The Donald Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review would add new warhead work to the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) portfolio at a time when the agency’s budget is already stretched to the limit, nuclear-weapons experts — including the NNSA’s recently retired administrator — said this week.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy branch, steward of the nation’s nuclear warheads, is refurbishing four aging weapons for further service. In fiscal 2017, these life-extension programs accounted for more than $1 billion of the agency’s roughly $13 billion budget.
Before he retired as NNSA administrator on Jan. 19, Frank Klotz, in an exit interview with Defense News, said the agency is “working pretty much at full capacity” just to finish the four ongoing life-extensions on time and on budget.
The final Nuclear Posture Review is due in February, a Pentagon spokesperson said this week. If it follows the draft that leaked earlier this month, the NNSA would have to whip up one and possibly two new warheads for submarine-launched missiles.
The first new sub warhead the review asked for, a low-yield warhead for existing submarine-launched ballistic missiles, could probably be finished in “a couple years,” a former National Security Council official said this week.
“That’s something that the laboratories probably effectuate in a relatively short period of time, a couple of years,” Jon Wolfsthal, senior director for arms control and nonproliferation in the Barack Obama administration’s NSC, said Tuesday at a press event in Washington hosted by the Arms Control Association.
But throwing the new ballistic sub warhead into the NNSA mix would “would throw off some of the schedules” for ongoing updates to the W88 and W76 warheads now used on submarine-launched ballistic missiles, the W80 used on air-launched cruise missiles, and the B61 gravity bomb, Wolfstahl said.
Wolfstahl was one of three panelists — all former government officials now working for nonproliferation-focused nonprofits in Washington — who spoke and answered questions from the audience during a 90-minute briefing.
The proposed low-yield submarine-launched warhead would be made from parts of existing weapons. The draft report also proposed studying whether the U.S. should build an entirely new submarine-launched cruise missile, along with a brand new warhead for that weapon.
Another panelist at Tuesday’s briefing said modifying existing warheads would be relatively simple, compared with the massive and disruptive undertaking of creating an entirely new warhead.
It would take “a relatively modest but not trivial modification to an existing weapon to convert your SLBM [submarine-launched ballistic missile] weapon to be one that’s low-yield in the near term,” said Joan Rohlfing, president and chief operating officer of the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Rohlfing dismissed the idea that either submarine-launched missile discussed in the NPR was cooked up by the NNSA in an attempt at mission creep.
The weapons’ inclusion in the review was more likely political, she said, intended as a response to Russia’s supposed escalate-to-de-escalate strategy. According to that doctrine, Moscow would quickly nuke its way out of any armed conflict it could not win with conventional weapons.
Rohlfing also said mention of the cruise missile might be a way to spook Russia into negotiations about scaling back cruise missiles. The United States says the Kremlin has violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty by building and deploying a short-range nuclear-capable missile.
“I would put both of those things in front of the NNSA trying to expand its mission space,” Rohlfing said. “They already have enough on their plate and not enough resources to tackle what they’ve been asked to do for their program of record.”
Even excluding the new work discussed in the draft Nuclear Posture Review, the federal government slated to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the existing nuclear modernization plan started by the Obama administration.
That 30-year plan to modernize and maintain the U.S. nuclear arsenal is still the program of record in the Trump administration and is expected to cost more than $1 trillion from 2017 through 2046.
