Citizens for Global Solutions: When I am President, the United States will once again be a leader in reducing the roles and risks of nuclear weapons, and preventing them from falling into the wrong hands. I support the goal of every president from Truman to Clinton of ending nuclear weapons, and I support the effort that Sam Nunn, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger, and George Shultz are leading to restore American leadership in this area.
I have opposed the Bush Administration's plans for the Reliable Replacement Warhead and I have also voted consistently to block funding for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, "bunker buster," warhead. The Bush administration has dangerously put the cart before the horse, planning to rush ahead with new nuclear weapons without any considered assessment of what we need these weapons for or what the impact of building them would be on our effort to stop the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. As President I will seek bipartisan support for a comprehensive nuclear weapons policy that takes into account the need to maintain a safe and reliable nuclear deterrent and the critical importance of restoring American leadership on nonproliferation.
As President, I will seek ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 2009, the tenth year of its initial rejection by the Senate. I will seek to negotiate an accord that substantially and verifiably reduces the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. I will also work to implement near-term steps Secretaries Schultz, Kissinger, Perry and Senator Nunn, including: increasing nuclear warning time, and reducing the danger of accidental or unauthorized launch.
In the Senate, I have introduced the Nuclear Terrorism Prevention Act to accelerate and reinvigorate U.S. efforts to prevent nuclear terrorism. My legislation would increase funding for the Global Threat Reduction Initiative to convert research reactors around the world from highly enriched uranium to low enriched uranium and to remove the highly enriched uranium from such facilities. Establishing an international fuel bank that guaranteed secure access to nuclear fuel at reasonable prices would help limit the number of countries that pose proliferation risks.
