Nuclear weapons are one of a trilogy of high-spend programs likely to affect defense budgeting decisions for years, the chair of a House Appropriations panel said this week in an online hearing.
“Cyber security, nuclear modernization and overseas contingency operations funding sound like they’re three unrelated topics,” Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), chair of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, said in the hearing on Tuesday. “[T]he common thread that unites them is the significant impact they all have had on our bill the last several years, and how they will continue to shape our work for the years to come.”
The Joe Biden administration is in the middle of closed-door reviews about nuclear weapons that has at various times since inauguration day kept high-level Biden officials and nominees tight-lipped about whether procurements such as the nuclear-tipped Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) intercontinental ballistic missiles, Minuteman III’s planned replacement and the NNSA’s two-state plutonium-pit production complex will go forward as planned under the modernization started by President Barack Obama and supplemented by President Donald Trump.
At Tuesday’s hearing, McCollum asked the sole nuclear-focused witness, James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, if there was “any scenario in which [he] would recommend moving forward” with GBSD.
Acton, co-director of the endowment’s nuclear policy program, didn’t say if there was or wasn’t — but he did say that someone should conduct an independent review of a 2015 Analysis of Alternatives the Pentagon conducted ahead of the GBSD procurement, which went to Northrop Grumman in September under a nine-year, $13-billion contract.
“[T]he 2015 analysis of alternatives … reportedly assumed that we should retain 450 [missiles],” Acton said. “That requirement has already dropped to 400 ICBMs and that matters because the fewer [missiles] we keep, the more we have that are available for testing and hence the longer you can sustain the Minuteman III force for.”
The House Appropriations Committee could require a review such as Acton suggested in a future budget bill, either as a condition of providing funds for GBSD, or in addition to whatever funds the committee recommends. The Senate, where majority Democrats may not vote against GBSD en bloc and do not have enough votes to pass legislation without Republican help even if they did, would still have to approve such a reporting requirement.
If there is such a review, Acton said, it should “look over some of the options that weren’t considered in the 2015 analysis of alternatives … including slightly reducing the size of the Minuteman III forces as a means of keeping it viable for longer.”
Meanwhile, the House’s Republican appropriators banded together Tuesday to urge Biden, in a letter, to continue the modernization programs as envisioned by Obama and later Trump.
Cut Other Programs for Nukes, Not Nukes for Other Programs
A day before McCollum hosted her hearing in the House, one of the Senate’s biggest nuke boosters appeared in a webinar to make her priorities clear ahead of the Biden’s administration’s scheduled “skinny budget” rollout next week.
“Nuclear deterrence is the number one mission of the Department of Defense,” Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) said in the online forum hosted by the Washington-based think tank, the Heritage Foundation. “That means when you’re putting together a budget, it’s the first thing, it’s the first thing that goes in.”
It would be “backwards” to cut nuclear weapons to fund priorities such as a cyber, said Fischer, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee whose state includes both U.S. Strategic Command headquarters outside Omaha, Neb., and rural communities surrounding Minuteman III silos crewed by the Air Force’s 90th Missile Wing.
Fischer was pushing back against the common refrain of arms control and disarmament groups in Washington — grown louder since Democrats took control of the federal government in November — who say the $1-trillion, 30-year nuclear modernization regimen started by the Barack Obama administration in 2016 will squeeze out funding for more urgent conventional weapons programs.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated nuclear modernization expenses will peak in the 2030s at around 7% of the total defense budget.
“We shouldn’t act like it’s no big deal,” Fischer said. “Nuclear modernization is not cheap, but it’s necessary.”
