FY 2010 Nonproliferation Bills, Bills, Bills

Last week, GSN’s Martin Matishak summarized the Fiscal Year 2010 budget cycle for nonproliferation programs. For a variety of reasons, some of this cycle’s funding levels were less than in previous years.

Matishak talked to Kingston, so many of NOH’s thoughts are in the GSN article. In a nutshell:

The White House set a "very ambitious goal" for securing the world's nuclear materials, [Reif] said, so "we were a little disappointed to see that at least the 2010 request was even less than the 2009 [request] and was also less than what was appropriated in 2009."

[snip]

One of the justifications for the reduced budget could be that the administration was still working out the strategy to achieve its nuclear-security goal when it issued its fiscal 2010 budget last February, according to Reif.

[snip]

Reif said the upcoming Nuclear Posture Review, the fiscal 2011 budget and that Obama administration's nuclear security summit next spring will "determine the direction of our threat reduction efforts."

Until then "the U.S. isn't going to able to achieve the sort of lofty goal the Obama administration laid out in the Prague speech and during the [presidential] campaign ... of securing all vulnerable fissile materials in four years without a much larger commitment to these programs," he said.