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Pentagon pushes for billions to refurbish nuclear bombs

I’ve written my October Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists column on the misbegotten B61 life extension program (LEP). Here’s how I begin:

At an estimated cost of more than $11 billion, the life-extension program for the B61 bomb would be the most ambitious and expensive nuclear warhead refurbishment in history. Concerned by this massive (and still growing) cost and skeptical of the need for a program of such breadth, two of the Senate’s appropriations subcommittees—Energy and Water, as well as Defense—slashed allotted spending on it in their respective fiscal 2014 funding bills.

Worried that their favorite refurbishment program is on the ropes, the Pentagon and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) have launched a counteroffensive with an assist from supporters in Congress. The lobbying effort will be on full display on October 29 at a hearing hosted by the House Strategic Forces Subcommittee. It will include testimony in support of the life-extension program from the head of US Strategic Command and high-ranking representatives of the NNSA and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The case against the proposed B61 life extension is simple: It is unaffordable, unworkable, and unnecessary. In addition, it is premised on assumptions about demand for nuclear bombs that may no longer be valid 10 years from now, when the program is scheduled to be completed. It would be foolish to spend $11 billion on an overly ambitious overhaul, when the future of at least half the weapons is uncertain and more cost-effective alternatives are available.

Read the whole thing here.

As I note in the column, the B61 is set to take center stage at a House Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing tomorrow afternoon. Expect the Pentagon/NNSA witnesses to expound all manner of arguments about how the current LEP of record is the cheapest LEP that meets military requirements to extend deterrence in Europe and Asia and ensure continued delivery by the B-2 bomber, would allow for a reduction in the size of the stockpile of nuclear gravity bombs (including the potential retirement of the earth penetrating B61 mod 11 and the aging B83 strategic gravity bomb), reduce long-term B61 life cycle costs, increase the safety of the refurbished weapons, obviate the need for an unplanned B61 life extension program in the 2020s, and is impossible to ditch at this point because NNSA has already dumped so much time and money into it.

Let’s set aside for the moment the fact that all of these arguments have major flaws (for example the B61 is already arguably the safest nuclear weapon in the stockpile; the Pentagon/NNSA have not provided a guarantee that the mod 12 would lead to the elimination of the B83; because the expected life of the mod 12 is only 20 years NNSA already has a second (!!) life extension program for the B61 on the books that is scheduled to begin in 2033 and could always move that date up a few years as a follow-on to a less ambitious LEP than the mod 12 if necessary; as of June 2013 NNSA had only spent $300 million on engineering work for the mod 12; NNSA has an ignominious history of launching into major protects only to determine later that it had overstated requirements and ignored more cost-effective alternatives; etc.).

The most important question that needs an answer is how NNSA plans to complete its proposed scope of work by 2019 given the current budget environment. Because as of now it’s not clear how the agency can do so.

Pentagon pushes for billions to refurbish nuclear bombs

by Kingston Reif Published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Online on October 25, 2013. Article summary below; read the full text here. At an estimated cost of more than $11 billion, the life-extension program for the B61 bomb would be the most ambitious and expensive nuclear warhead refurbishment in history. Concerned by this massive […]

Would the United States ever actually use nuclear weapons?

I’m way late in blurbing this, but I wrote my September Bulletin column on the conditions under which the United States might consider using nuclear weapons, using the debate over whether to use force in response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons as a jump off point. Here’s how I began (and FYI I wrote it before Secretary of State Kerry’s maybe not so off the cuff remark led to a diplomatic deal with Russia that is at least for now leading toward Syria’s chemical disarmament):

The Syrian regime’s large-scale use of chemical weapons has prompted a vigorous discussion about whether the United States should respond with military force, and if so, how. Those advocating the use of force have debated options ranging from limited cruise missile strikes to a much larger campaign designed to mortally wound Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

One military option that has thankfully not been part of the debate is the use of nuclear weapons. Yet unbeknownst to many, the most recent Nuclear Posture Review—a US government assessment of the proper role of nuclear weapons—technically does not rule out using them in response to nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons use by states, like Syria, deemed to be in noncompliance with their nonproliferation obligations.

There is, on the other hand, apparently universal agreement that using nuclear weapons in the midst of another country’s civil war would be wildly inappropriate and ineffective. But Syria’s use of chemical weapons raises several important questions that bear on US policy: If Washington wouldn’t consider using nuclear weapons even where its own official policy allows it, under what circumstances would it actually contemplate using them? And if it did, how many might it use?

Apart from responding to another country’s first use, the scenarios under which a US president would consider authorizing the use of these weapons are so limited as to be almost inconceivable. Moreover, if the president did use nuclear weapons, he or she would likely need only a handful, not the thousands the United States currently possesses. While nuclear weapons still retain value as a deterrent, changing geopolitical and technological conditions have made them a niche weapon, not the bedrock of US security that some still claim they are.

