Administration Official on START Hush Money

The National Nuclear Security Administration is slated to receive $11.2 billion in fiscal year 2011, a 13.4 percent increase over the current fiscal year. Undersecretary Tauscher said the increase will make a "very crucial investment" in the new Stockpile Management program. Vice President Biden said the increase “reverses this decline [in nuclear laboratories and facilities] and enables us to implement the president's nuclear-security agenda.” Hell, even NNSA framed the increase as part of “implementing the nuclear security agenda President Obama outlined in his Prague speech.”

NNSA is definitely all about the Prague.

Notice that nobody said what we all know: the NNSA budget increase is hush money; or, as KReif put it, proof that the Obama administration “views increased funding for the nuclear enterprise as a necessary step to secure Republican support for a new arms control agreement and the CTBT.” Perhaps “retainer fee” sounds less gangster?

Leave it to a number cruncher to cut through the BS. In response to a question about the cost of New START implementation at his budget briefing Monday, DOD Comptroller Robert Hale said “the adds to the budget of the National Nuclear Security Administration…will improve nuclear infrastructure in a variety of ways and – and we think that is an important step toward START ratification.”

I’m glad we’re all on the same page now.

UPDATE 2/4: I didn't see it before posting, but Jeffrey Lewis takes up this same issue over at ACW.