SIX

EXPLODING BUDGETS

Fiscal constraints and the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are forcing reductions in America’s military budgets.¹ As of now, it is unclear how much we can expect these budgets to be reduced. But, barring another national emergency or war, it is almost certain that as the troops come home, the budgets will come down. The Department of Defense began its budget submission to Congress in January 2012 with this historical context:

After every major conflict, the U.S. military has experienced significant budget draw downs. The new budget level for the Defense Department will rise from FY 2013 to FY 2017; however, total U.S. defense spending, including both base funding and war costs, will drop by about 22% from its peak in 2010, after accounting for inflation. By comparison, the 7 years following the Vietnam and Cold War peak budgets saw a similar magnitude of decline on the order of 20 to 25 percent.²

This estimate of the reductions (which includes substantial savings from ending the wars) may be too low. Even with American troops still suffering casualties in the Afghanistan war, polls show little public support for keeping the large Pentagon budgets of the past ten years. A July 2012 survey, “Consulting the American People on National Defense Spending,” conducted by the Program for Public Consultation, the Stimson Center, and the Center for Public Integrity, showed that three-quarters of the American people favor lowering the level of spending on the base budget (excluding spending for the wars), including two-thirds of Republicans and nine in ten Democrats. On average, those surveyed favored lowering the base budget by 23 percent—far more than either the Congress or the administration is considering. The majority favored lowering the budget at least 11 percent.³

Those taking the survey were allowed to choose where they would make cuts in the military programs. Nuclear budgets took the hardest hit. Two-thirds of respondents decreased the budget for nuclear weapons, including eight in ten Democrats and two-thirds of Republicans, with the public as a whole cutting the budget an average of 27 percent—the largest percentage cut for any program in the survey.⁴

The participants in this survey were presented with arguments for and against nuclear weapons before they were asked their opinion on budget levels. In a fascinating side note to the results—which may tell us something profound about the nature of the overall debate on nuclear weapons—the respondents found the arguments for and against equally compelling. But they still cut the budgets. The pollsters vetted the arguments with advocates for each side to ensure they were consistent with the way the advocates themselves would present them.

The case for nuclear weapons emphasized, as advocates do in real debates, the vital strategic importance of the weapons and their low cost:

America’s nuclear arsenal is our country’s ultimate insurance policy against aggression. It helps protect our influence in a world with many threats and at a relatively modest cost. It provides assurance to our allies, decreasing incentives to develop their own nuclear weapons, and communicates our resolve to be a global power. It also deters threatening actions by our enemies. Developing newer models of nuclear warheads, as well as more modern bombers, more accurate missiles, and submarines to carry them, ensures that the deterrent remains reliable, useable and therefore credible.⁵

About two-thirds of the respondents found this convincing, with 22 percent finding it very convincing. There was some difference according to political party: about 60 percent of Democrats and independents agreed; 74 percent of Republicans agreed.

The argument against the nuclear weapons budget focused on the huge size of the nuclear arsenal and its irrelevance to today’s threats:

America’s nuclear arsenal consists of thousands of weapons, most far more destructive than the one that obliterated Hiroshima. The idea that we need thousands of weapons to deter an adversary is absurd: We can effectively destroy a country with a small number of weapons. Their use is also highly unlikely against today’s foes—some of whom use crude road bombs. Advanced conventional arms can accomplish virtually every mission that nuclear arms can, without killing thousands of civilians and producing long-lasting nuclear fallout.⁶

A similar 67 percent of the respondents found this convincing, with 26 percent finding it very convincing. There was little difference according to political leanings with 72 percent of Democrats, 66 percent of Republicans, and 62 percent of independents agreeing with the argument.

Yet, in the end, all cut the nuclear weapons budgets—and cut them far more than the budgets for ground forces, naval forces, or air forces. Republicans cut it by 18 percent, independents by 26 percent, and Democrats by 35 percent. It seems that whether one agrees or disagrees with the arguments on nuclear policy, most agree we can do what we need to do for far less money.

Shrinking budgets will soon force military leaders to prioritize among competing weapons programs. U.S. leaders, like the public, may well choose to preserve conventional military capabilities over nuclear forces that many now see as irrelevant to current threats. This will set up a major budget crunch for the nuclear weapon programs, many of which set ambitious expansion goals in the years when defense budgets were increasing. It will be impossible to accommodate all these new programs with budgets that are flattening or contracting.

Another factor that will add to the nuclear budget pressure is the miserable management track record of the chief agency in charge of programs for developing, producing, and modernizing nuclear warheads and materials, the Nuclear National Security Administration. Almost all NNSA programs are over-budget, behind schedule, and underperforming. In 2012, it was revealed that several major projects originally estimated to cost several hundred million dollars had each ballooned to several billion dollars. NNSA was forced to delay a plant for producing dozens of new plutonium bomb cores—likely killing the project—when the budget skyrocketed from $800 million to over $6 billion without a clear rationale for the extra capacity.⁷ The Albuquerque Journal, the leading paper in New Mexico, home to two nuclear laboratories, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory, editorialized in November 2012 that NNSA “has turned the nuclear weapons complex into a bureaucratic quagmire that defies attempts at efficiency. Its inability to move forward with essential projects is a threat to our nuclear security.”⁸

