Abstract
His strident views on nuclear energy and nuclear weapons have earned him legions of detractors, but Sen. Pete domenici's positive imprint on nonproliferation policy is undeniable.
Sen. Pete Domenici was at the height of his political power in March 2004. The New Mexico Republican chaired both the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee. Fellow Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the executive branch. Yet as he sat at the head of a raised hearing room platform on March 24, Domenici was visibly irritated about having to defend the Bush administration's proposal to build new nuclear weapons. Sen. Diane Feinstein, a California Democrat, was comparing the new warhead, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP), to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Domenici's face turned scarlet, beginning at his collar and slowly covering his face. He clenched his right hand into a fist.
Feinstein and he had clashed before on the idea of building new nuclear weapons. As a devout Catholic, he was offended by her framing of the issue as a moral argument. Domenici was determined to see the multimillion-dollar nuclear design program reinstituted at the two nuclear weapons labs in New Mexico, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories. He also saw the RNEP program as key to maintaining a long-term mission and jobs for the nuclear weapons designers at the two labs. Despite this, Domenici was not interested in seeing the weapons go beyond the research stage. As he told Feinstein in the hearing, “I don't favor a new round of development of nuclear weapons.”
Domenici managed to tamp down the opposition to RNEP. Yet the next year, Congress ceased funding the program, as bipartisan opposition to the warhead grew even louder. A chorus of arms control and religious organizations, including the three Catholic bishops from New Mexico, called for the weapon's termination. The next year, two House committees voted to end the program, and Domenici was unable to revive it. For “St. Pete,” as he is affectionately called by the scientists who work at New Mexico's nuclear weapons labs, it was a rare defeat.
The senior senator from New Mexico has been a dominant congressional voice on U.S. nuclear weapons policy for two decades. He has fought to increase funding for the nuclear weapons labs, advocated for maintaining the nation's nuclear weapon designing expertise, and articulated a role for nuclear weapons in the 21st century. His enthusiasm for investing in the nation's nuclear infrastructure–including his fervent advocacy for the role of nuclear power–has earned him a number of critics. Yet despite his pro-nuclear outlook, Domenici has also proven to be one of only a few voices within Congress that consistently fight for the nonproliferation programs that have arguably contributed more to global security than any other factor since the end of the Cold War.
Domenici is leaving office for health reasons at the end of 2008. As one of the last moderate Republican senators on nuclear weapons policy, he worked on a bipartisan basis to guide the nuclear nonproliferation budgets through the annual appropriations gauntlet. His absence is likely to result in a more polarized Senate on nuclear weapons issues and to make it even more difficult to pass meaningful new nonproliferation programs. At a time when the U.S. nuclear industry is preparing for a revival, his absence will also acutely be felt by the nuclear power lobbyists on K Street.
The son of illegal Italian immigrants who ran a grocery in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Pietro “Pete” Domenici taught junior high school science before graduating from the University of Denver law school in 1958. In 1966, he won election as an Albuquerque city commissioner and later became the chair, equivalent to the city mayor. In 1972, he won election to the U.S. Senate, the same year President Richard Nixon was reelected in a landslide over South Dakota Sen. George McGovern.
Domenici brought his enthusiasm for science into elected office. He was a believer in what he termed “big science” and constantly referred to the weapons labs as the “crown jewels” of U.S. science and technology. He believed the federal government should play a larger role in science research and development and worked hard to provide federal research facilities across the country with large budgets–starting with the New Mexico labs. In contrast to current prevailing Republican orthodoxy, he has bucked President George W. Bush and fought for spending levels in the annual energy and water appropriations bill significantly higher than the president's requests.
Like most senators, Domenici had one book he wanted to write. It wasn't on statecraft or on his personal journey to public service; it was on nuclear energy. (His advocate's brief for nuclear power, A Brighter Tomorrow: Fulfilling the Promise of Nuclear Energy, was published in 2004.) While working to lard the federal budget with earmarks for his home state, Domenici avoided perks for himself. He rented an old garage for his car in an alley several blocks from his Capitol Hill office, giving up the free underground parking space available to all senators. “I knew that my life in public service would never be a life of ease and never be a life of plenty because I would never be rich,” Domenici told the Albuquerque Tribune last year.
When he entered the Senate in 1973, Domenici's legislative focus was the numerous water projects scattered across New Mexico. He joined the Senate Budget Committee and became chair in 1981. He remained chair through 1987 and returned to the post in 1995 when Republicans regained control of the Senate. He later became head of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, an obscure subcommittee that drafts the annual spending bill for an eclectic range of federal programs–from fish ladders on the Columbia River to nuclear weapons.
