The head of U.S. Strategic Command this week again praised the advantages of a key treaty limiting the U.S. and Russia to 1,500 deployed strategic warheads, but said any follow-on accord should apply limits all other types of nuclear weapons.
“We would like to have all nuclear weapons as part of a future strategic arms treaty,” Gen. John Hyten said in a Tuesday hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Hyten was replying to a question from Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), the ranking Democrat on the panel’s strategic forces subcommittee. Heinrich wanted to know whether it was true, as he had heard, that the Donald Trump administration was considering whether to extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) into 2026. New START went into force in 2011 during the Barack Obama administration and will limit deployed strategic warheads only through 2021, unless the U.S. president and the head of the Russian Federation approve a five-year extension.
Hyten did not affirm or deny that Trump was close to a decision on extending New START. The Air Force four-star said only that Trump “asks me about that every time I see him,” and that the issue is “high on his [Trump’s] mind.”
In the coming months, the House and Senate Armed Services committees — respectively controlled by Democrats and Republicans — are set to clash over the nuclear status quo wrought during the Barack Obama administration: modernizing and maintaining the full U.S. nuclear triad at a cost of about $1 trillion over 30 years while pursuing and strengthening bilateral arms-control treaties with Russia.
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), chair of the House Armed Services Committee, wants to slash the arsenal, extend New START, and eliminate the low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead to be delivered to the Navy this year by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, opposes any cuts to the arsenal or the low-yield warhead, but has signaled conditional support for New START.
In particular, Smith has said the U.S. plans to buy too many new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) as part of the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent program. Under that program, Boeing and Northrop Grumman are maturing competing designs for a new missile to replace the aging, 400-missile Minuteman III fleet starting in the late 2020s.
On Thursday, in a separate Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Inhofe praised as “excellent” the testimony of three former government officials — Republican and Democrat — who essentially urged the Senator and all his colleagues to actively support the nuclear status quo.
But no matter Inhofe’s feelings on New START, he is not in the position to offer an extension to the landmark treaty in exchange for shielding the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent from cuts.
“The Senate, because it provided its consent to the treaty, has no further role in the actual extension,” Madelyn Creedon, former principal deputy administrator for the Obama administration’s National Nuclear Security Administration, said during the hearing. “But it would be very helpful if the Senate, on a bipartisan basis, could indicate not only broad support for the treaty, but actually urged a five-year extension.”
Creedon was one of three witnesses to testify before the panel on Thursday, and the only one to urge an immediate New START extension. The other two witnesses, retired Strategic Command commander Gen. Robert Kehler and former Geoge W. Bush National Security Council member Frank Miller, said the U.S. should not agree to an extension until Russia agrees to come to the table and discuss limits nuclear weapons not covered by that treaty.
New START does not cover the intermediate-range missiles banned by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty from which the U.S. now plans to withdraw Aug. 2, nor exotic Russian weapons such as the nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed, autonomous torpedo Russian President Vladimir Putin has publicly briefed.
Lawmakers generally did not discuss Russia’s more novel nuclear concepts in hearings this week, but the leaders of the House Armed Services panel that writes nuclear weapons policy did touch on INF-range weapons Tuesday.
In the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee’s first hearing of the 116th Congress, Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) asked an ex-government official if it would be possible to at least prevent a nuclear standoff between the U.S. and Russia after Aug. 2, when the two nations will no longer be prohibited from deploying conventional and nuclear missiles with a range of about 310 miles to 3,100 miles.
That ex-official, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Alexander Vershbow, offered a qualified yes.
“If there were political will on the Russian’s part to cooperate, I think we could have sufficient confidence that Russia honored an obligation only to deploy conventionally armed versions of this 9M729 and future INF systems that they have in the pipeline,” Vershbow said.
The U.S. said Russia started developing the since-deployed 9M729 in 2008. The Obama administration publicly accused Russia of violating the INF Treaty in 2014. The Trump administration, citing Russian refusal to destroy the missile and its infrastructure, announced Feb. 2 the U.S. would officially leave the INF Treaty in six months.
Russia has claimed the 9M729, the existence of which it long denied, does not violate the INF Treaty.
Washington and Moscow each say they do not currently plan to deploy nuclear-armed INF-range missiles along NATO borders.
Meanwhile, the House Armed Services Committee will get the next word in the national nuclear policy debate in a hearing scheduled for March 6. Miller is scheduled to return to Capitol Hill to testify alongside Bruce Blair: a researcher at Princeton University and former Air Force missileer who last year published a detailed plan for drastically reducing the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The White House, according to media reports, is expected to release its 2020 budget proposal by March 18. Armed Services Committees do not write budget bills, but they do write the annual National Defense Authorization Act that sets policy and spending limits for appropriators.
In 2018, the House rolled out its first draft of the annual National Defense Authorization Act in May.