The ability of security officials and policy makers to make smart budget decisions is complicated by the failure of the government to track total spending on nuclear weapons programs. There is no comprehensive accounting for these systems. In 2012, Ploughshares Fund commissioned several studies of the nuclear budget. One of these, Resolving Ambiguity: Costing Nuclear Weapons, produced by the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., estimated that the United States spends about $31 billion each year on the missiles, bombers, submarines, and warheads that compose America’s offensive strategic force.⁹

In addition, the government spends about $10 billion a year on anti-ballistic-missile weapons designed to intercept enemy missiles; about $9 billion a year on environmental cleanup and health costs related to the manufacture and maintenance of nuclear weapons; about $6 billion a year on programs working to secure nuclear weapons and materials in other nations and prevent their spread; and just under $1 billion a year on nuclear incident management programs to deal with the consequences should a bomb explode in the United States. This spending is about to increase with plans to start new nuclear weapons programs. A Ploughshares Fund study in September 2012 found that the United States is on track to spend approximately $640 billion from 2013 through 2022 on nuclear weapons and related programs.¹⁰

Some of this budget would remain even if nuclear weapons were eliminated tomorrow. A large portion would be necessary even with reduced arsenals. A good deal of this spending, however, is unnecessary. As detailed in previous chapters, the U.S. nuclear arsenal is still configured to counter the Cold War threat of a massive Russian nuclear attack—even though military and intelligence officials agree that the greatest threats to the nation come from nuclear terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons to other states. Reconfiguring the nuclear force to address the actual twenty-first-century threat environment could reduce force numbers dramatically over the next decade without sacrificing vital military missions. Negotiating with other nations to verifiably eliminate nuclear weapons over the next two decades would allow the government to shift funds from the oversized nuclear budget to other pressing defense and domestic needs and avoid most of the planned expenditure of several hundred billion additional dollars for the development and production of a new generation of long-range nuclear weapon delivery systems that would keep thousands of nuclear weapons on airstrips, in silos, and prowling the oceans into the 2070s.

THE CURRENT FISCAL CRISIS

In 2012, the federal government ran an annual budget deficit of over one trillion dollars. The total national debt has ballooned from $5.6 trillion in 2000 to over $16 trillion in 2012. In 2011 alone, the United States paid $454 billion in interest to finance this debt. Of that, $36 billion went to China—in effect, the amount required to fund more than one-quarter of China’s estimated annual defense budget.¹¹

As Roger Altman and Richard Haass noted in 2010:

The U.S. government is incurring debt at a historically unprecedented and ultimately unsustainable rate.… As the world’s biggest borrower and the issuer of the world’s reserve currency, the United States will not be allowed to spend ten years leveraging itself to these unprecedented levels. If U.S. leaders do not act to curb this debt addiction, then the global capital markets will do so for them, forcing a sharp and punitive adjustment in fiscal policy.¹²

Their view is now the common wisdom, as are the grave consequences for the national defense. Former secretary of defense Robert Gates warned in 2011, “This country’s dire fiscal situation—and the threat it poses to American influence and credibility around the world—will only get worse unless the U.S. Government gets its finances in order. And as the biggest part of the discretionary federal budget the Pentagon cannot presume to exempt itself from the scrutiny and pressure faced by the rest of our government.”¹³ Cuts in Pentagon spending need not sacrifice security, though the two are often conflated. Baker Spring, a Heritage Foundation research fellow, said the Obama administration’s proposed defense budget for fiscal year 2013 was “simply too small.” He wrote:

The Obama Administration’s budget policies are reducing America’s military capacity so drastically that upholding these commitments will become impossible over time. A conservative Congress, which as the name implies should focus on preserving essential American values, institutions and commitments, would necessarily reject the Obama Administration’s defense budget proposal.¹⁴

However, national defense spending has grown out of proportion to the military threats confronting the nation. National defense spending doubled after the attacks of September 11, rising from $334 billion in fiscal year 2001 to a peak of $717 billion in fiscal year 2011 (this includes the budget for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan).¹⁵ The 2011 budget spent more on military programs than in any year since the end of World War II—more than during the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or any year of the Cold War. From 2002 to 2012, Congress appropriated close to $7 trillion for national defense, including $1.3 trillion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States spends as much on defense as the next fourteen countries in the world combined (many of whom are U.S. allies) and spends five times more than China, which ranks second in defense spending at roughly $143 billion a year.¹⁶

In January 2011, Secretary Gates proposed scaling back the growth of the defense budget for the next five years to realize $78 billion in savings from previous plans. The 2012 and 2013 budget requests reflected this priority: the 2012 budget request totaled $671 billion ($118 billion of that was war costs) and the 2013 budget request was $614 billion (with $88 billion in war costs).¹⁷ This likely marked only the beginning of the necessary reductions.

