Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
6/26/2015
If existing nuclear forces are not modernized, the U.S. will lose its existing deterrent capabilities in the 2020s and 2030s, the Pentagon’s No. 2 official said Thursday. “The choice that we’re facing quite frankly…is not [between] keeping the existing force or modernizing the force,” Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said Thursday during a full House Armed Services Committee hearing on nuclear deterrence policy. “The choice right now is modernizing the force or losing deterrent capability in the 2020s and 2030s. That’s the stark choice that we face.”
While other Pentagon officials have warned that fiscal austerity could impinge on nuclear modernization efforts, Work was the first to cast nuclear modernization as an all-or-nothing proposition with little margin even for life extension efforts. “Without additional funding dedicated to strategic force modernization, sustaining this level of spending will require very, very hard choices that will impact the other parts of the defense portfolio, particularly our conventional mission capability,” Work said. “This modernization we have delayed, and we cannot produce further any delays without putting the safety, security and effectiveness of our forces at risk.”
The Defense Department estimates that maintaining and modernizing nuclear forces will cost an average of $18 billion per year from 2021 to 2035 in Fiscal Year 2016 dollars, Work said, totaling $270 billion over that 15-year span.
Garamendi Presses Sherwood-Randall on Pit Production
As part of ongoing nuclear modernization efforts, the Energy Department is working to increase its capacity for plutonium pit production capability to 80 pits per year (ppy), as part of a Congressional directive and approved by the Nuclear Weapons Council. Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) pressed Deputy Energy Secretary Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall to describe the Energy Department’s rationale behind requiring the development of 80 plutonium ppy. She said DOE is working toward a “fully responsive nuclear infrastructure” to adapt to today’s “dynamic threat environment.”
After Sherwood-Randall offered to provide Garamendi a cost estimate after the hearing, he pressed further, saying, “We would want to know that at the outset. There seems to be some shortage of money for all of this.” Garamendi also criticized Sherwood-Randall’s representation of DOE’s rationale for the 80 ppy requirement. “Someday, we might want it, and therefore we’re going to build it now and we don’t have the money to do so,” he said. Sherwood-Randall said constructing necessary infrastructure involves time and planning. “We can’t snap our fingers and produce the infrastructure,” she said. But Garamendi proposed another option. Running multiple shifts at the existing facilities could produce far more pits than the 10 ppy that are produced today, he said. Sherwood-Randall said she would explore that option.
Rogers Presses Vice Chair of JCS for INF Response Timeline
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), asked Adm. James Winnefeld, Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for an implementation timeline of possible responses—military and otherwise—to Russia’s alleged violation of the Intermediate-Range Forces Treaty of 1987. Winnefeld said he could not provide a specific timeline, yet noted that the U.S. military is closely engaging with NATO about the alleged violation. Winnefeld said the U.S. is still awaiting Russia to come back into compliance with the treaty, and that the Pentagon does not want to compromise the ongoing process.
“I don’t think that we want to necessarily rush into a definitive move, because we would like to bring Russia back into this treaty,” Winnefeld said. “But there’s no question, as you point out, that we’ve got options at hand that I can’t really discuss in an unclassified hearing, but those options are available for use. Some of them are expensive. None of them contribute to Russia’s security, and they need to understand that. They need to come back inside this treaty.”
Rogers countered that taking action would not be premature. “We’re not rushing into anything,” Rogers said. “This has been going on for years. It’s just the last two years that the Administration’s officially recognized it. [Russian President Vladimir Putin] has played us along and we’re just letting him. And I just don’t understand why it continues to go on. I know you’re not the president, you can’t tell him what to do, but we need to be making some decisions and doing something proactively.”
