nuclear-news

In a little-noticed comment before his controversial July summit meeting with Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump expressed a desire to talk to his Russian counterpart about their countries’ extensive nuclear modernization plans. Trump characterized his own government’s plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade the aging nuclear arsenal as “a very, very bad policy.” He seemed to express some hope that the two countries, which together possess over 90 percent of the planet’s nuclear warheads, could chart a different path and avert a new arms race.

Still, it’s not clear Trump is actually interested in a different path. He said on Monday, in the context of his decision to withdraw the United States from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, that “We have far more money than anybody else by far. We’ll build [the U.S. nuclear arsenal] up until” other nuclear-armed states such as Russia and China “come to their senses.”

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, there has been heated debate about the appropriate role and  number of nuclear weapons in U.S. policy. What has largely been above debate, however, has been the need for a strong and credible arsenal so long as nuclear weapons exist — a top policy and budgetary priority of recent administrations of both parties.

But a reckoning is coming, the result of a massive disconnect between budgetary expectations and fiscal reality. Despite claims that nuclear weapons “don’t actually cost that much,” the simple fact is that unless the administration and its successors find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, spending to maintain the current arsenal — to say nothing of a buildup — will pose a significant affordability problem. Trying to recapitalize nearly the entire arsenal at roughly the same time means less money is likely to be spent on each individual modernization program, thereby increasing the time and cost required to complete each one. The absence of reasonable planning will also result in more suboptimal choices when hard decisions become inevitable. The current path is an irrational and costly recipe for sucking funding from other defense programs and/or buying fewer new nuclear delivery systems and reducing the size of the arsenal. The longer military and political leaders continue to deny this reality, the worse off America’s nuclear deterrent and armed forces will be.

The Third Wave of Nuclear Modernization Spending………. Sustaining the arsenal will require a third wave of major upgrades. The Obama administration committed to a major overhaul of the arsenal in 2010, part of its effort to win Republican support for the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with Russia. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated last fall that the plans Trump inherited from his predecessor to maintain and upgrade the arsenal over the next 30 years would cost $1.2 trillion in today’s dollars. That CBO projection includes about $400 billion in modernization spending that falls largely in the mid-2020s to early 2030s, as well as relatively stable, though steadily increasing, operations and sustainment costs over the entire 30-year period.

……The CBO’s projection of $400 billion in nuclear modernization spending might be a best-case scenario. Because the Pentagon has not built intercontinental ballistic missiles or ballistic missile submarines in a long time, the department’s independent Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office has acknowledged that the confidence levels for nuclear upgrade cost estimates are relatively low. This means that, even if the programs are managed perfectly, they could end up costing a lot more than the estimates project. The land- and sea-based missile programs, as well as the plan to build over 100 B-21 long-range bombers, could, by our count, each cost as much as $150 billion after including inflation, easily putting them among the top ten most expensive Pentagon acquisition programs.

On top of all of this, the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review proposes expanding U.S. nuclear capabilities by calling for new warheads and new missiles to counter Russia, more bomb production infrastructure, and a greater emphasis on nuclear command and control. These proposals would likely add additional tens of billions to the $1.2 trillion price tag. So too could a U.S. withdrawal from the INF Treaty and failure to extend New START, which is slated to expire in 2021. In particular, the verifiable New START caps on Russian deployed nuclear forces aid U.S. military planning by reducing the need to make worst-case assessments that could prompt additional costly nuclear force investments.

Third Wave of Nuclear Modernization: Unique Challenges.……..

Most importantly, the overall federal fiscal outlook is far direr. The most recent CBO estimates suggest that the United States will add somewhere between $12 to $13 trillion in new debt from spending over the next decade. …….

The growth of mandatory spending in all categories, coupled with the recent tax cuts, will balloon the national debt to the highest level relative to GDP in the nation’s history. This will increase pressure to slash discretionary expenditures, including defense.

While Congress approved a major increase to defense spending in fiscal year 2018, the Budget Control Act caps return in 2020 and 2021. Without amendment, these could result in a $171 billion national defense spending decline, or 13 percent of the total planned for those two years. Absent a “grand bargain” that eluded lawmakers in 2011 and led to the Budget Control Act’s spending caps, sustaining real growth in the defense budget will be almost impossible. This will make it difficult to afford both conventional and nuclear modernization in tandem.

Additionally, bipartisan political support for increasing nuclear weapons spending is fragile and far from assured in the future. ………

Disarmament by Default

Numerous Pentagon officials and outside experts have cautioned that the current nuclear upgrade plan cannot be sustained without significant and sustained increases to defense spending — which are unlikely to be forthcoming — or cuts to other military priorities……….

The first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there is one. Whether one believes America’s nuclear weapons spending plans are good or bad policy, pursuing them poses a massive fiscal challenge that America’s military and political leaders can no longer afford to ignore.https://warontherocks.com/2018/10/the-ticking-nuclear-budget-time-bomb/