A few weeks ago I wrote about the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Fiscal Year 2014 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan (SSMP), the agency’s 25-year blueprint to sustain and modernize US nuclear warheads and their supporting infrastructure.  In that initial post I focused on the astronomical cost of NNSA’s new proposal to consolidate the number of warhead variants from the current level of 12 down to 5 interoperable warheads and raised questions about the necessity and feasibility of this so-called “3+2” strategy.

Upon closer inspection, the SSMP is even more outlandish than I first described. 

All you really need to know about the “3+2” strategy is contained in the short, two-page conclusion to the 298-page document.  It starts by noting that the strategy “is absolutely essential and must be accomplished…”  

Then we get this paragraph:

Future planning will include a number of as yet unresolved issues. In the summer of 2013, NNSA and the Office of Cost Analysis and Program Evaluation (CAPE) in the Office of the Secretary of Defense anticipate completing a number of studies to inform NNSA planning. Two of these studies are intended to achieve savings by identifying management efficiencies and setting workforce priorities, which will require detailed plans and tradeoff analyses. In addition, many of the life extension programs and elements of the plutonium strategy are still in the early study phase and the cost estimates are not complete. Furthermore, the work planned for FY 2013 may not be completed because of mandatory funding reductions and may require adjustments to out-year plans and dates. Finally, unforeseen technical challenges in the stockpile or geopolitical events could change the priorities on which this SSMP has been built. Therefore, while some elements may require adjustment, this SSMP is an executable plan aligned with DoD requirements to provide a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent. [emphasis mine.]

Let’s unpack each of these astounding statements in turn.

First, NNSA is anticipating finding billions in efficiencies to help finance the “3+2” strategy, but it hasn’t finished the analysis to determine if these savings are actually achievable. NNSA’s FY 2014 budget request, for example, assumes efficiency savings of $320 million, but according to the Senate Appropriations Committee, the agency “has not completed any assessments to determine the reasonableness, feasibility, or source of those savings.” Meanwhile, NNSA’s management of the nuclear weapons complex has to date been the antithesis of efficient: all of NNSA’s major life extension and construction projects are behind schedule and over budget.

Second, even though the “3+2” strategy hasn’t advanced much beyond the PowerPoint slide stage (i.e. “early study phase”), NNSA has already determined that the strategy is “absolutely essential and must be accomplished.” But if NNSA has yet to fully flesh out the strategy, how can it conclude that the strategy is necessary? This concern is made even more acute by that fact that NNSA has a history of inflating requirements and ignoring cost-effective alternatives.

Third, given NNSA’s atrocious cost-estimating practices, the fact that the cost estimates for the “3+2” strategy are not complete should be a huge red flag. The approximately $300 billion estimated cost of the plan (which, by the way, doesn’t include an estimated cost to sustain US plutonium capabilities, which will be enormous!) is likely to be much, much higher.  

Fourth, due to Congressionally mandated budget cuts (i.e. sequestration) NNSA can’t even complete the work it hoped to do in FY 2013 because there’s not enough funding. But the SSMP assumes that unprecedented levels of funding will be available over the long-term.

Fifth, unanticipated technical obstacles could arise that could mess up NNSA’s plans. One can imagine, for example, that NNSA might encounter difficulties in implementing concepts that are orders of magnitude more complicated than anything it has ever attempted previously.

Despite admitting these weighty disclaimers (i.e. “unresolved issues”), NNSA confidently proclaims that “this SSMP is an executable plan.” All of which raises the question of whether there is anyone home at the White House, Office of Management and Budget, Pentagon, or Nuclear Weapons Council tasked with telling NNSA that it is generally bad practice to list the reasons why a plan is basically unexecutable but then say “Don’t worry, the plan is in fact executable”!? The answer appears to be a resounding no.

Oh, but there’s more.

As I noted in my first post on the SSMP, the conclusion also notes that “the “3+2” strategic vision will reduce stockpile maintenance costs while maintaining strategic flexibility and offering the potential to consider decreasing the size of the stockpile hedge without increasing the risk.” [emphasis mine.] In other words, even after spending approximately four decades and untold hundreds of billions to implement the “3+2” strategy, there’s no guarantee that the US reserve stockpile of approximately 2,500 warheads can be reduced. Again, has anyone in the White House considered what this might mean for the President’s objective to negotiate a treaty with Russia that covers not only deployed warheads, but non-deployed warheads as well? NNSA seems to be saying that there cannot be any significant reductions unless the SSMP is executed.

Furthermore, NNSA does not provide an explanation for how the “3+2” strategy would reduce stockpile maintenance costs, especially if no reductions are made to the hedge.  

Fortunately, Congress is already balking at the stockpile management vision described in the SSMP.

