C.T.B.T. — Warmed-Over ‘Nuclear Freeze’ Agenda Item — Threatens to Give U.S. Nuclear Deterrent the ‘Big Chill’
(Washington, D.C.): News Item: “A senior Energy Department official and his wife, one of
the
lead attorneys involved in the Karen Silkwood case, were arrested this week on charges of
growing and possessing marijuana….” Washington Post, 4 September 1999
The revelation that a political appointee in the Clinton Energy Department, Robert
Jason
Alvarez, was busted for pot was considered to be of sufficiently little news value that
the Post
ran the story in its Metro section on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. In such coverage as the
paper afforded the matter, moreover, priority was given to the fact that Alvarez was subsequently
fired from his position as a senior policy advisor in charge of environmental safety and health.
One might be forgiven for thinking it should be newsworthy that the Department of Energy
has
had in its senior ranks a pedigreed nuclearphobe like Alvarez. DoE is, after all, the government
agency charged with maintaining the Nation’s nuclear weapons. But the Post buried
this
information, near the bottom of the article that was itself buried in the paper’s back sections:
“Both Alvarez and [his wife, Kathleen Marie ‘Kitty’] Tucker were widely known figures
among
anti-nuclear activists in the 1970s and 1980s. Alvarez worked for public interest groups,
focusing on the health effects of radiation and pushing for cleanup of nuclear waste
contamination at government facilities.” Specifically, Alvarez was for many years prior to
joining the government the director of the Nuclear Power and Weapons Project at the
Environmental Policy Institute, one of seemingly innumerable left-wing policy agitation
operations in Washington.
Not Alone
The regrettable truth is that the Clinton Energy Department’s senior staff has been
riddled
with people who have at least as impressive resumes of campaigning for U.S. nuclear
disarmament as the one caught with as many as 69 live marijuana plants in his
basement.
If Alvarez was a pathfinder for these no-nukes types, starting work at DoE in 1988 (at the start of
the hugely successful effort to divert an ever-larger percentage of the agency’s budget from
nuclear weapons-related activities to environmental clean-up), he has hardly been alone.
Among those whose backgrounds bespeak an affinity for the anti-nuclear agenda who were
recruited by Secretaries Hazel O’Leary, Federico
Peña and/or Bill Richardson to serve in
influential policy-making positions at the Energy Department are: Under Secretary
Ernest
Moriz, a physicist from MIT, one of Cambridge’s bastions of ban-the-bomb thinking;
Assistant
Secretary (and former Chief of Staff to Secretary Hazel O’Leary) Dan
Reicher, formerly a
senior attorney with the radical Natural Resources Defense Council; former Assistant
Secretary
Tara O’Toole, once a member in good standing of a “Marxist-Feminist” reading group;
and
Assistant Secretary Rose Gottemoeller, who has publicly espoused the
dealerting and ultimate
abolition of U.S. nuclear weapons. 1
Hardy Perennial of the Disarmers
The policy predilections of those who are now, or have been, driving the
Department of
Energy’s positions on nuclear matters over the past seven years are worth considering as
the campaign to sell the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) gets underway, The
proposal to ban all nuclear testing has been an idée fixe of the anti-nuclear
crowd for decades.
Notably, it was a central goal of the Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980s, whose potential to
inflict unilateral disarmament on the United States — or at least to mobilize public opinion
against Ronald Reagan’s deployments of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe and his
strategic force modernization programs at home — is now known to have been gleefully exploited
by the Kremlin.
Despite some recent celebrity endorsements by people who should know better, the
CTBT
remains what it always was: a backdoor stratagem advanced by the radical Left to “disarm
the one they’re with” by “freezing” the American nuclear weapons program. Its
objective and
effect, however, would be more insidious than merely keeping things as they are. If ratified, a
permanent ban on testing would prevent the United States from taking the steps necessary even
to maintain — let alone to modernize — our deterrent. For example, obsolete components of
aging weapons cannot simply and confidently be replaced without proving by actual testing that
they will work in a reassembled device.
Over time, conditions will inexorably be created that will undermine the safety, reliability
and
effectiveness of our nuclear arsenal. In other words, the “freeze” would be tantamount to the
“Big Chill” for the ultimate guarantor of the Nation’s security.
George Bush: U.S. Testing ‘Required for the Foreseeable Future’
To be sure, the CTBT’s proponents contend that this multilateral treaty, signed by over 150
nations, will bind everyone, not just us. The trouble is that an end to testing will have decidedly
asymmetric effects. Our surpassingly sophisticated nuclear forces have been designed and
constructed in the expectation that their continued functionality could be assured by periodic
underground testing. For this reason, on his last day in office, President George Bush wrote the
Congress warning that “the requirement to maintain and improve the safety of U.S. forces
necessitates continued nuclear testing for these purposes, albeit at a modest level, for the
foreseeable future.”
