Last Friday at the Fairmont Hotel in downtown Washington, DC, I was among a group of reporters who'd been invited to a lunchtime question-and-answer session with Thomas D'Agostino, the head of the National Nuclear Security Agency, and Ellen Tauscher, the under secretary of state responsible for arms control and international security affairs.
In case you didn't know, NNSA was founded 10 years ago in the wake of the Wen Ho Lee affair. In 1998, Lee, a nuclear weapons designer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, downloaded restricted data to his home computer. The US government accused Lee of handing over top-secret material to a foreign power, presumably China. If found guilty, Lee would have spent the rest of his life in prison.
The government dropped the charges because of lack of evidence, but the security breach and others that came to light prompted the government to create a separate nuclear security agency within the Department of Energy. The department retains overall responsibility for the development and manufacture of America's nuclear arsenal, whereas the NNSA, according to its website
plays a critical role in ensuring the security of our Nation by maintaining the safety, security, and effectiveness of the US nuclear weapons stockpile without nuclear testing; reducing the global danger from the proliferation of nuclear weapons and materials; providing the US Navy with safe and effective nuclear propulsion; and providing the Nation with an effective nuclear counterterrorism and incident response capability.
The Fairmont, which I hadn't visited before, put on a good lunch in its Sulgrave Suite. I especially liked the fresh pea soup. Soon after we reporters had been fed and watered, D'Agostino arrived with his agency's deputy director of public affairs, Jennifer Wagner, and a man in a US Navy uniform who didn't introduce himself. Tauscher was on speaker phone.
Senior government officials are typically busy. Not many of them enjoy talking to reporters. If Tauscher and D'Agostino made time in their schedules to meet us, it must have been to get some sort of message out. Sure enough, D'Agostino opened the proceedings by noting US policy on nuclear weapons had recently attained a rare degree of clarity under President Obama. That clarity, said D'Agostino, was reflected in Obama's Nuclear Posture Review, his 2011 budget request for the NNSA, and in the agency's so-called 1251 report, which looks at problems 10 years ahead.
Tauscher, who had to leave early, spoke next. Her main concern was Senate ratification of New START, a nuclear weapons treaty that Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev signed five months ago in the Czech capital Prague.
With a tone of exasperation in her voice, Tauscher noted that senators have had plenty of opportunity to scrutinize the treaty. She cited 24 hearings and 19 official questions for the record. Asking for more time, as some Republican senators have done, was "political posturing." Tauscher presumably knows of what she speaks. Before she joined the state department, she represented California's tenth district as a Democrat.
"Political posturing" doesn't seem inaccurate. The Associated Press has just reported that Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), who supports New START, is working on provisos to the treaty resolution that would mollify Republican holdouts. Such unilateral provisos, whether attached by the US Senate or the Russian Duma, are not part of the already agreed-on treaty. They really do amount to little more than posturing for domestic consumption.
In the Q&A session one reporter—I think it was someone from Bloomberg—asked Tauscher if there was any political cost to opposing prompt ratification of New START. Unfortunately, she couldn't cite any.
