WASHINGTON — The Senate on Tuesday turned back a Democratic effort to eliminate funding for research on a new generation of nuclear weapons, rejecting arguments that the White House-backed project could trigger a new arms race and raise the risk of nuclear war.
Voting 53-41, the Republican-controlled Senate turned down a proposal by Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., to drop $21 million for research on "mininukes" and bunker-busters from a $27.3 billion spending bill for energy and water projects, including the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
The Feinstein-Kennedy proposal would also have blocked a proposal to reduce the time needed to resume underground nuclear testing and to construct a new plant to build "pits," or core devices, for nuclear weapons.
Later, Republicans accepted a proposal by Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., to bar anything but research on the two new weapons, meaning the administration would have to come back to Congress for approval before actual development could begin.
The Senate vote to go ahead with research work on the new weapons followed a sometimes emotional debate in which Democrats charged — and Republicans denied — that the administration’s nuclear initiatives could rekindle the arms race and undermine international efforts to curb the development and spread of nuclear weapons.
The Senate action leaves intact administration requests for $15 million for research on an earth-penetrating nuclear warhead capable of destroying deeply buried bunkers and $6 million to study development of "low-yield" weapons with a yield of 5 kilotons or less, or about one-third the force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. The high-yield "bunker-buster" would have a force of about 10 times the Hiroshima blast.
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