Mark Esper, who could be confirmed as secretary of defense as soon as next week, held strictly to U.S. nuclear orthodoxy in his Senate confirmation hearing this week, boosting the Department of Energy’s stockpile stewardship program and urging continued funding for long-term modernization and maintenance of the nuclear arsenal.
The Senate Armed Services Committee approved Esper’s nomination Thursday in a closed-door meeting, setting the stage for a floor vote on Tuesday.
A former Raytheon lobbyist and current secretary of the Army, Esper said in written testimony Tuesday that the 30-year, $1-trillion nuclear modernization and maintenance program started by the Barack Obama administration was “sufficient to support the full modernization of the nuclear triad.”
The ongoing modernization regime, slightly modified by the Trump administration, was conceived as the U.S. and Russia enacted the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) that capped the countries’ deployed strategic warheads — those not designed purely for battlefield use — at 1,550 each. New START will expire in February 2021, if the U.S. and Russian presidents do not agree before then to a five-year extension.
In written answers to committee questions, Esper wrote the Pentagon agrees with the White House’s criticism that New START “does not capture Russia’s improving and increasing arsenal of nonstrategic nuclear weapons,” or prohibit Moscow from deploying so-called exotic nuclear weapons that do not closely resemble the missiles, bombs, submarines, and aircraft covered by the existing treaty.
Esper also wrote that he “look[s] forward to supporting” the Trump administration’s efforts to “to constrain a rapidly growing Chinese nuclear capability” through arms control.
Nevertheless, Esper wrote, “New START Treaty extension could potentially fit into a new arms control framework provided the net result improves the security of the United States and of our allies and partners.”
Esper also praised the stockpile stewardship program that DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) uses to certify, without nuclear explosive tests, that aging U.S. nuclear weapons have maintained their designed destructive power.
The United States, which ceased nuclear explosive testing in the 1990s, “would only consider a return to nuclear explosive testing if there is a severe technical or geopolitical challenge that cannot be addressed through other means,” Esper wrote.
The defense secretary-designate did not field any questions about the Trump administration’s planned low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead, the W76-2. The weapon has proved the most hotly debated part of the White House’s nuclear strategy to date. House Democrats have already passed authorization and appropriations bills that prohibit the Pentagon from deploying W76-2.
Meanwhile, U.S. and Russia diplomats met this week in Geneva to discuss nuclear arms control, including the possibility of including China in a follow-on agreement to New START. China has said it will not join a nuclear arms-control treaty with the U.S. and Russia.
At the meeting, John Sullivan, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, “underscored the importance of modernizing nuclear arms control in line with the President’s vision for a new direction,” a State Department spokesperson wrote in a statement Wednesday.
Sergei Ryabkov, the Russian deputy foreign minister, led the Kremlin delegation at the talks. On Wednesday, Ryabkov reiterated an old old Russian line: Moscow is open to renewing New START, but worries the U.S. has not rendered some of its bombers and submarine missiles tubes incapable of launching nuclear weapons. That is according to the Russian state-run media outlet, TASS.
