The Threat to America’s Nukes

By MICHAEL KREPON

February 25, 2014

The wages of austerity are coming due for America’s military. On Monday, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced a major downsizing of the U.S. Army. He wants to retire the A-10 Warthog fleet of ground-support aircraft and the venerable U-2 manned spy planes. And he’s cutting the operations of the Navy’s cruiser fleet in half.

So far, Hagel has been silent about reductions in nuclear forces, promising to preserve all three legs of the so-called triad — missiles, bombers and submarines — while making “important investments to preserve a safe, secure, reliable and effective nuclear force.” But reductions in nuclear forces are coming: It’s not a question of whether, but when — and how deep.

The United States still has more than 5,000 nuclear weapons, all supported by a complex of bases, production facilities and nuclear laboratories likely to cost American taxpayers in excess of $20 billion per year this decade. But nuclear weapons seem anachronistic in the post-Cold War world. They have less military utility than conventional forces, their numbers are far larger than conceivable war plans and their replacement costs are extremely high.

Over the past half-century, the boosters of arms control and nuclear deterrence have managed to find common ground, bringing the size of America’s nuclear stockpile down from its Cold War peak of more than 30,000 warheads. All the while, these two camps have kept battling it out, even though their respective goals — ratifying treaties and modernizing America’s creaking nuclear infrastructure — remain linked. Both agendas have become harder to achieve as the Cold War fades into history. And now, this odd, fractious partnership may be breaking up over irreconcilable differences. Tight Pentagon budgets make the old bargain — treaty votes in return for promises to modernize the triad and bomb-related facilities — harder to cut. Nuclear deterrence boosters complain that earlier promises haven’t been kept, and arms controllers complain that the price of ratification has become way too high.

Besides, no treaties are queued up for the Senate’s consideration. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty fell 19 votes short in 1999 and has been languishing ever since. Senate Republicans have permitted Democratic presidents just one treaty each — John F. Kennedy the Limited Test Ban, Lyndon B. Johnson the Outer Space Treaty, Jimmy Carter the Panama Canal handoff before failing on SALT II, and Bill Clinton the Chemical Weapons Convention before losing the CTBT vote. President Barack Obama got New START, his strategic arms treaty with Russia, in 2010. His prospects for a second treaty look bleak, given the state of partisan rancor on Capitol Hill.

Replacing aging warheads, subs, land-based missiles and bombers does not come cheap — perhaps $1 trillion over the next 30 years, according to a report by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Nuclear deterrence backers counter that this amounts to just 3 percent of the Pentagon’s budget. But too many bills are coming due at once. A former head of the U.S. Strategic Command puts it this way: “We’re in a bad place at the worst possible time.”

The average age of U.S. warheads now exceeds 20 years. The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has proposed five warhead types for major rehabs and life extensions. Designing a replacement for Trident submarines, which carry nuclear-tipped missiles, has been postponed for two years because the Navy’s shipbuilding budget can’t absorb the costs. These subs will now be retired when their hulls are more than 40 years old. The utility of the Air Force’s Minuteman missiles was in question even before reports surfaced of missile crews being bored and cheating on proficiency exams. Then there’s the cost of building new bombers to replace 70-year-old B-52s and supplement 20-year-old B-2s.

There’s more: America’s nuclear weapon labs — now rebranded as the “nuclear enterprise” — want costly new facilities, including one at Los Alamos with the capacity for a five-fold annual increase in plutonium pit production in the event that existing pits, which provide the yields expected of nuclear detonations, become faulty. There are massive cost overruns for a uranium processing facility at Oak Ridge and not enough money for all of the warheads scheduled for life extensions.

Securing congressional support for a tab this large — the Congressional Budget Office estimates $355 billion over the next 10 years, well before new subs and bombers come on line — would be hard even if there were a treaty ratification vote to plus-up nuclear accounts. But nuclear deterrence boosters oppose reductions below New START limits — which would allow the United States to maintain more than 1,000 deployed warheads, with multiples in reserve — as a slippery slope to nuclear abolition. Supporters of arms control have returned fire by labeling the Bomb and its backers as relics of the Cold War.

The Obama administration’s promise of an oversize plutonium pit production facility at Los Alamos hasn’t been kept in an environment of deficit reduction, sequestration and higher defense priorities. A new opportunity to increase nuclear accounts in return for treaty ratification may be a long way away. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty has few Republican backers. New START doesn’t expire until 2021, with the possibility of a five-year extension. The treaty’s monitoring provisions can be applied to deeper cuts, but at present, the Obama administration doesn’t want to cut its forces unilaterally, and Moscow wants to build up rather than down. Nor are Senate Republicans inclined to get beat up by hard-liners for supporting the ratification of another strategic arms reduction treaty.

It will be extremely hard for arms controllers to forgo the CTBT and new treaties ratcheting down U.S. and Russian forces in transparent ways. But the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing becomes even more remote with every passing year, and tight Pentagon budgets will result in deeper nuclear force reductions whether or not there are new treaties.

As arms controllers have become less tolerant of deal making, nuclear deterrence boosters have become less tolerant of treaties. The next time there’s a ratification debate, treaty critics will demand more than the traffic will bear, but they will receive less than they want. And no promises of appropriations during a treaty ratification fight are binding on future Congresses.

If this standoff continues, treaty ratification and nuclear force structure can expect lean years ahead. A brave new world beckons in which the United States views treaties and nuclear weapons as relics of the Cold War, while other countries cling to both.

Michael Krepon is co-founder of the Stimson Center and author of Better Safe Than Sorry: The Ironies of Living With the Bomb.