There is fierce political debate over the proper size of the Pentagon budget. At first, in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 fiscal crisis, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle agreed that any serious effort to reduce government spending must include cuts in military programs. Shortly after becoming Republican majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) explicitly included cuts in defense budgets as one option for congressional action on reduced government spending. “Every dollar should be on the table,” Cantor said, “No one can defend the expenditure of every dollar and cent over at the Pentagon.”¹⁸ In early February 2011, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) proposed a 2 percent cut from the DOD budget request.¹⁹ A number of senators and representatives propelled into Congress by the Tea Party movement broke from the traditional conservative opposition to cuts in military spending. Newly elected senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said in 2011, “As our country’s economic crisis continues, many progressives and conservatives alike are deeply concerned about skyrocketing deficits. Sharing this concern myself, I urge Congress to cut defense spending. I believe that large cuts in defense spending are indispensable if we hope to return to balanced budgets any time in the foreseeable future.”²⁰

Table 6.1  Largest Military Budgets, 2011

COUNTRY	DOLLARS (IN BILLIONS) FOR FY2011
1. United States	711.0
2. China	143.0
3. Russia	71.9
4. UK	62.7
5. France	62.5
6. Japan	59.3
7. India	48.9
8. Saudi Arabia	48.5
9. Germany	46.7
10. Brazil	35.4
11. Italy	34.5
12. South Korea	30.8
13. Australia	26.7
14. Canada	24.7
15. Turkey	17.9
TOTAL	713.5

Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), “The Fifteen Countries with the Highest Military Expenditure in 2011 (Table),” September 2011, http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/milex/resultoutput/milex_15/the-15-countries-with-the-highest-military-expenditure-in-2011-table/view.

The bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (known as the Simpson-Bowles Commission after its two cochairs, Senators Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles) proposed nearly $4 trillion in deficit reductions through 2020, which would include capping discretionary spending, or nonmandatory spending, at 2011 levels. The Department of Defense accounts for 54 percent of all discretionary spending.²¹ The commission also recommended holding spending growth at half the rate of inflation after 2013, requiring substantial budget cuts through 2020. The commission argues these cuts would save $1 trillion in costs from security-related programs alone.²²

Some business leaders also weighed in. Republican financier Peter G. Peterson noted that military spending makes up 23 percent of all government spending and recommended “eliminating costly weapons systems, reducing troop deployments overseas, lowering the number of nuclear weapons, and reforming military pay and benefits.”²³ Specifically, Peterson argued:

The U.S. nuclear weapons program provided a powerful deterrent when the Soviet Union posed a significant threat during the Cold War. Many defense analysts argue that now that the Soviet Union has disintegrated, the U.S. needs far fewer warheads to maintain our security and deter potential enemies, and that we should reduce the size of the arsenal and limit funding for nuclear research.²⁴

In an effort to reconcile sharply divergent budget priorities, Congress passed the Budget Control Act (BCA) in August 2011, capping security and nonsecurity spending. The BCA included $487 billion in defense cuts over the next ten years and provided a mechanism for finding more savings: the so-called Super Committee, a bipartisan group of twelve members of Congress. But the Super Committee failed to agree on a package for more savings, triggering across-the-board spending cuts that would automatically go into effect in 2013, returning the Department of Defense budget to its FY 2007 level and yielding ten-year reductions of about $960 billion (relative to the FY 2012 plan).²⁵

When planning for fiscal year 2013, policy makers largely ignored the Budget Control Act; both Congress and the president broke the BCA spending caps by several billion dollars in their marks for the fiscal year 2013 budget.²⁶ As the 2012 political campaigns heated up, many political figures distanced themselves from cuts to the Pentagon budget. GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney promised to increase military spending by at least 4 percent of GDP. A major part of the Republican campaign against the Democrats was the claim that President Obama wanted to slash defense budgets. Republican leaders in Congress championed increased military spending and struggled to put back in the budget programs that the administration had eliminated, including nuclear weapons programs.

Conservatives remain deeply divided between the defense hawks and the deficit hawks, however. The columnist David Brooks summarized the divide on the PBS Newshour in August 2012:

You have got the defense hawks, who really think cuts in defense spending in general would devastate our national security. And they’re led by John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

On the other hand, you have the more Tea Party–oriented people, who are not against defense spending, necessarily, but it’s not a priority for them. Lowering taxes and domestic economy are a priority for them, and they are quite happy to see the defense budget really decrease, not all of them … but certainly a lot of them.

So are you seeing this rift opening up between the defense hawks versus the tax cut hawks. I would say, if you look at the balance of the Republican Party, they are in the tax cut hawk [camp]. So support for high defense spending is probably decreasing in the Republican Party.²⁷

Grover Norquist, a prominent Republican lobbyist, is a leading tax-cut hawk. He argued for cutting wasteful military spending in August 2012, trying to convince Republicans in Congress to “cut the defense budget to avoid a major federal tax hike.” Many wasteful projects could be cut without harming national security, Norquist argued: “You need to decide what your real defense needs are. That doesn’t mean chairmen of certain committees get to build bases in their states. That’s not a defense need … [but] a political desire.”²⁸

There is a potential alliance between these Republicans and prominent Democratic defense leaders in Congress who are looking at nuclear weapons programs as one area where budgets can be cut without harm. When a CSPAN reporter asked Representative Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, in July 2012 where, specifically, he would cut the budget, he responded by citing savings from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and stating that “our nuclear policy is based on a premise of deterrence and mutually assured destruction with the then–Soviet Union. I think there is clearly savings to be found in that area as well.”²⁹ After listening approvingly to the president’s State of the Union address in January 2012, Smith added, “We can reduce the size of our nuclear arsenal, potentially saving billions of dollars and strengthening national security.”³⁰

Similarly, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee, said in June 2012, the administration “should consider going far lower” that the 1,550 strategic nuclear weapons allowed under the New START treaty.³¹ Saying that spending on the nuclear arsenal is “ripe for cuts,” Levin added, “I can’t see any reason for having as large an inventory as we are allowed to have under New Start, in terms of real threat, potential threat.”³²