Potential adversaries are not faced with the same problem. Most have opted for relatively
crude
nuclear devices whose reliability can be assured without testing. Others can exploit the
unverifiability of the CTBT to conduct low-yield, but highly informative, covert tests. Of
course, the argument that this ban on testing will stop proliferation is made even more
preposterous by the fact that it is now possible to buy nuclear weapons that someone else has
tested, or rent the necessary scientific know-how and materiel to build a functional, if basic,
bomb.
The Bottom Line
In coming weeks, Republican Senators will be buffeted by a concerted campaign of
anti-nuclear
political action the likes of which have not been seen since the Nuclear Freeze melted away in
the 1980s, discredited and defeated by the validation of Reagan’s strategy of “peace through
strength.” Some will doubtless be tempted to do the expedient thing — supporting the latest
product of the arms control machinery, irrespective of the consequences for national security.
Others may be seek political cover by embracing a new, fraudulent presidential commitment to
deploy missile defenses in exchange for their vote for the CTBT. 2
No one — in or out of the U.S. Senate — should be under any illusion, however: The
credentialing of advocates of radical nuclear disarmament in the Clinton Energy Department, and
the resulting official embrace of an unverifiable, ineffectual and counter-productive CTBT,
doesn’t change this treaty’s spots. For the same reasons that, until this
president, every one
of his predecessors and their nuclear experts rejected a zero-yield Comprehensive Test
Ban, it must be rejected this time, as well.
The CTBT may be, as President Clinton has declared, the “longest sought and hardest
fought”
arms control objective for the radical Left. It should still not be acceptable to, or imposed upon,
the rest of us.
1 For more on these individuals and various denuclearization
initiatives with which their
Department has been associated in recent years, see the Center’s Decision
Briefs entitled U.S.
‘De-Nuclearization’: Who Is Minding the Store? (
Important Justification for Firing Hazel O’Leary: Her Role in Denuclearizing the United
States (No. 95-D 90, 10 November 1995);
Clinton’s Reckless Nuclear Agenda Revealed? Study
Co-Authored By Candidate For Top Pentagon Job Is Alarming (
First Blood On C.T. B.: Bush, Schlesinger, Barker Make Compelling Case For
Continued
Nuclear Testing (No. 97-D 160, 28
October 1997); and U.S. Deterrent ‘Unplugged’: The
Denuclearizers’ Already Far- Advanced Agenda Is A Formula For Unilateral
Disarmament
(No. 97-D 170, 14 November 1997).
2 This trial balloon was floated last Monday by Senator Joseph
Biden (D-DE) in a front-page
article in the New York Times. See ‘Grand Deal’ for C.T.B. Would Likely Leave
U.S. Without
Either Missile Defenses or Safe, Reliable Nuclear Deterrent (No. 99-D
93, 30 August 1999).
Mr. Gaffney is the host of Secure Freedom Radio, a nationally-syndicated radio program heard weeknights throughout the country. He is an associate author of highly acclaimed Shariah: The Threat to America and the publisher of over a dozen other books and monographs from the Center for Security Policy Press.
In April 1987, Mr. Gaffney was nominated by President Reagan to become the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, the senior position in the Defense Department with responsibility for policies involving U.S.-USSR relations, nuclear forces, arms control, missile defense policy and U.S.-European defense ties. He acted in that capacity for seven months during which time, he was the Chairman of the prestigious High Level Group, NATO’s senior politico-military committee. He also represented the Secretary of Defense in key U.S.-Soviet negotiations and ministerial meetings.
From August 1983 until November 1987, Mr. Gaffney was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy under Assistant Secretary Richard Perle.
From February 1981 to August 1983, Mr. Gaffney was a Professional Staff Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by the late Senator John Tower (R-Texas). And, in the latter 1970’s, Mr. Gaffney served as an aide to the late Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson (D-Washington) in the areas of defense and foreign policy.
Mr. Gaffney holds a Master of Arts degree in International Studies from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.
Mr. Gaffney’s leadership has been recognized by numerous organizations including: the Department of Defense Distinguished Public Service Award (1987), the U.S. Business and Industry Council’s Defender of the National Interest Award (1994), the Navy League of the United States’ Alfred Thayer Mahan Literary Achievement Award (1999), and the Zionist Organization of America’s “Louis Brandeis Award” (2003), the Western Conservative Summit’s Stephen H. Long Award (2015), the Council for National Policy’s George Washington Military Leadership Award (2016) and the IMPACT Award from Ginni Thomas and United in Purpose (2017).
Mr. Gaffney was born in 1953 and resides in the Washington, D.C. area.
- The UN transforms itself into a world government - September 22, 2024
- Hezbollah is engaged in terrorism, not Israel - September 22, 2024
- Israel must seize the day - September 20, 2024