Pat Dollard

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Politico:

President Barack Obama has been clear. He wants no new nukes.

Pentagon chief Robert Gates has been equally direct, advocating in recent years for a new generation of warheads.

And nearly 14 months into their bipartisan-tinged partnership, Obama and Gates haven’t publicly reconciled their views. Some anti-nuclear activists suspect the pair still don’t see completely eye-to-eye and that Gates has never fully abandoned his goal of refurbishing the American nuclear arsenal with new weapons.

Now, the administration is on the verge of releasing a major nuclear policy review that could call attention to this disagreement between the Democratic president and his holdover Defense Secretary – just in time for a nuclear safety summit Obama is hosting for heads of state next month in Washington.

“Quite clearly,” said Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, “the secretary has been stating he sees a need for replacement warheads and new designs, and I’m not sure those are the words the president would want to use at this stage in the process.”

The Obama administration is acutely aware of perceptions that the Nuclear Posture Review has divided senior officials—with Vice President Joe Biden viewed as heading up an arms-control focused camp, and Gates perceived as speaking for a military and nuclear establishment that favors more funding and new weapons programs.

“This is the big challenge of the Obama administration, that it has to find some common ground for those two relatively, I wouldn’t say contradictory, but what can be distant positions,” Kristensen said.

When Obama asked Gates to stay on, the move was widely hailed for bringing continuity to the Pentagon at a time of two wars, and for avoiding the temptation any president faces to purge all of his predecessor’s appointees.

But holding over a member of the Cabinet, especially one who served a president of the opposing party, inevitably means some awkward policy clashes.

It’s not merely that a president and one of his senior advisers might diverge on an important policy question. It’s that Obama’s call to move toward a world without nuclear weapons is one of the signature tenets of his foreign policy.

And liberal arms control activists worry that Obama’s 2011 budget – which would spend more on nuclear weapons labs and related activities than the United States did at the height of the Cold War, even adjusted for inflation—goes too far to assuage the concerns of the defense secretary and leaders of the nuclear weapons complex.

“Increasing funds for nuclear weapons appears to conflict with a vision of a world without them,” former Office of Management and Budget analyst Robert Civiak said.

Asked directly about whether Obama and Gates had squared up their past differences, White House officials dismissed the question as premature ahead of the release of the policy review.

“The NPR is still being worked,” National Security Council Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said in response to questions from POLITICO.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said the Obama administration’s overall approach is in line with Gates’ views. Gates “still believes in the fundamental goals of ensuring warhead safety, security, and reliability, and believes we need a modern infrastructure to support that. Those investments are in the budget,” the spokesman said. “The RRW [Reliable Replacement Warhead] program was killed by Congress, and isn’t coming back. Sec. Gates recognizes that fact.”

However, Morrell said it was too soon to say how modernization of nuclear warhead stocks would be carried out. The Pentagon is “not going to say now what the policy will be on this issue,” the spokesman said.

During the presidential campaign, Obama was unequivocal in his opposition to new designs. “I will not authorize the development of new nuclear weapons,” he told Arms Control Today in September 2008.

About a month later, while still working for Bush, Gates delivered a speech calling for “urgent attention” to the Bush administration’s call for a new Reliable Replacement Warhead and warning of a “bleak” outlook for the U.S. nuclear arsenal if the new devices weren’t pursued.

“Sensitive parts do not last forever. We can and do re-engineer our current stockpile to extend its lifespan,” Gates said. “With every adjustment we move farther away from the original design that was successfully tested when the weapon was first fielded…At a certain point it will become impossible to keep extending the life of our arsenal—especially in light of our testing moratorium.”

Gates might have been expected to keep mum on the point after Obama was elected, at least in public. He didn’t.

“It is clear, at least to me, that it is important for us to continue to make investments, and I think larger investments in modernizing our nuclear infrastructure, the labs and so on, the expertise in those places, to have the resources for life extension programs and in one or two cases probably new designs that will be safer or more reliable,” Gates said last September, fielding a question at an Air Force Association conference.

So it was no accident that when Biden delivered a policy address last month about nuclear disarmament and the need to boost funding for America’s atomic labs, Gates introduced the vice president—who quickly downplayed any divisions.