Whether these lawmakers will find the political will necessary to rein in defense spending in future years remains to be seen. But their critique is correct: the U.S. nuclear posture is still configured much as it was during the conflict with the Soviet Union. The Cold War has been over for twenty years, but thousands of weapons remain deployed, on hair-trigger alert and intended to strike hundreds of targets in Russia (see chapter 4). Decisions over the next few years will either maintain the status quo, or set the nation on a path to increased security with lower force levels and greater savings. The former vice chairman of the Joint Staff General James Cartwright stresses the gravity of this decision point: “We are at a 50-year inflection point in the department. We are about to recapitalize most of our capital assets, which will have generally somewhere between 30 and 50 years of life. So the decisions we make about our submarines, the decisions we make about our ICBMs, the decisions we make about our bombers, are 50-year decisions.”³³

PAYING FOR THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES

President John F. Kennedy famously warned in 1963: “Each of us lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, miscalculation or by madness.”³⁴ When Kennedy spoke, the United States was nearing the end of a huge nuclear build-up—surging from 300 warheads in 1950 to more than 28,000 in 1963.³⁵ The United States has steadily reduced its nuclear stockpile over the past twenty-five years through negotiated agreements with Russia, but nuclear weapons budgets have remained at Cold War levels or higher.

As already noted, the United States spends about $56 billion per year on nuclear-weapons-related programs.³⁶ If the scope is narrowed to offensive strategic nuclear weapons—those that are counted by most arms-control treaties—the costs are still staggering. For fiscal year 2011, this included $22.71 billion for the Department of Defense and $8.25 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s weapons budget, for a total of $30.96 billion.³⁷ These are just the annual costs. The ten-year estimate developed by Stimson Center analysts for nuclear spending on offensive strategic weapons (warheads, missiles, bombers, and submarines) is $352–$392 billion.³⁸ Unless the president and the Congress chart a new path soon, the budgets for nuclear weapons will soon explode.

A 2012 Ploughshares Fund study expanded the Stimson ten-year estimate, adding in other nuclear-weapons-related programs.³⁹ These included:

  Missile defenses: $95.9–$97.4 billion: Most policy makers and analysts intimately link antimissile programs to nuclear policy. The study projected spending of $95.58 and $97.44 billion on these programs over the next ten years. This estimate used the Department of Defense projection for missile defense spending from FY13–FY17. Costs were assumed to grow with inflation through FY22.⁴⁰

  Environmental and health costs: $100.7 billion: The study estimated that the U.S. would spend $100.7 billion managing and cleaning up radioactive and toxic waste resulting from nuclear weapon production and testing activities, as well as compensating victims of such contamination.⁴¹

  Nuclear threat reduction: $62.7 billion: This includes funding for nonproliferation, securing and disposing of fissile materials, the Mixed Oxide Fuel facility, converting HEU-fueled reactors, and other programs.

  Nuclear incident management: $8.5 billion: This estimate included programs to prepare for emergency responses for a nuclear or radiological attack against the United States. It did not include relevant expenditures by the National Guard and federal and local agencies that would be involved in nuclear incident response.

The full ten-year estimate of between $620 and $662 billion is conservative. It did not include relevant costs that are difficult to calculate—including intelligence programs, some missile defense funds, and aerial refueling costs. The study did not account for programs that did not yet have official budget estimates—such as a new ICBM. The estimate also did not account for cost growth—an unfortunate reality for acquisition programs. Contractors often low-ball initial estimates, hoping that moving quickly to production will create jobs that lock in political support even as programs double or triple in costs. Finally, the study provided a range of possible future budgets. The low estimate assumed that defense budgets grow at less than the rate of inflation in keeping with the president’s budget plans. The high estimate simply assumes defense programs grow with inflation. The average of the two estimates is $640 billion.

Even if some of these programs are scaled back, the government will still have to spend billions each year. There is no quick exit to the cost of nuclear weapons. The question is, where are we going? Are we steadily reducing the costs, as well as the numbers and role of nuclear weapons? Or are we locking in spending at current levels for the next two generations of Americans?

When President Obama committed to reducing and eventually eliminating nuclear weapons, he also committed to maintain a “safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary and guarantee that defense to our allies.”⁴² Some have interpreted this goal to mean the indefinite preservation of the current nuclear force posture and nuclear weapons complex. Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) said, “While the goal of reducing global levels of nuclear weapons is noble, it cannot take priority over our duty to protect Americans.”⁴³ Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) echoed this view in a 2010 Wall Street Journal op-ed, arguing that nuclear budgets were too low for our security needs:

Despite pledging over $100 billion to maintain and modernize nuclear delivery systems, the [New START] plan makes a commitment only to a next-generation submarine—not to a next-generation bomber, ballistic missile or air-launched cruise missile. The administration has also made no decision about whether or how it will replace the B-52 bomber, which first flew in 1952, and under current plans will continue to fly until possibly 2037. Nor does the White House intend to decide what the new U.S. nuclear force structure will look like.⁴⁴

Senator Kyl was correct that the budget plans did not yet include these future program costs. But the opposite is also true: President Obama’s desire to negotiate reductions in global nuclear arsenals had not yet impacted the long-term plans of the Departments of Defense or Energy as of late 2012. Procurement was racing ahead of policy. Contracts were being let for nuclear weapons mandates by guidance dating from decades past, and policy decisions to change that guidance languished. Commenting on the growing budgets for these programs, Time magazine said: “Something profound is happening in the proposed 2012 … defense budget … but few are paying attention. You may want to, because it sets the nation on a path that, if history is any guide, will last for a half-century, and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.”⁴⁵

ARE NEW NUCLEAR WEAPONS AFFORDABLE?

