Democrats Challenge Bush on Weapons Reduction Plan

Senate Democrats on Thursday challenged the Bush administration’s new approach to the U.S. nuclear arsenal, arguing that proposed reductions represent far less change than claimed and could increase the threat of arms proliferation.

In their first concerted attack on the policy, Democratic lawmakers charged that plans to warehouse rather than destroy some active warheads are simply “rearranging the furniture” in the nuclear arsenal. They disputed the administration’s contention that it is moving the United States away from a nuclear deterrence approach that created a “balance of terror” during the Cold War.

“This is warehoused terror rather than immediate terror,” Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) declared at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

President Bush has promoted his team’s new vision of nuclear weapons as one of the major policy innovations of his term. He has announced plans to withdraw from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which barred most strategic anti-missile weapons, and he has declared his intention to cut the U.S. offensive missile arsenal by two-thirds, to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads.

The announcement in November that the United States planned to decommission thousands of warheads brought wide praise. But the reaction shifted last month after a report disclosed that the Pentagon intended to store some of these warheads for possible redeployment rather than destroy them.

Critics maintain that although warehousing would reduce the threat of a nuclear conflict, it would not be enough to persuade Russia to continue to shrink the size of its nuclear arsenal. And they said that if Russia warehoused a large number of nuclear warheads in unsafe facilities, it could raise the chance of an accident or the theft of a warhead.

Russian officials, who are engaged in intermittent arms talks with the United States, have insisted that the cuts be irreversible.

Bush officials, however, have maintained that a share of the warheads must be available for redeployment because of the chance that an unexpected security threat could suddenly arise. In a long-range report on the nuclear arsenal released last month, the administration called for the creation of a “responsive force” including warheads that could be redeployed on missiles and bombers.

Levin contended that because the administration planned to keep about the same number of bombers and missiles, and to keep an undisclosed number of the decommissioned warheads in storage, the nuclear plan wasn’t “exquisitely different,” as claimed.

“It looks to me exactly the same,” he said.

Sen. Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii) said that moving the warheads to storage was simply “rearranging the furniture.”

“This is not a reduction,” he said.

The administration has contended that by ending the old ways of negotiating arms treaties with the Russians and developing new defensive and conventional arms, the United States was at last taking steps to end the deterrent system called “mutually assured destruction,” or MAD.

But Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said that the administration still planned to rely on the threat of retaliatory strikes with nuclear weapons as a way of deterring adversaries.

“It seems that it might be dead, yet MAD is still reaching us from the grave,” Reed said.

Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, the Pentagon’s top arms-control official, held his ground, insisting that “we are drastically reducing our dependence on nuclear arms.”

Some outside analysts said pressure from the lawmakers, along with pressure from the Russians, could influence the outcome of the U.S.-Russian talks aimed at reaching a new arms agreement.

Although the Bush administration wants a deal that won’t tie its hands, it also wants to be able to sign some kind of agreement and has already made some “modest concessions,” said John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World, an arms-control advocacy group. The Democrats “do have some ability to shape this agreement,” he said.