“This speech was a collaborative document,” Biden told the audience at the National Defense University, in an apparent ad lib. “Bob Gates could have delivered this speech.”

Unsurprisingly, Obama’s categorical opposition to any new nuclear weapons appears to have carried the day—at least on the surface. When the administration’s 2011 budget plan emerged last month, there was no mention of any new atomic weapons programs.

But the question of whether Gates is still pushing for new designs isn’t as clear-cut, despite Biden’s 22-minute speech and the public budget proposal.

Analysts say squaring the previously stated positions of the president and the Pentagon chief depends on what the definition of the word ‘new’ is. And, as is so often the case with the federal government, the Obama budget’s proposal for a huge injection of cash should help smooth over any hard feelings at the Pentagon and the nuclear labs.

“It comes down to what constitutes ‘new,’ ’’ Kristensen added. “Even very new concepts can be proposed that are not necessarily considered ‘new,’ but as modifications of existing types of warheads. It’s not a black and white thing.”

“A big part of the nuclear review was to assure Secretary Gates and others that we would be investing in all the tools and programs necessary to keep the arsenal safe and effective for the indefinite future,” said one longtime arms control advocate, Joseph Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund. “I believe the Secretary’s concerns have been met.”

Some say Gates, a veteran government official who served as CIA director under Bush’s father, also knows when he has to get on the team.

“My guess is that Gates’s bureaucratic instincts are on autopilot,” said John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. under the Bush administration. He said the Defense Secretary may be trying to adjust to the “overwhelmingly pro-arms control” Obama team.

No matter how the Obama administration irons out its differences, Bolton contends that the U.S needs new nuclear weapons, like bunker-busters and low-yield nuclear weapons. “It would be better, cleaner, safer and more reliable simply to design what are clean, new designs intended for that purpose, which is very necessary given countries like Iran and North Korea are doing to bury hardened targets,” he said.

If Gates were to publicly renounce his call for new warheads, he would be able to cite a new study released last fall in which scientists concluded the current arsenal could last for decades without all-new warheads. In his public comments, Gates has consistently said his sole concern was reliability and safety, not trying to seek a military advantage.

“We have no desire for new capabilities. That’s a red herring,” Gates said last September. “This is about modernizing and keeping safe a capability that everyone acknowledges we will have to have for some considerable period into the future.”

While the arms control community has generally been ecstatic about the repeated public calls from Obama and his administration to move towards a nuclear-free world, they are nervous that the large budget hike the White House proposed for nuclear programs pulls in the opposite direction, all but ensuring that the U.S. will have a large and growing nuclear weapons complex for the indefinite future.

Obama is proposing spending $7.3 billion in nuclear weapons-related activities in fiscal 2011, up 14 percent from this year, according to Civiak. The total 2011 request is the largest ever, and 40 percent higher, adjusted for inflation, than during the Cold War.

“Future administrations could use this new capacity to produce new nuclear weapons,” warned said Nickolas Roth of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability.

Administration officials are scrambling to wrap up the delayed nuclear posture review in advance of Obama’s nuclear safety summit in Washington and a Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty review conference set to take place in May at the United Nations.

Given Gates’s earlier statements in favor of new warheads, arms control advocates will be reading the U.S. strategy paper closely to see whether programs purportedly aimed at refurbishing the current nuclear arsenal could amount to new weapons programs in disguise.

“That’s a very fair concern,” Cirincione said. “People will be taking a very close look at what the posture review says about the Life Extension Program for exactly this reason…..I think this is mostly on the up and up.”

Speaking to reporters earlier this year, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher said she was keenly aware of suspicions that ramping up funding for the nuclear labs could be seen as undercutting disarmament efforts. She said the scientists have been given explicit instructions to avoid that. “You’re not going to do things that are going to cause people to think that we’re saying one thing and doing another. Because we don’t have enough time in the day to unwind that monster,” she said.

Tauscher also insisted that Gates was fully on board with the administration’s approach—notwithstanding his past statements. “A lot of people have morphed to where we are right now,” she said.

Jen DiMascio contributed to this report.