In addition to the substantial monetary costs associated with these programs, there are also substantial opportunity costs. The U.S. Navy plans to replace its current fleet of fourteen ballistic-missile submarines, which collectively deploy half of the U.S. strategic arsenal, with twelve new submarines at the rate of one boat per year between 2031 and 2044. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the navy’s preliminary plans will consume at least 25 percent of its entire shipbuilding budget, crowding out new ships for conventional missions.

Cost estimates for the new fleet doubled in just three years. In 2010, the navy issued plans for the new class of submarine—the SSBN(X)—estimating that the first boat off the line would cost $7 billion.⁴⁶ By 2012, the navy’s estimate grew to $11.7 billion for the first submarine, with a goal of reducing average costs per submarine to $6–$7 billion. But the CBO estimated that the first submarine would actually cost $13.3 billion, with an average cost of $7.2 billion per boat. In total, the entire program was estimated to cost from $100–$110 billion.⁴⁷ The navy is increasingly concerned about the effects of the SSBN(X) costs on the shipbuilding program, as noted in the FY 2013 Shipbuilding Plan: “Spending $5-$6B per year for a single ship over a 10 to 12-year period will strain the Department of the Navy’s yearly shipbuilding accounts.”⁴⁸

If the SSBN(X) project is completed as planned, in 2040 U.S. Navy submarines will likely deploy 800 nuclear warheads.⁴⁹ It is not at all clear why. A rationale for this military capability has not been presented to Congress. Nor did President Obama explain how this force fits with the April 2010 Nuclear Posture Review plan to take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons “by reducing the number of nuclear weapons and their role in U.S. national security strategy.”⁵⁰

As for the other legs of the nuclear triad, plans for a new class of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and a new strategic nuclear bomber are only beginning to form. The Minuteman III missile—of which the United States has 450—is about to complete a $7 billion upgrade to extend its service life to 2030.⁵¹ The development of a replacement heavy bomber will cost $292 million in the FY2013 budget and an additional $5 billion projected for FY2014–FY2017.⁵² Early estimates are that the new bomber will cost upward of $55 billion to develop and procure.⁵³ The air force also plans to develop a new air-launched, nuclear-armed cruise missile for the bomber fleet. A 2009 study by the Air Force Association estimated the replacement triad would cost $216 billion through 2050,⁵⁴ but there are no truly reliable cost estimates yet for these new weapons systems. It will likely cost two to three times that amount to fully replace the current generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles, bombers, and submarines, as is now planned, well in excess of half a trillion dollars over the next few decades.

TOWARD SMALLER ARSENALS AND REASONABLE BUDGETS

How many nuclear weapons do we need? Often the discussion of this question is conducted at a high level of abstraction and decisions on force levels are often based more on political calculations than strategic ones. As Jeffrey Lewis of the Monterey Institute for International Studies notes about justifications for hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons, “Much of this is just crazy talk.”⁵⁵ In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously tried to put the power of nuclear weapons in perspective with his “Atoms for Peace” address to the United Nations:

Atomic bombs are more than twenty-five times as powerful as the weapons with which the atomic age dawned, while hydrogen weapons are in the ranges of millions of tons of TNT equivalent. Today, the United States stockpile of atomic weapons, which, of course, increases daily, exceeds by many times the total equivalent of the total of all bombs and all shells that came from every plane and every gun in every theatre of war in all the years of the Second World War. A single air group whether afloat or land based, can now deliver to any reachable target a destructive cargo exceeding in power all the bombs that fell on Britain in all the Second World War.⁵⁶

President John F. Kennedy added in his address to the United Nations in 1961:

The mere existence of modern weapons—ten million times more powerful than any that the world has ever seen, and only minutes away from any target on earth—is a source of horror, and discord and distrust.… And men may no longer pretend that the quest for disarmament is a sign of weakness—for in a spiraling arms race, a nation’s security may well be shrinking even as its arms increase.⁵⁷

In 2008, Ivo Daalder, ambassador to NATO from 2009 to 2013, and a former senior defense department official, Jan Lodal, wrote a cogent Foreign Affairs analysis on the decreasing utility of nuclear weapons in the twenty-first century. “The Logic of Zero” begins from the assessment that whatever security benefits nuclear weapons may have held during the Cold War, they are now outweighed by the security threats they pose: “Only one real purpose remains for U.S. nuclear weapons: to prevent the use of nuclear weapons by others. That reality has yet to sink in. U.S. nuclear policies remain stuck in the Cold War, even as the threats the United States faces have changed dramatically.” Not only do massive arsenals do nothing to deal with the real threats the United States confronts today—nuclear terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons to other states—but they actually make these problems worse. “The more nuclear weapons there are in the world, the more likely it is that terrorists will get their hands on one,” say Daalder and Lodal. “How can Washington expect to persuade other countries to forgo the very capabilities that the U.S. government itself trumpets as ‘critical’ to national security?”⁵⁸ As long as these weapons exist, there is a risk of their use. The only way to prevent nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation is to eliminate all nuclear weapons. “The logic of zero is driven by this threat,” write Daalder and Lodal.