Domenici's leadership on nuclear weapons issues coincided with the end of the Cold War. During the 1980s, Domenici did not need to remind Congress of the necessity of the nuclear weapons work being done at Los Alamos and Sandia. The Cold War was raging, and U.S. expenditures for nuclear weapons research, development, testing, and production were at their highest levels since 1945.
With the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, President George H. W. Bush took major, unilateral steps to reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal; Congress cancelled a new nuclear warhead; and, at the end of 1992, imposed a temporary nuclear testing moratorium. In addition, funding for nuclear weapons research started to decrease, putting the future of the nuclear weapons labs in New Mexico in doubt.
About the same time, members of Congress became alarmed about the security of nuclear weapons and materials in the former Soviet Union. Frightened at the prospect of loose nuclear materials and weapons, and looking to engage the expertise of Los Alamos scientists, Domenici helped the lab's director Siegfried Hecker to set up the Lab-to-Lab Program in October 1992. The program initiated direct contacts between U.S. nuclear weapons scientists and their Russian counterparts, bypassing both countries' government bureaucracies. The goal of the program was to assist Russia in securing the tons of bombgrade nuclear material stored across its territory and to initiate a series of scientific experiments. The collaboration eventually led to the first joint nuclear experiments between the two nations. After President Bill Clinton took office, Domenici worked with Energy Department officials to expand the program and also obtained funding for the Initiative for Proliferation Prevention, which sought to provide work for former Russian weapons scientists.
When senators Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat, and Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, began drafting legislation to expand their eponymous cooperative threat reduction program in 1993, they included Domenici in the process because of his expertise in Energy's nuclear programs and because of his proven ability to move legislation and secure funding in the Senate.
The Nunn-Lugar program was launched in 1991 and directed the Defense Department to secure and destroy strategic weapon delivery systems in the former Soviet Union. The expanded version of the program passed in 1993 enlarged the Energy Department's nuclear nonproliferation programs–and indirectly benefited the nuclear weapons labs. The informal Lab-to-Lab program was refashioned into Energy's Material Protection, Control, and Accounting program, which today has a budget of $625 million and operates in 20 countries. It also spurred other Energy nuclear nonproliferation programs, whose funding totals $2 billion today.
Among these is the Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) Purchase Agreement Program. Starting in 1993, Russia agreed to down blend 500 tons of HEU from dismantled Russian nuclear weapons into low-enriched uranium (LEU). The United States agreed to buy the LEU to be used as fuel for U.S. commercial nuclear reactors. The agreement required considerable negotiation between 1993 and 1995, when the first LEU was delivered to the United States, and conflicts consistently cropped up as the program moved forward. Domenici worked tirelessly to cajole, badger, and at times threaten federal bureaucrats to keep the program on track. When the agreement faltered in 1998 because Russia complained it wasn't being paid enough for its LEU deliveries, Domenici appropriated $325 million to pay for past deliveries. In spite of the hiccups, the agreement has made possible the destruction of hundreds of tons of Russian HEU, and today, 10 percent of U.S. electricity originates from Russian nuclear weapons-derived fuel.
The HEU agreement fit snuggly into Domenici's larger nuclear policy agenda. In a November 17, 1997 speech to the American Nuclear Society, Domenici laid out a broad program for nuclear technology and chastised past U.S. officials for basing their nuclear policy decisions on “a number of incorrect premises.” In a preview of what would become two of the defining features of the Bush administration's energy prescriptions, Domenici underscored what he saw as the broad benefits of expanding U.S. nuclear power production and of closing the nuclear fuel cycle by pursuing the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. He also advocated adjusting cleanup standards for former nuclear research sites, irradiating food products to protect against food-borne illness, and a range of measures aimed at nuclear security.
Indeed, MSNBC recently characterized St. Pete as the “nuclear Renaissance man,” and as “both its Michelangelo and its Machiavelli.” The nuclear industry's lobbying group, the Nuclear Energy Institute, gave him its leadership award in 2006 for the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which provided a number of financial incentives for new nuclear power reactors. Domenici was also the main booster for the controversial Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), which envisions spent fuel reprocessing as the mid-term solution to the problem of nuclear waste. “It is clear to me that our nuclear energy strategy must not only address new plants, but must solve the waste problem as well. I support GNEP as a responsible solution to addressing our spent fuel needs,” Domenici wrote in a 2006 press statement.
In a July 15, 1997, speech on the Senate floor, Domenici surprised official Washington by announcing that he was “leaning strongly in support of the international treaty” to ban nuclear testing, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The Clinton administration had succeeded in negotiating the CTBT in Geneva the previous year and was preparing to submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification. Domenici's endorsement gave the arms control community a shot of confidence.
