The United States does not need as many intercontinental ballistic missiles as the Air Force plans to build, and Congress should take another look at a low-yield warhead lawmakers just approved, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee said Wednesday.
“I think we have too many ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles], absolutely,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. “Does that mean we get rid of them all? I don’t know. But we certainly don’t need as many as they’re contemplating building.”
Smith also said he “absolutely” plans legislation to address the low-yield, submarine-launched, ballistic-missile warhead Congress — at the Trump administration’s request — directed the Department of Energy to build as part of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act signed Aug. 13.
A House Armed Services Committee spokesperson on Thursday had no details to provide about any possible future legislation.
The NDAA passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, including from Smith. However, the House’s top military-policy Democrat only voted for the legislation after making several impassioned speeches on Capitol Hill, in which he called the low-yield nuclear weapon “troubling” and “a mistake.”
Smith spoke with Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor here after an on-stage interview with the military trade publication Defense News, which hosted a daylong conference in Arlington, Va. The interview, before an audience of military personnel, industry representatives, and reporters, was part of the 2018 Defense News Conference.
The United States has 400 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, according to the nongovernmental Federation of American Scientists. These include two variations of the Minuteman III made by Boeing.
Boeing and Northrop Grumman are working on competing designs for new intercontinental ballistic missile systems under the Air Force’s Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) program. The three-year contracts, awarded in 2017, are respectively worth about $350 million and $330 million. The Air Force plans to deploy GBSD missiles in the late 2020s.
Beyond signaling an appetite to cut the U.S. ICBM force — components of which the Department of Defense and Department of Energy are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade in fiscal 2019 and beyond — Smith did not detail his plans for reducing U.S. nuclear forces.
“The bottom line is, we can get the deterrence we need with fewer nuclear weapons,” he told NS&D Monitor.
Smith did say the Navy’s fleet of 14 nuclear-armed Ohio-class submarines, which are intended to be undetectable and have essentially global range, “are the most important part” of the nuclear triad.
The nuclear triad encompasses: land-based ICBMs that are mostly tipped with W78 warheads provided by the Department of Energy; aircraft that can carry air-launched cruise missiles tipped with W80 warheads, along with B61 gravity bombs; and submarine-based Trident II-D5 missiles tipped with W76 warheads.
Democrats are in the minority in Congress, but they have a chance to retake the House and the Senate in the midterm elections scheduled for Nov. 6. In committee votes that preceded final approval of the 2019 NDAA — and which provided minority lawmakers with a forum to make policy declarations through votes that could not actually defeat a bill — Democrats opposed the new low-yield warhead essentially en bloc.