Many experts and advocates agree. The former CIA operations officer Valerie Plame Wilson and Queen Noor of Jordan, a leader of the international movement Global Zero, discussed their nuclear nightmares in November 2012 on a Today Show interview. Plame argued that the elimination of nuclear weapons “has to be the goal … nuclear technology is so widely available … far beyond where we were at the height of the Cold War where it was just the United States and Russia. And now we have to drain the swamp, there is no other way ahead.”⁵⁹ U.S. leadership is essential, they argued, to rally other nations in a joint effort to both stop the spread of these weapons and reduce global stockpiles.

Daalder and Lodal recognize the economic benefits of zero. In addition to potentially preventing trillions of dollars in economic losses resulting from the use of just one nuclear weapon on a major city, they argue that the direct economic costs of maintaining a robust regime to verify nuclear disarmament “are likely to be low in comparison to the economic savings resulting from the elimination of nuclear weapons.”⁶⁰

Reducing the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal may not yield proportional cuts to the U.S. nuclear weapons budget at first. Some areas of the U.S. nuclear budget—including maintaining a nuclear weapons production complex—are largely sunk costs and cannot be quickly reduced. Indeed, some targeted investments in facilities will be necessary to retain sufficient capacity at the complex for years to come. However, by requiring fewer warheads and fewer delivery vehicles, the United States can still shave billions of dollars off annual budgets over the next few decades.

REAPING THE SAVINGS

How much money would reducing the weapons arsenal save? In 2006, Steven Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments proposed a number of options for scaling back the U.S. nuclear arsenal to achieve greater budgetary savings. In one option, he argued the United States could retool its strategic arsenal to deploy 1,000 warheads for an average cost of $13.5 billion a year through 2035, or one-third of the current annual expenditures.⁶¹

This option is predicated on reducing the size of the nuclear force and on buying smaller replacement systems. It calls for the development and deployment of 150 smaller, single-warhead ICBMs. The strategic nuclear bomber force would be reduced to 32 bombers—including a smaller replacement for the B-52H to be procured in 2030—with 288 deployed nuclear bombs. Finally, it calls for the development and deployment of eight new, smaller ballistic-missile submarines. Six would be deployed at any time, with twelve missiles apiece and eight warheads per missile, for a total of 576 submarine-based nuclear warheads. Kosiak, now in charge of defense programs at the Office of Management and Budget, argued that this scaled-back force structure would yield substantial savings in operations and support for the nuclear forces, while requiring fewer replacement weapons systems at relatively lower costs. Further reductions would yield further savings. Though the savings do not track one-to-one with reductions (there are costs associated with maintaining a bomber base, for example, regardless of how many bombers are stationed there), rationalizing the force further down to a few hundred weapons would save tens of billions more.

Benjamin Friedman and Christopher Preble of the Cato Institute proposed a series of substantial budget cuts to military spending, totaling more than $1.2 trillion over ten years.⁶² Their proposal illustrates the dramatic scale of the budget cuts being brought to the table. They recommended cutting $87 billion over ten years from the nuclear weapons budget. A later Cato report in May 2012 found several billion dollars in nuclear budget savings in fiscal year 2013 alone.⁶³

Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association also has suggested “right-sizing” the nuclear submarine fleet to find significant savings. Procurement of the Ohio-class replacement was pushed back from 2029 to 2031, a move that will save $6 to $7 billion over the next decade according to Pentagon projections. Kimball suggests that adjusting the size of the fleet could save billions more. He writes, “By reducing the Trident nuclear-armed sub fleet from 14 to eight or fewer boats and building no more than eight new nuclear-armed subs, the United States could save roughly $27 billion over 10 years, and $120 billion over the 50-year lifespan of the program.”⁶⁴

Additional savings could be found by delaying a new bomber replacement, as today’s B-2s and B-52s are being refurbished to last until the 2040s. Kimball estimates that this would save $18 billion in ten years. Finally, he suggests cutting one squadron of ICBMs at each of the three air force bases, bringing their total number down to 300. This would “save approximately $360 million in operations and maintenance costs in fiscal 2013 alone and far more in future years,” Kimball writes.⁶⁵

Looking forward, going down to zero weapons over the next two decades could save most of the $31 billion spent each year on strategic offensive forces. This would be enough to finance the annual budgets of five of America’s largest cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.⁶⁶

HOW LOW CAN WE GO?

Under the New START treaty, the United States and Russia will reduce both sides’ long-range strategic nuclear forces to no more that 1,550 warheads on no more than 700 delivery vehicles. However, the treaty does not deal with shorter-range nuclear weapons (also known as tactical weapons) or the weapons each side holds in reserve. Both of these categories are likely to be the subject of the next round of negotiations between the two nations.

Some want to block any further reductions in nuclear forces. In a November 2012 Heritage Foundation report, Baker Spring and Rebeccah Heinrichs argued for a dramatic increase in the number of U.S. nuclear weapons, arguing that the “failure to maintain a dynamic and effective nuclear force because of a misunderstanding of deterrence or an ideological pursuit of ridding the world of nuclear weapons could empower America’s foes and increase the likelihood of a holocaust.”⁶⁷

Their report calls for a stockpile of between 2,700 and 3,000 nuclear weapons, including “a minimum of 800 short-range nuclear weapons that are modernized for rapid delivery in order to meet counterforce targeting requirements relative to the Russian short-range nuclear weapons.”⁶⁸ As a reference point, the U.S. currently has an estimated 1,950 operationally deployed warheads.⁶⁹ The U.S. arsenal had 2,702 deployed nuclear warheads in when President George W. Bush left office in 2009. To meet Heritage’s proposed numbers, the United States would have to reverse reductions taken by President George W. Bush and build up above the SORT and New START treaty ceilings.⁷⁰

