Trump goes ahead with costly US nuke overhaul

During his speech last week about Afghanistan, United States President Donald Trump slipped in a line that had little to do with fighting the Taliban: “Vast amounts” are being spent on “our nuclear arsenal and missile defence,” he said, as the administration builds up the military.

The president is doing exactly that. Last week, the air force announced major new contracts for an overhaul of the US nuclear force: $1.8 billion for initial development of a highly stealthy nuclear cruise missile, and nearly $700 million to begin replacing the 40-year-old Minuteman missiles in silos across the US.

While both programmes were developed during the Obama years, the Trump administration has seized on them, with only passing nods to the debate about whether either is necessary or wise. They are the first steps in a broader remaking of the nuclear arsenal — and the bombers, submarines and missiles that deliver the weapons — that the government estimated during President Barack Obama’s tenure would ultimately cost $1 trillion or more.

Even as his administration nurtured the programmes, Obama argued that by making nuclear weapons safer and more reliable, their numbers could be reduced, setting the world on a path to one day eliminating them. Some of Oba-
ma’s national security aides, believing that Hill-ary Clinton would win the presidential election, expected deep cutbacks in the $1 trillion plan.

Trump has not spoken of any such reduction, in the number of weapons or the scope of the overhaul, and his warning to North Korea a few weeks ago that he would meet any challenge with “fire and fury” suggested that he may not subscribe to the view of most past presidents that the US would never use such weapons in a first strike. “We’re at a dead end for arms control,” said Gary Samore, who was a top nuclear adviser to Obama.

While Trump is moving full speed ahead on the nuclear overhaul — even before a review of US nuclear strategy, due at the end of the year, is completed — critics are warning of the risk of a new arms race and billions of dollars squandered.

The critics of the cruise missile, led by a former defence secretary, William J Perry, have argued that the new weapon will be so accurate and so stealthy that it will be destabilising, forcing the Russians and the Chinese to accelerate their own programmes.

And the rebuilding of the ground-based missile fleet essentially commits the US to keeping the most vulnerable leg of its “nuclear triad” — a mix of submarine-launched, bomber-launched and ground-launched weapons. Some arms control experts have argued that the ground force should be eliminated.

Defence Secretary Jim Mattis told Congress in June that he was open to reconsidering the need for both systems. But in remarks to sailors in Washington state almost three weeks ago, he hinted at where a nuclear review was going to come out. “I think we’re going to keep all three legs of the deterrent,” he told the sailors.

The contracts, and Mattis’ hints about the ultimate nuclear strategy, suggest that Obama’s agreement in 2010 to spend $80 billion to “modernise” the nuclear arsenal — the price he paid for getting the Senate to ratify the New Start arms control agreement with Russia — will have paved the way for expansions of the nuclear arsenal under Trump.

“It’s been clear for years now that the Russians are only willing to reduce numbers if we put limits on missile defence, and with the North Korean threat, we can’t do that,” said Samore, now at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “I think we are pretty much doomed to modernise the triad.”

At issue in the debate over the cruise missile and the rebuilding of the land-based fleet is an argument over nuclear deterrence — the kind of debate that gripped US national security experts in the 1950s and ‘60s, and again during the Reagan era.

Cruise missiles are low-flying weapons with stubby wings. Dropped from a bomber, they hug the ground to avoid enemy radars and air defences. Their computerised brains compare internal maps of the terrain with what their sensors report.

The air force’s issuing last week of the contract for the advanced nuclear-tipped missile — to Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Missile Systems — starts a 12-year effort to replace an older model. The updated weapon is to eventually fly on a yet-undeveloped nuclear bomber.

The plan is to produce 1,000 of the new missiles, which are stealthier and more precise than the ones they will replace, and to place revitalised nuclear warheads on half of them. The other half would be kept for flight tests and for spares. The total cost of the programme is estimated to be $25 billion.

The most vivid argument in favour of the new weapon came in testimony to the Senate from Franklin C Miller, a longtime Pentagon official who helped design President George W Bush’s nuclear strategy and is a consultant at the Pentagon under Mattis.

The new weapon, he said last summer, would extend the life of the US’ ageing fleet of B-52 and B-2 bombers, as Russian and Chinese “air defences evolve to a point where” the planes are “are unable to penetrate to their targets.”

Incentive to wage war

Critics argue that the cruise missile’s high precision and reduced impact on nearby civilians could tempt a future president to contemplate “limited nuclear war.” Worse, they say, is that adversaries might overreact to the launching of the cruise missiles because they come in nuclear as well as non-nuclear varieties. Miller dismisses that fear, saying the new weapon is no more destabilising than the one it replaces.

Some former members of the Obama administration are among the most prominent critics of the weapon, even though Obama’s Pentagon pressed for it.

Andrew C Weber, who was an assistant defence secretary and director of the Nuclear Weapons Council, an interagency body that oversees the nation’s arsenal, argued that the weapon was unneeded, unaffordable and provocative.

He said it was “shocking” that the Trump administration was signing contracts to build these weapons before it completed its own strategic review on nuclear arms. And he called the new cruise missile “a destabilising system designed for nuclear war fighting,” rather than for deterrence.

The other contracts the Pentagon announced last week are for replacements for the 400 ageing Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles housed in underground silos. The winners of $677 million in contracts — Boeing and Northrop Grumman — will develop plans for a replacement force.

During Obama’s second term, the ground-based force came under withering criticism over the training of its crews — who work long, boring hours underground — and the decrepit state of the silos and weapons. Some systems still used 8-inch floppy disks. Internal Pentagon reports expressed worries about the vulnerability of the ground-based systems to cyberattack.

But the Trump administration appears determined to hold on to the ground-based system, and to invest heavily in it. The cost of replacing the Minuteman missiles and remaking the command-and-control system is estimated at roughly $100 billion.