Most of the discussion at President Obama’s final nuclear summit last week centered on nuclear terrorism and the growing problem of North Korea’s insatiable nuclear ambitions.
Largely absent from the debate was any serious discussion of the looming budget crisis over funding the Pentagon’s ambitious plans to overhaul and modernize all three legs of America’s nuclear triad, plans that most experts agree will cost up to $1 trillion over the next 30 years.
The question of whether the U.S. really needs all three legs of the triad — bombers, submarines and land-based missiles — rarely comes up in Washington, and when it does it’s quickly brushed aside.
The question was asked at a March 16 House Armed Services Committee hearing. “Has the administration conducted detailed analysis of eliminating one or more legs of the triad, or significantly altering the U.S. nuclear posture? And if so, what were the results of those efforts?” Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., asked of top military and civilian leaders.
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus responded: “I’m not aware of any detailed look at that.”
Arms control advocates, who have been arguing for years that the Pentagon’s nuclear modernization plan is unaffordable, were left shaking their heads. “Unbelievable, really. We do studies on the most minuscule of issues, but study our ability to destroy human civilization? Nope, not worth our time,” said Joe Circincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund.
To the extent there is any debate about the efficacy of the cold-war triad, it’s limited to a small circle of think-tankers and nuclear policy wonks. For the administration, the Pentagon and Congress, it’s pretty much an article of faith.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh testified last month that “without all three legs of the triad, you expose seams in that nuclear deterrence’s posture to certain enemies.”
What’s less clear is where the money to modernize all those weapons and weapons platforms will come from.
Take the Navy’s plan to replace its aging fleet of 14 Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines in the coming decades with 12 more modern subs, each with a price tag of upwards of $5 billion. The cost of that single program would devastate the Navy shipbuilding account, so Navy officials have been pleading with Congress to set up a separate “strategic deterrence fund,” arguing the ballistic missile submarine fleet is a “national” asset, not a service-specific one.
Predictably, when Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James heard that line of reasoning she wanted in, too. “I am not fully familiar with the strategic deterrence fund that you all have referenced here,” she testified alongside her Navy and Army counterparts, “but if that is a strategic deterrence fund, which would help or benefit one leg of the triad, I would ask for consideration that all the legs of the triad be included in such an approach.”
The thinking behind the nuclear triad is for the U.S. to have a robust and redundant capability so that no potential foe would dare consider starting a major war with the U.S. — essentially “deterrence on steroids.”
Each triad leg has unique capabilities. Submarines are stealthy, nearly undetectable and packed with trident missiles that have multiple warheads. They are generally agreed to be the most survivable, and therefore most valuable, leg of the triad.
Bombers, including the aging B-52, the new F-35 stealth fighter and the future B-21 long-range bomber, all serve a dual role, delivering mostly conventional munitions, and when in a nuclear role have the advantage of being “recallable” if circumstances change.
It’s the land-based ICBMs, buried in 450 silos across America’s heartland, that critics, including retired U.S. Strategic Commander James Cartwright of the Marine Corps, suggest could be phased out with little loss in deterrent value. The argument for ICBMs is that they can be launched in less than 30 minutes. That makes them the choice if the U.S. needs to respond before its nuclear weapons are wiped out in a first strike.
But that rapid-response capability also makes them the most destabilizing leg of the triad, because a president might feel pressure to use them or lose them in a crisis, says former Defense Secretary William Perry. He told “PBS Newshour” last month, “If you’re going to blow up the whole world, what is the hurry? Why do you mind waiting another 20 minutes to do that? I don’t see either the common sense or even the strategic argument for doing that.”
President Obama argued in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post Thursday that he has been trimming the U.S. nuclear arsenal, if not the triad. “I’ve reduced the number and role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy. I also have ruled out developing new nuclear warheads and narrowed the contingencies under which the United States would ever use or threaten to use nuclear weapons,” Obama wrote.
It’s true the Pentagon is not building new nukes, but it is modernizing the old nukes in ways that make them much more versatile and therefore usable.
The life-extension program for the venerable B-61 bomb is a good example. In modernizing the cold-war weapon, it has been given a new radar, a tail-fin kit that makes it steerable, new high-explosives to trigger the nuclear chain reaction and a variable yield feature that can reduce its blast radius enough to qualify it as a battlefield nuke.
The Pentagon’s plans for new subs, bombers, missiles, cruise missiles and bombs sends a mixed message as the U.S. is trying to convince other nations to give up their nuclear ambitions.
As former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn told the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists last week, “It’s very hard to be chain smoking and telling everyone else they shouldn’t take a puff. When you get the two superpowers not discussing reductions but really discussing a very significant buildup, it creates a very negative psychology.”
