Marshall Billingslea, President Donald Trump’s new point man on arms control, warned Thursday that Congress would undercut arms control negotiations with Russia and China by slowing progress on the modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
“Congress has strongly supported the modernization of our deterrent,” Billingslea, the State Department’s special presidential envoy for arms control, said Thursday in a webcast hosted by the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington. “Certainly, now is not the time to change course. And I need to be very clear about this: the risk of any cuts to the bipartisan consensus on modernization, and the plans we have that are under way, in the midst of a negotiation is to inadvertently, or otherwise, hand the initiative to either Beijing or Moscow or both.”
Billingslea delivered his message not to rock the boat on modernization as he and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov have agreed to meet for in-person arms-control talks, once the COVID-19 pandemic relents. It also comes at a time when Democrats who control the House of Representatives, and who last year proved willing to slow down the modernization of U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles, are writing the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act.
The Trump administration is keen on fashioning a new trilateral arms control agreement between the U.S., Russia, and China to replace the expiring New START treaty between Washington and Moscow. New START, ratified during the Barack Obama administration, limits each side to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads. The treaty also allows each side to perform limited compliance inspections of the other side’s arsenal. New START will expire Feb. 5, unless the U.S. and Russian presidents agree to extend it for up to five years.
Citing sources, Politico this week reported that the Trump administration might consider a shorter-term New START extension with Russia. On Thursday, however, Billingslea declined to say whether he would recommend that Trump extend New START at all.
“I’m just not going to speculate on that at this early stage,” Billingslea said.
The ongoing $1 trillion U.S. modernization program will eventually: replace 14 Ohio-class submarines with 12 Columbia class boats; replace the aging B-52 bomber with B-21 Raider aircraft; swap 400 Minuteman III ICBMs with an equal number of deployed Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missiles; refurbish the warheads the National Nuclear Security Administration makes for the weapons; and rebuild some weapons production infrastructure that the civilian agency needs to keep nuclear weapons operational into the 2080s.
House Democrats last year proposed to slash funding for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, likely to be built by Northrop Grumman. The chamber’s majority proposed $460 million or so, rather than the $615 million requested. The program eventually received $635 million for this year.
Also last year, those same lawmakers proposed providing $410 million to start building a pair of plutonium pit factories at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, rather than $710 million, as the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) requested .
The GOP-controlled Senate easily quashed those efforts in conference, giving the NNSA an all-clear to start rebuilding infrastructure crucial to the production of nuclear-weapon cores. The first new cores will be for the GBSD’s W87-1 warheads.
This year, with the House Armed Services Committee at work on its version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act, progressive lawmakers within the House Democratic caucus are urging leadership not to increase military and defense spending during the COVID-19 pandemic. The House has not set a timeline for passing its version of the bill; the Senate Armed Services Committee thinks its version could pass in July.
At the same time, the NNSA now says its previous cost estimates for modernizing U.S. nuclear weapons production infrastructure abandoned or neglected after the end of the Cold War was off by billions, Any more specific accounting? The agency says it needs a roughly $20-billion budget for fiscal 2021: almost $3 billion more than it predicted, in 2019, it would need for the budget year that begins Oct. 1.
This month, Trump nominated Billingslea to be undersecretary of state for arms control and international security at the State Department. However, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had yet to schedule a hearing on that nomination. If confirmed, and Billingslea has had difficulty making it through the Senate before, he would assume full time the job now performed on an acting basis by Christopher Ford, assistant secretary for international security and nonproliferation. Billingslea would formally succeed Andrea Thompson, who left the State Department in October 2019. This particular undersecretary is State’s day-to-day point person on international arms control negotiations and compliance.
Billingslea last got through the Senate in June 2017, when lawmakers voted 65-35 to confirm him as Treasury’s assistant secretary for terrorist financing. That year, 12 Democrats crossed the aisle to join every Senate Republican in voting “aye.”
Last year, Democrats began to coalesce against him, citing his involvement, as a Department of Defense staffer in the Geroge W. Bush administration, with the use of interrogation techniques later deemed torture on terrorism detainees at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. In a Senate report from 2008, Billingslea advocated for such techniques.
