ARLINGTON, Va. — 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 here.
“I think we have too many ICBMs, absolutely,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing. “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 added that he “absolutely” plans legislation to address the low-yield, submarine-launched, ballistic-missile warhead Congress — at the Donald Trump administration’s request — directed the Department of Energy to build as part of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act signed Aug. 13.
The bill passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, including from Smith. However, the House’s top military-policy Democrat only voted for the bill after making several impassioned speeches on Capitol Hill, in which he called the low-yield nuclear weapon “troubling” and “a mistake.”
Smith spoke with Morning Briefing here after an on-stage interview at 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 ICBM systems under the Air Force’s Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent program. The three-year contracts, awarded in 2017, are worth about $350 million and $330 million, respectively. The Air Force plans to begin deploying GBSD missiles in the late 2020s, with the aim of replacing the existing Minuteman III arsenal.
Beyond signaling an appetite to cut the U.S. ICBM force — components of which the Departments of Defense and 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 said.
Smith did say the Navy’s fleet of 14 nuclear-armed Ohio-class submarines, which are essentially undetectable and have essentially global range, “are the most important part” of the nuclear triad.
