coming of Benedict Arnold based on the comparatively puny amount that was spent on modernizing our nuclear infrastructure.

Second, the nuclear weapons are completely reliable. The JASON advisory panel, which is made up of actual rocket scientists, concluded that the nuclear weapons were in fine shape:

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 [Life Extension Programs] to date.

The right is now attempting to make some hay out of a letter from some nuclear lab directors that said the JASON study was too positive and that more funding was needed for the labs. Conservatives are just shocked, shocked, to find out that the heads of an organization want more money for their organization. Nevertheless, these lab directors, despite having a significant interest in receiving more funds, still did not contradict the fundamental point that was communicated in the unclassified executive summary of the JASON report – that the nuclear weapons are fine as long as we continue the modernization programs that are already on the books.

Third, we are modernizing our nuclear weapons. Conservatives like Bolton desperately want the US to build an entirely new nuclear warhead and they claim that our weapons are really old and increasingly unreliable. They must not watch any home renovation shows, because they seem to have no understanding that it is possible to renovate or modernize something, without starting from scratch. If Bolton were on This Old House he would tell Tom Silva to just tear down the house they are renovating and start from scratch. This is a foolish and costly approach. The fact is that the US is constantly refurbishing and modernizing its nuclear weapons. As Stephen Pifer of the Brookings Institution explained:

We [the US] take a missile frame and we modernize it, and we refurbish it, whereas the Russian practice is to take a missile, they use it for 15 years and then they replace it completely. So you’ll see new numbers coming up on the Russian side and you may think that, gosh, the Americans are still deploying these 1970s missiles. I suspect when they retire the last Minuteman III in 2030, it may have three of the original bolts on it from 1970 but it’s going to be a very different missile.

The reality is that our weapons are the best in the world and conservatives who attack the state of our nuclear arsenal need to answer a question posed by Kingston Rief in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:

So those who continue to argue that Washington doesn’t show enough interest in modernizing its nuclear weapons should be forced to answer a simple question: If given the choice, would they trade the U.S. nuclear arsenal for the Russian or Chinese nuclear arsenals? Clearly, the answer is no.

One issue we didn’t hear very much of during the 2008 Presidential campaign was nuclear policy, largely because both Senators Obama and McCain almost entirely agreed with each other. In fact, McCain called for dramatic nuclear cuts, a new START treaty, and ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

At the University of Denver in May 2008, John McCain laid out his nuclear policy in a speech that could have just as easily been given by President Obama:

the Cold War ended almost 20 years ago, and the time has come to take further measures to reduce dramatically the number of nuclear weapons in the world’s arsenals. It’s time for the United States to show the kind of leadership the world expects from us, in the tradition of American presidents who worked to reduce the nuclear threat to mankind.

Based off his comments in 2008, one would expect John McCain to be largely supportive of the Nuclear Posture Review and the New START treaty. But this is 2010 and McCain is doing some serious backtracking on his once mavericky forward-looking approach to nuclear weapons.

McCain it seems has joined forces with nuclear weapons-hugger Jon Kyl (R-AZ) in criticizing Obama’s nuclear efforts. In February, McCain signed on to a letter with Jon Kyl and Joe Lieberman, which held that the three would oppose the treaty if the Russians issue an entirely symbolic unilateral statement on missile defense. Such a stance is merely a smokescreen to disguise opposition to the treaty, since a unilateral signing statement would have no practical impact whatsoever, as the Russians could withdraw from the treaty with or without ever having issued a statement. McCain’s new skepticism contradicts his past stance as an advocate of getting a new START agreement. McCain said in 2008:

We should be able to agree with Russia on binding verification measures based on those currently in effect under the START Agreement, to enhance confidence and transparency.

McCain’s vote may be critical to the ratification of New START in the Senate and his new stance is a significant reversal that may delay ratification, at least until after the Arizona primary in August.

Now McCain is attacking the just released Nuclear Posture Review. Yesterday, McCain jointly issued a statement with Kyl that criticizes a nuclear posture review, that as Marc Ambinder noted, doesn’t have “all that much that Republicans can complain about.” Despite the fact that the Obama administration has already pledged massive increases in funding for the nuclear infrastructure, the statement raises concerns about the state of the nuclear arsenal and demands even more nuclear pork be lavished on the labs:

Moreover, the amount of money committed to this in the FY11-15 budget window – the $5 billion budget transfer referenced by Defense Secretary Gates, spread over five years – is woefully inadequate.

Funny that in an entire speech on nuclear weapons in 2008, McCain never mentioned his concern over the state of the nuclear arsenal, despite the Bush administration was funding our nuclear infrastructure at much lower levels. As Ambinder points out:

No one would have anticipated that the administration would be spending a billion dollars a year to modernize its stockpile. The folks who actually do this stuff requested more money, and they got it — a lot more.

Furthermore, while McCain, as did Obama, pledged to maintain the nuclear force during the campaign, he didn’t state his support for building new nuclear warheads in his 2008 nuclear weapons policy speech. But this seems to be one of the main demands of Kyl and may shape up to be the issue that Republicans will try to make Obama cave on in exchange for supporting the treaty. Building new warheads, essentially building new nuclear weapons, is both completely unneccessary and would be widely seen as the US backing off its disarmament commitments – commitments that the McCain of 2008 firmly supported.