That same year he told a crowd at Harvard University: “Based upon the threat I perceive right now, I think our stockpile could be reduced. We need to challenge our military planners to identify the minimum necessary stockpile size. … As we seriously review stockpile size, we should also consider stepping back from the nuclear cliff by de-alerting and carefully re-examining the necessity of the ground-based leg of the nuclear triad.” The talk further energized the arms control base.
Despite his support, Domenici was cautious in assessing the test-ban treaty's prospects. Proponents argued that the treaty would not harm U.S. national security, because the weapons labs had sufficiently developed their ability to test the readiness of nuclear weapons through the Stockpile Stewardship Program without physically setting them off. But skeptics remained. “I guarantee you that [the CTBT] has no chance of passing, if senators can come to the floor and have credible information that those who are in charge of making sure those weapons are safe … can say we don't have enough money in there to do that. … And I can tell you there will be senators who are going to say that, regardless of what we put in this bill,” Domenici said in his July 15 speech.
Further complicating his support of the nonproliferation agenda was Domenici's support for nuclear energy. In his 1997 Harvard address, he called for an expansion of nuclear power for electricity production. He closed his speech by pledging “to lead a new dialogue with serious discussion about the full range of nuclear technologies. …While some may continue to lament that the nuclear genie is out of his proverbial bottle, I'm ready to focus on harnessing that genie as effectively and fully as possible.”
As part of that long-term agenda, Domenici hoped to use the Senate ratification process for the test-ban treaty as an opportunity to leverage a funding commitment for the Stockpile Stewardship Program at the nuclear weapons labs. During the next two years in the Senate, however, the atmosphere in the Republican caucus became increasingly acrimonious toward President Clinton. A vote on an obstruction of justice charge arising from Clinton's impeachment proceeding was defeated on a 50-50 vote in February 1999. (A two-thirds vote was required for conviction.) Clinton's credibility among Republican senators was nonexistent. They were in no mood to negotiate a deal over CTBT ratification and instead sought to humiliate the president by delivering a major legislative defeat.
A better vote-counter than the Clinton administration, Domenici realized that the treaty was about to “go down in flames,” as he had warned could happen two years earlier. He worked for four weeks in late September and early October 1999 to try to postpone the vote. He joined a bipartisan group of senators in a last-minute letter to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott urging a delay in the treaty vote until 2001, after Clinton had left office. That effort and others by Domenici failed. On October 18, the Senate rejected the treaty on a 48-51 vote, far short of the 67 votes needed. Domenici voted against ratification.
Immediately after the vote, the senator issued a press release saying the Senate vote “should not have happened.” He stated that he voted against the treaty in part because “science-based stockpile stewardship has not yet been given enough time to prove whether or not it will give us the assurance we need in the reliability and safety of our nuclear weapons without physical testing.” He believed that “the vote by the Senate today to reject this treaty was ill-timed and this prior timing could have adverse consequences in the world.” And he left open the door for his future support: “Treaties never die, even when defeated and returned to the executive calendar of the Senate. Therefore, we will have another chance to debate the CTBT. And, it may well be that if my concerns about the overall strategic arms strategies and their relationship to CTBT can be alleviated, and if the potential for stockpile stewardship during the next decade can be realized, I will be able to vote for a CTBT in the future.”
When senators Sam nunn and richard Lugar began drafting legislation to expand their eponymous cooperative threat reduction program in 1993, they included domenici in the process because of his expertise in energy's nuclear programs.
As arms control organizations begin thinking again about the potential for Senate ratification of the CTBT, among other nonproliferation measures, under a new administration, Domenici's presence will be missed. One of the most skilled legislators in the modern Senate, Domenici loved to work the back rooms and emerge with a complicated deal that advanced his perception of the national interest–and of New Mexico's.
Domenici had planned to leave his political legacy in the hands of his Albuquerque Republican protégée, Cong. Heather Wilson. Wilson, however, was defeated in the June Republican primary by the more conservative New Mexico Cong. Steve Pierce. Political pundits project that a Democrat, Cong. Tom Udall, will win Domenici's Senate seat.
After 36 years, St. Pete leaves a legacy of legislative accomplishment that few senators can match. On nuclear issues, it is a legacy full of contradictions. A strong advocate for the nuclear weapons and nuclear power establishments, Domenici also sought to advance a nonproliferation agenda. His relationship with arms control advocates was never close, yet he listened to their proposals and regularly took their programs under his broad wing in the annual budget battles on Capitol Hill. He was not interested in seeing the United States produce new nuclear weapons and believed in the importance of nonproliferation, a point underscored by the many nonproliferation initiatives he shepherded through Congress during the last 20 years.
Congress has only a handful of members who take the time to immerse themselves in issues of nuclear policy and technology, and starting in January it will have one fewer.