The majority of experts, in and out of the military, believe that U.S. national security objectives can be met at far lower numbers. Ambassador Steven Pifer and the scholar Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution outlined several possible scenarios in their 2012 book, The Opportunity: Next Steps in Reducing Nuclear Arms. They argued that the aim of the next round of negotiations between the United States and Russia could and should be to reduce “deployed strategic nuclear inventories to 1,000 warheads and their inventories of non-deployed strategic and nonstrategic nuclear warheads to another 1,000–1,500, [where] they would retain a clear numerical dominance over the medium nuclear powers.”⁷¹ This would “aspire to a time line in which negotiations on a treaty would begin within ten years, with the global elimination of nuclear weapons ideally to occur by 2030 or 2035.”⁷²

Many respected nuclear policy experts have recommended seeking deeper near-term reductions as stepping-stones toward zero. A 2012 report from the Global Zero Nuclear Policy Commission, whose authors include former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright (ret.), former NATO commander general Jack Sheehan (ret.), Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, and Ambassadors Richard Burt and Thomas Pickering, as well as the nuclear expert Bruce Blair, concludes that the United States needs no more than 900 total nuclear weapons to provide a reliable deterrent. As one illustration of how the force might look at these levels, 720 strategic warheads could be assigned to 10 Trident submarines, and 180 gravity bombs, to 18 B-2 bombers. The ICBM force could be eliminated. Additionally, the report suggests that the new nuclear force would be on a de-alerted operational status, meaning they would take twenty-four to seventy-two hours to prep for an offensive strike.⁷³

The authors argue that while some may still see nuclear arsenals as playing a role in deterring a nuclear-armed state like North Korea, outsized arsenals are not needed for this purpose:

We surely do not need thousands of modern nuclear weapons to play this role vis-à-vis a country with a handful of primitive nuclear devices. In fact, strong conventional forces and missile defense may offer a far superior option for deterring and defeating a regional aggressor. Non-nuclear forces are also far more credible instruments for providing 21st century reassurances to allies whose comfort zone in the 20th century resided under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Precision-guided conventional munitions hold at risk nearly the entire spectrum of potential targets, and they are usable.⁷⁴

The nuclear scientist Sidney Drell and Ambassador James Goodby of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University suggested going down to 500 deployed strategic warheads with another 500 as a responsive force. They propose, for example, keeping four or five submarines (three at sea) with ninety-six warheads each, one hundred ICBMs in silos, and twenty to twenty-five bombers. The nondeployed “responsive force” would consist of fifty to one hundred ICBMs taken off high-alert status, with warheads removed, and twenty to twenty-five bombers on hand for maintenance or training.⁷⁵

Going deeper, the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament suggested in 2010 that the United States and Russia seek reductions down to a total of 500 warheads by 2025.⁷⁶ The nuclear experts Hans Kristensen, Robert Norris, and Ivan Oelrich have also supported reducing to 500 warheads as part of a strategy of fielding a “minimal deterrent” nuclear force. They recommend removing the submarine leg of the nuclear triad and deploying only 200 single-warhead ICBMs and 250 gravity bombs for strategic bombers, holding perhaps 50 warheads in reserve.⁷⁷ Friedman and Preble, mentioned earlier in this chapter, offer a force structure at this level, which they estimate could cut $97 billion from the Departments of Defense and Energy between 2011 and 2020. They propose reducing the force to a dyad—dropping the bomber leg—with eight submarines (six on patrol) holding up to 192 warheads and 150 ICBMs.⁷⁸

In a 2010 article in Strategic Studies Quarterly, an air force journal, Col. B. Chance Saltzman, chief of Strategic Plans and Policy Division at Air Force Headquarters, and his coauthors, James Forsyth Jr. and Gary Schaub Jr., asked a simple question: “What size force is needed for deterrence?” They gave a surprising answer: “The United States could address military utility concerns with only 311 nuclear weapons in its nuclear force structure while maintaining a stable deterrence.”⁷⁹ This proposition would include 192 single-warhead, submarine-launched ballistic missiles on 12 Ohio-class submarines, 100 single-warhead ICBMs, and air-launched cruise missiles loaded on 19 stealth B-2 bombers. The authors argue that this relatively small, survivable force is sufficient for keeping the United States secure under a strategy of minimum nuclear deterrence. It would also allow the United States to relieve itself of the tremendous costs and catastrophic risks associated with the current arsenal of thousands of warheads.

