The need to spend heavily to modernize the nationÂ’s shrinking nuclear stockpile has been apparent for at least two decades. President George H.W. Bush reduced the stockpile by nearly 40 percent and imposed a ban on nuclear testing. President Bill Clinton extended the ban while reaffirming the importance of maintaining the arsenalÂ’s safety and performance.
President George W. Bush came into office in 2001 planning to shrink and modernize the vast and deteriorating nuclear complex. Although he cut the stockpile by almost 50 percent and made some progress on renovating the complex, the effort was largely derailed by the costs and complications of two wars.
You just make sure you don't mention the last two GOP presidents have reduced the stockpile and Clinton didn't.
While the administration was surprised by the state of the stockpile, the decision to spend heavily on modernization was also driven by a deal cut with Senate Republicans in late 2010. As part of negotiations to win ratification of the New START accord and reduce the nuclear weapons maintained by the United States and Russia, the administration agreed to increase money for modernizing the nuclear-weapons complex. Some Republicans say the administration isnÂ’t spending enough.
Oh, look: Obama didn't want to spend much on the modernization -- and some say he's still not spending enough.
Much of the blame for the soaring costs has fallen on the National Nuclear Security Administration, the division of the Department of Energy responsible for managing and modernizing the nuclear stockpile. For years, the Government Accountability Office, the Pentagon and some lawmakers have cited the NNSA for chronic poor planning and bad management. The GAO has had the NNSA on its “high-risk list” for fraud, waste and abuse in contracting and management since 1990.
Government reports show that the NNSA has blown budgets across the board. For instance, the projected cost of a new weapons conversion facility at the DOE’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina rose to $5 billion from $1.4 billion. It was eventually scrapped — after $700 million in planning costs. The cost of building a new fuel fabrication facility at Savannah River also has tripled to $5 billion, and it is scheduled to open in 2016, a decade late.
Oh, look: Government inefficiency and incompetence. But that's the GOP's fault. Somehow. It just is.
Right, TM?
The nuclear arsenal has not entirely escaped cuts. To comply with the new Budget Control Act spending limits, the NNSA decided this year that it could not afford to replace both the crumbling plutonium testing facility at Los Alamos for $6 billion and the deteriorating uranium processing facility in Building 9212 at Oak Ridge for $6.5 billion.
The NNSA chose to rehab Building 9212 because there was no alternative site where the critical work carried out there could be performed.
So, after 250 contractors moved into Los Alamos last year and tractors dug out 160,000 cubic feet of volcanic tuff rock from the side of a hill, NNSA and the administration decided that building a new plutonium-testing site would be delayed five years. The crews stopped work. The tractors were idled. A new reality sank in.
Oh, spending cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act that Obama signed?
How is that the GOP's fault, again?
As usual, TM tells only part of the story. Lying by omission.