Last month the Senate Appropriations Committee reduced the budget request for the B61 life extension program, the first in line of the five warheads slated to make up NNSA’s stockpile of the future, by approximately 30 percent. The Committee expressed concern “that NNSA’s proposed scope of work for extending the life of the B61 bomb is not the lowest cost, lowest risk option that meets military requirements and replaces aging components before they affect weapon performance.”

The Senate Appropriations Committee also expressed doubts about the combined life extension program for the W78 intercontinental ballistic missile warhead and the W88 submarine launched ballistic missile warhead, the first of three interoperable warheads slated for refurbishment as part of the “3+2” strategy. While the Committee did not cut funding for the program, it stated “that an integrated warhead may be unnecessarily complex and expensive, increase uncertainty about certification and meeting the full range of military characteristics and stockpile-to-target sequences needed for submarine and intercontinental ballistic missile systems, and fail to address aging issues in a timely manner.” According to the SSMP, the combined W78/W88 life extension program will cost at least $14 billion.

The House Appropriations Committee has raised similar alarms. The Committee declared that it “will not support dedicating significant funding for new stockpile transformation concepts unless the Administration can more clearly lay out its rationale and the NNSA can demonstrate that it is taking a conservative approach that accounts for all costs, is executable in the timeframe needed, is technically feasible, and has demonstrable benefits that justify such a large investment.” Though the House did not reduce appropriations for the B61 life extension program, it did cut the budget for the joint W78/W88 warhead by $23 million. The House funding level would permit consideration of an interoperable warhead, but only as part of a continued study of alternatives, including a separate life extension program for the W78.  

The Pentagon, NNSA, and the contractors they employ have often overreached in their pursuit of nuclear stockpile modernization. But this time, they have taken that overreach to a whole new level.

Last Spring, I wrote that one of the perks of being a Republican president in the United States is the freedom to make drastic changes to US nuclear force levels while Democratic presidents are forced to travel a much tougher political road, often in the pursuit of far less ambitious goals. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the ranking Republican on the Senate Strategic Forces Subcommittee, recently provided further evidence of this phenomenon.

In his June 19 speech in Berlin, President Obama proposed to reduce US deployed strategic nuclear warheads with Russia by up to one-third below the New START level of 1,550 warheads. Predictably, this drove the President’s critics crazy. In a well-coordinated series of press statements and op-eds in response to the speech, Republican members of Congress, former Bush administration officials, and the ICBM pork caucus trotted out the standard-issue talking points against changing our outdated nuclear strategy.

But in a fit of candor, Sen. Sessions strayed wildly off-message and revealed the pure, unadulterated partisanship animating his party’s attitude on nuclear weapons issues. The day after the President’s speech, Sessions told a gathering on Capitol Hill that:

In other words, reductions implemented by Republican Presidents are fine and dandy, but reductions implemented by Democrats are a threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Sen. Sessions attempted to cover his tracks by arguing that Obama’s proposed reductions are dangerous because of the President’s support of the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons. But this protestation rings hollow given that President Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of Republican defense hawks, argued vehemently decades before for nuclear zero while the Cold War still raged.

While the GOP lambastes Obama for being open to a further incremental reduction in deployed forces with Russia, the truth is that since the end of the Cold War, Republicans Presidents have repeatedly slashed the size of the US nuclear arsenal, including significant reductions without reciprocity from any other nation. And as Sessions suggests, Republicans didn’t complain.

Take George W. Bush, for example. During a press conference at the National Press Club on May 23, 2000, then Governor Bush declared:

Apparently taken aback by Bush’s sweeping statements, a reporter asked:

After his election, President Bush continued to voice his preference for unilaterally reducing the US nuclear arsenal. In a November 2001 press conference with Vladimir Putin, Bush announced that pursuant to a recently completed nuclear posture review, the United States would reduce its arsenal of deployed strategic warheads from approximately 6,000 to 1,700-2,200 (!) as a matter of national policy without a formal arms control agreement with Russia. “We don’t need arms control negotiations,” Bush said, “to reduce our weaponry in a significant way.”

The Russians, however, preferred to implement further cuts via a treaty with the United States. Ultimately, Bush was persuaded by Secretary of State Colin Powell and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to codify reductions in a treaty with Russia, which he did in 2002 in the form of the Moscow Treaty. But the Bush team remained unilateralists to the end. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate as it was considering the Moscow Treaty, “We would have made these cuts regardless of what Russia did with its arsenal.”

Beyond the deployed arsenal, President Bush also authorized unilateral reductions in the arsenal of US non-deployed warheads and non-strategic warheads deployed in Europe. From 2001 to 2009, Bush cut the total nuclear stockpile by approximately 50%. No treaty governed these enormous reductions. And there was nary a peep from Senator Sessions or any other member of Congress.

Nor was the international strategic environment more stable then than it is now. While America was (unilaterally) cutting its arsenal, North Korea conducted its first nuclear test, Iran made great progress on its nuclear program, and Pakistan continued to churn out fissile material.