Some conservatives thinkers believe efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons undermine U.S. security and argue for maintaining or increasing the number of nuclear weapons. Former Bush administration deputy assistant secretary of defense Keith Payne holds that the elimination of nuclear weapons is “divorced from reality” and “recommendations for deep reductions within 10 years rest on a set of assertions contrary to obvious facts and no small amount of unwarranted idealism regarding international relations.”⁸⁰ Payne does not believe deterrence is reliable with a smaller arsenal, basing his case on uncertainty and our own inability to predict the future:

Confident and near-universal claims that we should expect deterrence to function predictably at relatively low numbers of US nuclear forces—whether 300,500 or 1,000—seemingly know how opponents will perceive US deterrence threats, value the stakes at risk, calculate costs and benefits and make the implement decisions.⁸¹

Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and several other Republican senators wrote to President Obama in April 2012 arguing that the president’s “budget proposal currently underfunds nuclear modernization, endangering our nation’s nuclear deterrent and the security of all Americans.” They argued:

A reliable and modern nuclear deterrent is central to American national security. A credible nuclear arsenal deters potential enemies from launching a nuclear attack against our country or our allies. A strong and dependable U.S. nuclear deterrent also helps prevent nuclear proliferation by assuring friendly nations that a nuclear program is unnecessary. When the U.S. fails to maintain a reliable and modern nuclear deterrent we undermine these objectives, which are central to the security of our country.⁸²

Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton says simply and strongly, “We should also announce our withdrawal from the New START arms-control treaty, and our utter disinterest in negotiations to prevent an ‘arms race’ in space. Let Moscow and Beijing think about all that for a while.”⁸³ And Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) summarized a common theme among some conservative analysts that holds the United States cannot further reduce its strategic offensive nuclear arms until Russia cuts it non-strategic (or tactical) weapons. “New Start is another Obama giveaway at the expense of U.S. citizens,” he says. “The treaty mandates strategic nuclear weapons parity with the progeny of an old Cold War foe, yet allows the Russians to maintain a 10-to-1 tactical nuclear-weapons advantage.”⁸⁴

These conservatives fight hard and persistently for their positions but appear to be waging a losing battle. Force levels have been going down for almost thirty years, and there is every indication that they will continue to do so. It is a question of speed, not direction. All the reduction proposals call for maintaining a capability to deter a nuclear attack on the United States for as long as other nations retain nuclear weapons. At these lower levels, however, the United States would create the conditions for serious negotiations with other nuclear-armed nations for step-by-step reductions down to tens of nuclear weapons held in each national arsenal and eventually to zero nuclear weapons.

The United States would likely continue to maintain the science and technology base that could support renewed nuclear weapon production even under a disarmament treaty, if simply as a hedge against the treaty failing in practice. However, the sprawling complex that developed, manufactured, and maintained nuclear weapons since World War II could be shuttered. The extraordinarily expensive bombers, missiles, and submarines could be retired or converted for conventional military use. An emergency nuclear production capability could likely be sustained at a few billion dollars per year, until such time as this insurance policy is no longer needed.

CONCLUSION

In 2010, President Obama began to reorient U.S. nuclear policy to reflect the “logic of zero.” The April 2010 Nuclear Posture Review concluded:

The massive nuclear arsenal we inherited from the Cold War era of bipolar military confrontation is poorly suited to address the challenges posed by suicidal terrorists and unfriendly regimes seeking nuclear weapons. Therefore, it is essential that we better align our nuclear policies and posture to our most urgent priorities—preventing nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation.⁸⁵

However, as of early 2013, this promised realignment had yet to occur. The budgets and force plans guiding U.S. nuclear weapon development had not yet moved from a Cold War focus on Russia and China to the new standard of how these forces prevent—or exacerbate—nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Indeed, senior defense officials still seemed gripped by Cold War thinking. On March 1, 2013, Deputy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced that he would protect two areas of military spending from the effects of the sequester: operations in Afghanistan and nuclear budgets. While the department intended to ground air forces and tie up ships in port, it would keep nuclear weapon programs at full throttle. “The very notion that nuclear deterrence should be exempt from sequestration,” wrote Jeffrey Lewis in Foreign Policy, “helps illustrate the incredibly convoluted and confused thinking that underpins the U.S. approach to nuclear weapons.”⁸⁶

New guidance from the president on nuclear weapons is needed to break this obsolete thinking and reshape budgets. It will become increasingly important as the United States moves into the process established by the Nuclear Posture Review of multilateral negotiations for nuclear disarmament. According to a 2010 study, Elements of a Nuclear Disarmament Treaty,

As the United States and Russia reduce their deployed weapons through New START, the United States will pursue negotiations for deeper reductions and greater transparency in partnership with Russia. Over time, we will also engage with other nuclear weapon states, including China, on ways to expand the nuclear reduction process in the future.⁸⁷

In the foreword to that study, former secretaries of defense Frank Carlucci and William Perry note that “precedents exist in past or existing international agreements, and in state practices for most of the measures that would have to be put in place to govern, verify and enforce a disarmament agreement.” They conclude: “The overriding obstacles are not technical; they are political.”⁸⁸ If these political obstacles can be overcome, the elimination of nuclear weapons will provide considerable economic benefits to all nations.

The administration needs to bring fiscal responsibility to the nuclear weapons bureaucracy. It should commission studies on the cost savings and strategic benefits of rationalizing the nuclear force to levels of 1,000 and to 500 nuclear weapons over the next ten years and to zero nuclear weapons in twenty or thirty years. The administration should integrate the president’s nuclear-reduction goals into all budget and planning processes. The navy, the air force, U.S. Strategic Command, and the National Nuclear Security Agency should be tasked to develop deployment plans and budgets for sharply reduced nuclear forces over the next twenty or thirty years. These can be presented to the president and Congress along with plans to maintain the current nuclear force indefinitely. Not providing these alternatives condemns policy makers to the tyranny of the status quo.

The fiscal logic of zero reinforces the strategic appeal of preventing nuclear catastrophe by eliminating nuclear weapons. The realization that policy makers can reduce both strategic and financial threats to the United States may broaden the support for moving towards the peace, security, and economic benefits of a world without nuclear weapons.