The Senate’s top nuclear-weapon authorizer pumped Air Force Gen. John Hyten during a Tuesday confirmation hearing for ammunition to use in upcoming budget negotiations with House Democrats over spending levels for the ongoing modernization and maintenance of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
President Donald Trump in April nominated Hyten, commander of U.S. Strategic Command since 2016, to become vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The general in charge of U.S. nuclear forces spent much of the hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee addressing allegations that he sexually assaulted an officer under his command at STRATCOM.
The Committee had not scheduled a vote on Hyten’s nomination at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) avoided that subject. Instead, the chair of the panel’s strategic forces subcommittee used her time to enlist Hyten’s help in shooting down arguments House Democrats used to support stockpile modernization funding cuts proposed in the National Defense Authorization Act the lower chamber passed on July 12.
At Fischer’s prompting, Hyten said he did not believe that placing a low-yield nuclear warhead on submarine-launched ballistic missiles made the submarine fleet less safe. He also repeated a Pentagon talking point that the current arsenal of low-yield bombs and air-launched cruise missiles are no substitute for a faster-traveling, low-yield, sub-launched nuclear ballistic-missile.
The Trump administration says the U.S. needs a low-yield nuclear weapon for a prompt strike to check an adversary from using its own low-yield weapon to quickly escalate and win a conventional conflict.
House Democrats reject that argument. Led by Armed Services Chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the lower chamber’s National Defense Authorization Act would ban the Navy from deploying the low-yield W76-2, which the NNSA planned to start delivering to the service by Sept. 30.
Smith and his allies say a low-yield weapon lowers the threshold for nuclear war and would, if used, expose the submarine that launched it to a counterattack that could destroy many high-yield nuclear missiles the U.S. relies on to deter a potentially devastating nuclear first-strike on American territory.
The Senate, in the NDAA it passed in June, approved full funding for all Department of Energy and Department of Defense nuclear weapons modernization programs. The House and Senate had yet to schedule conference negotiations on the legislation at deadline Wednesday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
