Senate Democrats — led by a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Democratic presidential candidate — are calling on committee leaders to adopt several House-passed measures that would ban low-yield missiles deployment and extend the New START Treaty during future conference sessions over the fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a letter Aug. 20 to Armed Services Chair Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-R.I.) requesting that they include three nuclear weapons-related provisions in the final NDAA that were passed in the House version, but not the Senate.
Co-signed by 17 fellow Democratic senators, the letter calls for banning the deployment of the W76-2 low-yield nuclear warhead, for the White House to extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), and for denying funding for specific intermediate-range nuclear missiles following the dissolution of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty earlier this month.
The W76-2 warhead is a “dangerous, costly, unnecessarily and redundant addition to the U.S. nuclear arsenal,” the senators said in the letter. “The sea-based leg of our nuclear triad is our most survivable deterrence asset. … By putting a ‘tactical’ nuclear weapon on a Trident missile, we will be putting our most valuable strategic asset at risk.”
The new weapon would also reduce the threshold for nuclear use, the letter said. Supporters of the W76-2 have argued that it provides a more credible deterrence against an adversary’s weapon of similar yield.
The letter’s authors requested that Senate Armed Services leaders keep intact House language from the lower chamber’s National Defense Authorization Act rejecting funding for new intermediate-range missiles “until pragmatic diplomatic and strategic planning steps are taken” to prevent an arms race in the European or Indo-Pacific theaters.
They also called for the extension of the New START pact for an additional five years, from February 2021 to February 2026, noting that the sole arms accord left standing provides the U.S. government with “valuable insight” into Russia’s nuclear arsenal and an extension would allow the Trump administration time to negotiate a better follow-on deal.
The Trump administration, in its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, said the U.S. needs a low-yield nuclear weapon that can be shot promptly at an adversary and penetrate all air defenses in order to check that adversary from using its own low-yield nuke to rapidly escalate and win a conventional conflict.
