California Sen. Dianne Feinstein got what she wanted today: a public hearing on her lonely crusade to kill the Pentagon’s planned $8 billion upgrade to the air-launched nuclear armed cruise missile.
“I understand and value the deterrent effect of our nuclear arsenal. However, building new nuclear weapons like this one appears unnecessary, costly and dangerous,” Feinstein said in her opening remarks of the Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.
The anti-cruise missile lawmaker had one ally among the three witnesses, former Defense Secretary William Perry, who back in the 1980s helped develop the very weapons he was now opposing as a Cold War relic.
“In my judgment, we do not have to take the risks we took during the Cold War and we should not,” Perry testified.
Perry argued new ballistic missile submarines and long-range strike bombers were sufficient to fulfill the primary mission of a nuclear arsenal, which is to deter nuclear war, and that adding smaller cruise missiles to the mix increased the chances an adversary might mistake a conventional attack for a nuclear strike.
“I believe [funding submarines and bombers] would give us a powerful deterrent force many decades into the future and will not open up to us the risk of starting a nuclear war either by accident or by miscalculation,” Perry said.
But Perry was out-flanked and out-gunned by the other two witnesses, former Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre and Frank Miller, a former member of the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration.
Hamre pointed out that the program was already fully funded, and enjoyed a broad support in the Congress and the Obama administration.
“There is a solid consensus that this a program we need, and the Congress is supportive of it,” Hamre said.
The Senate energy and water development appropriations bill, which passed the Senate on May 12 by a vote of 90 to 8, includes $220 million for the W80-4 warhead, which will be carried on the Long-Range Standoff Weapon.
Hamre, who now heads the Center for Strategic and International Studies, also pointed out that unilaterally taking the cruise missile out of the U.S. arsenal would forfeit a major advantage in dealing with the Russians.
“The START [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty] gave a very favorable position to airborne assets, you know the bombers are counted as single warheads,” Hamre said. “Now if we’re going to have a future arms control arrangement with the Russians, we would be giving up an enormous advantage, to basically neutralize one of the key leverage points in an arms control treaty.”
Miller, who is now with the Scowcroft Group, argued the cruise missile is part of the leg of the nuclear triad of missiles, submarines, and bombers that’s the least likely to start an accidental war.
“The bomber force has traditionally provided the president with wide variety of deterrent capabilities,” Miller testified. “Stability, because it’s not on day-to-day alert, because the launch of the force is detectable and uniquely subject to recall, and because the bombers and cruise missile take a very long time to reach their launch points and targets.”
The hearing was largely an academic exercise, because there is no support for eliminating funding for the cruise missile upgrade.
In fact, at the opening of the session, Feinstein admitted she had been granted the hearing in return for “not making big a fuss” about the funding for the program.