So the next time you hear a Republican member of Congress attack President Obama for suggesting that the US and Russia continue to reduce the size of their still enormous nuclear arsenals, remember that for all the arguments  about global zero, nuclear modernization, the triad, the dangerous international environment, extended deterrence, Section 303(b) of the Arms Control and Disarmament Act, and Russian cheating, the bottom line is that when it comes to nuclear reductions, Democratic presidents are held to a much different standard than their Republican counterparts.

Last week, Georgetown professor Matthew Kroenig, no stranger to taking provocative stances on nuclear issues, stepped into the fray surrounding President’s Obama speech in Berlin.  In an article for Foreign Policy, he argued that the nuclear reductions proposed by the President “could potentially be highly damaging to US interests.” Though Kroenig has undoubtedly put more thought into his criticism than can be said of most of the President’s knee-jerk detractors, his argument against further cuts to the US arsenal fails to stand up to scrutiny.

Like many opponents of nuclear reductions, Kroenig uses the specter of rival nuclear powers, particularly Russia and China, to justify his opposition to cuts in the US arsenal. For instance, he claims that the President’s proposed cuts would “attenuate our advantages vis-à-vis Russia” and counsels that the United States should not reduce below the New START level of 1,550 warheads, which Washington must do by 2018. In making this claim, he appears to have forgotten the fact that, though the US currentlyhas more deployed strategic warheads than Russia, the New START treaty imposes equal limits on both the United States and Russia. This raises the question of how, exactly, pushing that equilibrium down from 1,550 to 1,000 would harm US interests.

Which brings us to China. It is technically true, as Kroenig argues, that further nuclear reductions would diminish the quantitative advantage of the US arsenal vis-à-vis China. The important question to ask here, however, is whether that advantage would be diminished in any qualitative (i.e. meaningful) way.  Currently, China’s total arsenal is composed of 250 warheads, which would place the PRC at a significant numerical disadvantage even if the US reduced its deployed arsenal to 1,000 (and don’t forget the additional hundreds of warheads the United States will continue to retain in reserve). Of course, China’s arsenal is likely to undergo some expansion in the coming decades, but given Beijing’s traditional nuclear doctrine (which has historically stressed the concept of “minimal deterrence”), the prospect of the PRC achieving nuclear parity with the US at any point in the foreseeable future is based on conjecture rather than fact. Moreover, further US and Russian nuclear weapons reductions are a necessary condition to eventually bring China into the arms control process.

Kroenig also rejects the notion that President Obama’s proposed reductions would help prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to other countries, arguing that previous US arsenal cuts have not “contributed to any breakthroughs on important nonproliferation problems.” However, this contention ignores the positive effect that the NPT regime has had in stemming the tide of global nuclear proliferation, and the key role that US actions play in maintaining this regime’s legitimacy. In 1963 – five years before the NPT was signed – President Kennedy predicted that, by 1975, there may be as many as 20 nuclear weapons states. That frightful vision has not come to pass, and the NPT is undoubtedly a major reason why. However, the legitimacy of the NPT is based, in large part, on a bargain between the five recognized nuclear weapons states (the US, Russia, UK, France, China), and non-nuclear weapons states: namely, that the former will take steps to rid themselves of nuclear weapons if the latter vow never to pursue them. By further reducing the size of its nuclear arsenal, the US would demonstrate its commitment to the NPT, and help to ensure that the treaty continues to remain an effective component of the global nonproliferation regime. The notion of a linkage between US actions and the continued viability of the NPT is not a particularly radical notion, either – in 2009, the bipartisan Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States asserted that “some other nations may not show the nuclear restraint the United States desires or support nonproliferation efforts if the nuclear weapon states take no further agreed steps to decrease their reliance on nuclear arms.”

Finally, Kroenig takes issue with the argument that nuclear reductions would lead to cost savings for the US, citing the short-term expenditures inherent in “pulling missiles out of silos…dismantling retired warheads, and decommissioning nuclear facilities.” Kroenig is right to point out that, in the short term, some nuclear reductions might require cost increases. However, in doing this, he disregards the long-term savings that would be brought about by a smaller arsenal and the near-term savings that further reductions would bring by reducing the need to build as many new replacement nuclear delivery systems. For instance, according to a recent estimate, the United States could save nearly $20 billion over the next decade alone by reducing our fleet of ballistic missile submarines from 12 to 8.  Further reductions could also reduce the planned scope of warhead life extension programs, which would entail significant cost savings.

Kroenig’s central argument is that America’s nuclear overkill is a vital asset. It is not. The President’s proposed reductions would pose no threat to US national security, would enhance the legitimacy of the global nonproliferation regime, and would result in long-term financial savings for the US. In the end, the arsenal’s overkill is precisely that – overkill.