President Donald Trump called it “fake” news and arms control wonks called it impossible: a radical increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal the commander in chief demanded during a private meeting at the Pentagon in July, according to an NBC News report Wednesday.
During the meeting with Cabinet officials and military brass, Trump reportedly said he wanted more nuclear weapons and more military equipment and troops. Trump, NBC reported, “sought what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.”
Trump denied the report Wednesday, calling it “pure fiction” in a Twitter post.
In a Thursday news conference, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who is now the White House chief of staff, said Trump thinks it would be “great” if nuclear states could get rid of all their nuclear weapons, and that the president backs ongoing nuclear modernization plans that would slim down the U.S. arsenal.
According to the latest figures from the State Department, the U.S. has roughly 1,400 nuclear warheads deployed on 660 long-range delivery vehicles: intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and bombers. Somewhere around 200 tactical weapons are also deployed at several bases in Europe.
That is only a fraction of the weapons in the stockpile, which then-Vice President Joe Biden (D) said sat at roughly 4,000 warheads, as of January.
Arms control experts on Twitter were quick to point out that a tenfold increase from today’s total would be prohibitively expensive and violate international arms control treaties signed by Republican and Democrat administrations. Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein said ramping up nuclear weapon production to anything near the historical U.S. apex would require an arms complex of a scope not seen since the beginning of the Cold War.
To illustrate the issue, to produce ~1,000 warheads/year, you need the nuclear complex that Eisenhower had. That took a decade to build.
— Alex Wellerstein (@wellerstein) October 11, 2017
At the height of the Cold War, the Hanford Site in Washington state was an active plutonium production site. Rocky Flats in Colorado was a thriving production facility, churning out the fissile cores for U.S. warheads. Uranium refining was in full swing at the Portsmouth and Paducah plants in Ohio and Kentucky.
Today, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management is in the process of demolishing Cold War nuclear facilities at all of those sites — except for Rocky Flats. In 2005, DOE declared the cleanup mission at the Rocky Mountain site near Denver complete. Now, the site more resembles a mountain wilderness than a military-industrial complex, at least outwardly.
U.S. nuclear arms production capacity these days, a former chemist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico wrote on Twitter, is much diminished.
1. Los Alamos is the only place in the US that can manufacture the fissile parts of nuclear weapons. It can maybe produce 80 a year.
— Cheryl Rofer (@CherylRofer) October 11, 2017
2. Pantex is the only place that can assemble or take apart nuclear weapons. Its capacity is currently stretched.
— Cheryl Rofer (@CherylRofer) October 11, 2017
4. It would take years to build new Los Alamos or Pantex, and probably trillions of dollars.
— Cheryl Rofer (@CherylRofer) October 11, 2017
The president has made no secret of his desire to shore up the U.S. military broadly, and the nuclear arsenal in particular. So far, however, official White House policy has been to continue and accelerate its predecessor’s nuclear modernization program.
In May, Trump proposed raising the budget for the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) — the semiautonomous agency in charge of sustaining U.S. nuclear weapons — to about $14 billion in fiscal 2018. That includes a billion-dollar-plus increase for NNSA’s program to manage and refresh the existing nuclear arsenal. Congress has rallied behind the proposal in its budget process.
Appropriations bills produced in the House and Senate over the summer would provide about as much as the White House requested for these programs.
But the modernization initiative, however quickly completed, would keep the U.S. stockpile below the levels prescribed by the U.S.-Russian New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty: an arms control agreement with Russia that was signed in 2010 and modeled after older treaties that have formed the backbone of U.S. arms-control policy since the Cold War.
While Trump has the authority to unilaterally launch nuclear weapons, he would still require cooperation from Congress to build more of them. Clues about whether he intends to seek that permission might be part of the Nuclear Posture Review expected to be published by the end of the year.
