Former government officials suggested this week that the Donald Trump administration could reach for either the retired W84 warhead or the workhorse W80 if it wants a nuclear-tipped missile after walking away from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
Trump announced Saturday, and reaffirmed Monday, that his administration would cease complying with the 1987 accord that forbids the United States and Russia from testing or deploying ground-based missiles — conventional or nuclear — with flight ranges between 500 kilometers and 5,500 kilometers (about 310 miles and 3,100 miles).
While Trump signaled the U.S. would start developing missiles that could operate in the treaty-prohibited range, he did not say Washington would proceed straight to a nuclear option. The Pentagon is already studying a conventionally armed INF-range missile under a directive Congress wrote into the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act.
If Trump does proceed to a nuclear option, one potential warhead is the 1980s-vintage W84 that once tipped ground-launched cruise missiles prohibited by the INF, former George W. Bush National Security Council arms control hand Frank Miller said Monday in a Monday conference call hosted by the Washington-based Atlantic Council. Another option is the W80, a slightly older weapon used on current air-launched cruise missiles and planned for use on future such missiles, Miller said.
If either weapon were repurposed for a new INF-range missile, “there’d be a degree of, at a minimum, refurbishment, etc. that would be required” by the Department of Energy, said Jim Miller, undersecretary of defense for policy in the Barack Obama administration from 2012 to 2014, said on the call. The Millers are not related.
Trump said national security adviser John Bolton would deliver details of the U.S. plans to abandon the treaty in a private meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week. Bolton subsequently said the U.S. had not officially withdrawn from INF.
U.S. politicians and policymakers on both sides of the aisle agree Moscow has violated the INF by testing and developing a prohibited-range missile over the past 10 years or so. Washington has not disclosed its evidence of the violation, though it has provided the Russian designation for the offending missile: 9M729. The Kremlin denies it has violated the INF and said this week it would continue to abide by the treaty.
Some in Trump’s orbit, notably Bolton, had for years publicly advocated scrapping the INF Treaty because it only constrained the arsenals of Russia and the United States, while leaving the economically powerful China free to develop missiles in the prohibited range.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review from February had already asked the Defense Department to study a new nuclear-armed Sea Launched Cruise Missile. Unlike land-based missiles, sea-based weapons are not covered by the INF. Part of the rationale for approving the study, U.S. officials have said in public testimony, was to pressure Moscow into returning to INF compliance.
The Sea Launched Cruise Missile was one example of a multifaceted pressure campaign that some Democrats in Congress, notably House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), were willing to tolerate.
On Thursday, however, Smith said he could “neither support, nor enable” unilateral withdrawal from the INF Treaty. In a letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Smith and Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, demanded a briefing on the sort of post-INF capabilities Russia might deploy, and the cost of countering them.
On the other side of the Hill, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), ranking Democrat on the upper chamber’s Armed Services Committee, said “[i]t would be better to build international pressure to hold Russia accountable for violating the treaty and force it back into serious negotiations than to have the U.S. pull out now.”
Reed also worried that withdrawing from INF might lead to abandoning the New START treaty, which limits the number of deployed U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads. That treaty limits both sides to: 700 deployed intercontinental- and submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers; 1,550 fielded strategic warheads; and 800 deployed and nondeployed long-range launchers. New START expires in 2021, but could be extended for five years beyond that.
