WASHINGTON — The author of a congressional report that pondered ways to trim billions of dollars in U.S. nuclear-weapon spending over the next 30 years speculated recently that targeting the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons complex would not yield considerable savings.
“You might find some more savings there, but I don’t think that changes the bottom line,” Michael Bennett, the lead Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyst on last month’s 73-page report, told an audience of policy wonks Nov. 20 at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
According to the report, “Approaches for Managing the Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2017 to 2046,” it will cost about $1.2 trillion to modernize and maintain the U.S. nuclear arsenal over 30 years. Postponing the Department of Energy’s (DOE) plan to create so-called interoperable warheads for use on both land- and submarine-launched ballistic missiles could save about $10 billion over 30 years, the report says.
In the analysis, the CBO compared the 30-year cost of the Barack Obama administration nuclear modernization and maintenance plans with hypothetical alternatives, such as eliminating nuclear bombers or intercontinental ballistic missiles from the U.S. nuclear triad.
One thing the report did not do, Bennett said during a question and answer session with the audience, was examine how much money the federal government could save if it trimmed the size of the deployed nuclear arsenal down to around 1,000 warheads and resized the DOE nuclear complex — which produces and repairs those warheads — to match.
The Donald Trump administration, if anything, has signaled that it prefers a larger nuclear arsenal. The White House in May tipped its hand a little, requesting almost $14 billion for DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration for fiscal 2018 — a billion-dollar raise from 2017. The Trump administration’s formal plans are expected to be part of the Nuclear Posture Review the administration ordered in January, and which is expected to be completed this year or in early 2018.
Senior Defense Department officials have worried that under projected budgets, the existing plan to modernize the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal — the nuclear bombers, submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles that make up the the so-called nuclear triad — will start to compete with the Pentagon’s conventional weapon programs.
According to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest report, nuclear modernization and maintenance will account for about 15 percent of all defense spending in the 2030s.
Some of the hypothetical nuclear cuts described in CBO’s latest nuclear report might make a dent in that figure, but even the largest — $140 billion in savings over 30 years by abandoning the U.S. ICBM program — would not be a cure-all for DOE and Pentagon spending problems, one panel said at the Carnegie event.
“You can’t fix the budget challenge on the back of nuclear weapons,” said Kingston Reif, an analyst with the Washington-based Arms Control Association who spoke alongside Bennett.
