U.S. Nuclear Arsenal Drops to 4,018 Warheads: Biden

The Obama administration has designated close to 500 additional nuclear warheads for disassembly, dropping the size of the in-service deterrent to 4,018 warheads, Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday.

The unilateral decision leaves roughly 2,800 warheads lined up for destruction, according to Biden. “And we have recommended that the next administration conduct a comprehensive nuclear posture review to determine whether additional reductions may be undertaken,” he said in prepared comments on nuclear security at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C.

President-elect Donald Trump has shown no sign that he would embrace such a recommendation, having tweeted in December that a stronger and expanded U.S. nuclear capability is necessary until “the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” The next day, he reportedly said the United States would prove victorious in any nuclear arms race.

President Barack Obama came into office with significant aspirations for advancing nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, which he outlined in his 2009 speech in Prague. He acknowledged the United States would maintain its arsenal as long as necessary to ensure the security of the nation and its allies, but said he would reduce nuclear weapons’ place in U.S. national security and pursue a new arms control treaty with Russia.

Both of those happened, Biden noted. The 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty requires Russia and the United States by February 2018 to reduce their arsenals of deployed long-range warheads and delivery systems. The administration’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review and 2013 nuclear weapons guidance both included language on lowering national security reliance on nuclear warheads.

As one example of this shift, advanced conventional weapons have taken a greater role in security for the United States and its allies – such as long-range bombers deployed with conventional cruise missiles above South Korea and elsewhere, said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.

Biden said Russia has essentially taken the opposite tack by leaning more heavily on its nuclear deterrent for security. Nonetheless, in today’s security environment, and with the United States’ security capabilities, there is little sense in or need for a pre-emptive U.S. first nuclear strike, Biden said.

“President Obama and I are confident we can deter—and defend ourselves and our Allies against—non-nuclear threats through other means,” he told the Carnegie audience. “The next administration will put forward its own policies. But, seven years after the Nuclear Posture Review charge—the President and I strongly believe we have made enough progress that deterring—and if necessary, retaliating against—a nuclear attack should be the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.”

The administration, though, never carried out a proposal reported last fall to enact a no-first-use rule for the nuclear deterrent. That was a particularly striking development, suggesting that Obama had been swayed against the move by relevant agencies, Kristensen said.

“That is something of an extraordinary situation,” he said in a telephone interview Friday. “He’s the commander-in-chief. They should be doing his bidding, not the other way around.”

Obama also was unable to realize some of his other goals, including further bilateral nuclear reductions with Russia and U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Biden said the administration was “blocked at every turn in the Senate” on CTBT ratification, though it did not formally submit the treaty to the upper chamber for consideration.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration moved ahead with what is anticipated to be an at least $1 trillion campaign over 30 years to modernize all three legs of the nuclear triad, including replacing today’s Minuteman III ICBMs, Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines, and strategic bombers. The costs of maintaining and revitalizing the arsenal are increasing yearly, according to an administration report obtained recently by CQ Roll Call: it forecast the cost at $341.78 billion from the current 2017 fiscal year to fiscal 2026, up $22 billion from the 2016 projection of $319.8 billion for that budget year through fiscal 2025.

Since Obama took office in 2009, the United States has disassembled 2,226 of the nuclear warheads that were in the queue for destruction, Biden said. The 500-weapon addition, above the number of warheads scheduled for retirement last year, brings the number of warheads awaiting destruction to 2,800, he added.

The 4,018 warheads would cover both active and reserve weapons, and is down by 553 since September 2015, according Kristensen. That leaves the U.S. nuclear arsenal lower by 1,255 weapons than at the end of the George W. Bush administration, he said in a blog post evaluating Biden’s speech.

“Even so, the Obama administration still holds the position of being the administration that has cut the least warheads from the stockpile compared with other post-Cold War presidencies,” Kristensen wrote. “Part of the reason for this is that the overall size of the stockpile today is much smaller than two decades ago, so one would expect new warhead cuts to also be smaller. But this is only partially true because the George W. Bush administration cut significantly more warheads from the stockpile than the Clinton administration.”

While the administration has been cagey about where in the arsenal the reductions occurred, Kristensen said the 553 are likely to have come from the “hedge” stockpile of reserve inactive warheads – specifically including surplus W76, B61, and B83 warheads.

Biden acknowledged the significant security threats facing Trump when he takes office on Jan. 20, including what the outgoing vice president called “counterproductive moves” by North Korea, Russia, Pakistan, and other nations that could make nuclear weapons more likely to be employed in a regional conflict in Europe or Asia. He specifically called out the Kremlin for violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

But these should not be cause for a massive buildup of the U.S. deterrent, Biden warned.

“If future budgets reverse the choices we have made—and pour additional money into a nuclear buildup that hearkens back to the Cold War— it will do nothing to increase the day-to-day security of the United States and our allies,” he said. “And it will mean we will have fewer resources to devote to areas that are indispensable to our 21st century security needs—areas like cybersecurity, space, and the health and modernization of our conventional force.”