You can read the whole thing here. In a future column I hope to explore what a force premised more heavily on retaliation, including numbers, force posture, and warhead and delivery system types, might look like.

The Stimson and CATO Diets for Nuclear Weapons Spending

Slimming down by starting a healthy diet is usually a smart decision to make when weight has become a health issue. The US Department of Defense has been forced into such a decision (at least for now) as a result of sequestration, which would, in the long-term, eliminate $500 billion from America’s national security spending coffers over the next decade. Against this backdrop, the Washington-based Stimson Center and CATO Institute recently proposed their own diets for the US defense budget.

The Stimson’s band of academic and military defense experts, known as the “defense advisory committee”, present 27 specific recommendations they call “Strategic Agility”. This strategy would result in annual fiscal savings of around $50 billion while maintaining US national security.

Of particular interest is the report’s identification of cost saving measures in nuclear weapons spending; a particularly fatty expense. It calls for retiring an ICBM wing, eliminating the stockpile of non-strategic B-61s, and scaling back the B-61 life extension program. The planned order of 12 new nuclear-armed Ohio-class replacement submarines would also be reduced to 10 under the proposal. Such changes will cut around $1.4 billion annually from the defense budget while maintaining a viable US nuclear deterrent.

An interesting facet of Stimson’s proposed diet is its argument for the continuation of the triad of nuclear delivery systems (bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine launched ballistic missiles). This is presumably a result of the underlying philosophy of “Strategic Agility”, which places a high priority on “visible evidence of US commitments and capabilities”. According to Stimson, a combination of bombers, missiles and submarines provides such evidence.

Conversely, a recent report by the CATO Institute questioned the strategic and fiscal rationale for the triad. Like the Stimson report, the CATO report authors Benjamin H. Friedman, Christopher Preble and Matt Fay propose a reduction in the number of strategic nuclear weapons. However, the CATO report calls for a shift from a triad of nuclear delivery systems to a dyad of systems based on land- and submarine-based missiles.

Aside from the massive fiscal savings that would result from a reduction to a monad, such a system would maintain a healthy US strategic nuclear deterrent. This argument rests in part on the fact that submarines are difficult to destroy and have the capability of launching a large number of nuclear warheads near a potential target; something the other systems lack. This ultimately reveals the other systems to be unnecessary and, therefore, perfect candidates for fiscal savings.

The report acknowledges the context within which it is arguing and concludes that a monad system is politically unfeasible. Intercontinental ballistic missiles enjoy strong political support, which makes them very difficult to cut. Bombers, by comparison, enjoy relatively less political support, and so, in light of the need for savings, a nuclear dyad would be the next best option.

The different nuclear force structures proposed by Stimson and CATO are certainly reflected in the tremendous differences in savings for nuclear spending that each report identifies. The slimmed down arsenal resulting from CATO’s proposed cuts to two of the three delivery systems amounts to an annual estimated saving of $20 billion. The Stimson slim fast estimates a far smaller annual saving of around $1.4  billion when one only considers the cuts related to nuclear weapons spending.

It is of course a sad fact about diets that many who require them never really start them, and, even if they do, the chances that they will stick with it are slim. This will most probably be the case with Congress and the Pentagon when it comes to the nuclear diets proposed by the Stimson Center and the CATO Institute, at least initially. Their appetite for nuclear defense spending has been traditionally large and definitely unhealthy.

However, the long-term implementation of sequestration would put enormous pressure on U.S. nuclear spending plans. If the face of such budget cuts you can only hide big ticket modernization programs such as a new nuclear ballistic missile submarine and a new long-range penetrating bomber for so long. This is all the more reason to take the Stimson and CATO recommendations seriously.

Navy Tries a Budget Sleight-of-Hand to Pay for Ballistic Missile Submarines

Over at the Center homepage I have a new piece responding to a recent proposal by the head of the Navy’s submarine force for supplemental funding outside the Navy shipbuilding budget for the Ohio class replacement program. Here’s how I begin:

The budget busting Ohio class submarine replacement program is fast becoming a roaring migraine headache for the US Navy. In an attempt to skirt the pain caused by the program’s enormous price tag, estimated to be over $100 billion, the Navy and its supporters in Congress are insisting that the program be exempt from normal budget procedures and protected from tough competition within the Navy budget.

Earlier this month the head of the US submarine force asked Congress for $60 billion in supplemental funding – meaning outside the regular Navy shipbuilding budget — over 15 years to pay for the new nuclear ballistic missile submarine program.

But this ploy merely provides the illusion of pain relief; the bills will be paid out of someone else’s budget. The Pentagon faces tough budget choices in a constrained fiscal environment. An end run around those budget choices by creating a special fund obscures the hard choices that need to be made between nuclear weapons and other defense programs in a time of budget austerity.

You can read the whole thing here.