The proposed nuclear-tipped sea-launched cruise missile might yet survive the Joe Biden administration’s nuclear posture review thanks among other things to the reported discovery of new Chinese missile silos, the official who coordinated the Donald Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review said Wednesday.
“I thought perhaps at the beginning of this process that this particular weapon didn’t stand a chance of making it through the [nuclear posture] review,” Robert Soofer, deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy in the Donald Trump administration from 2017 to 2021, said in a virtual forum hosted Wednesday by the non-governmental Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance.
“But with the recent expansion of Chinese [intercontinental ballistic missile] silos, I think that the SLCM-N [nuclear sea-launched cruise missile] now fares a reasonable chance of gaining some support in one way or another,” said Soofer.
Both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have authorized the Biden administration, as requested, to continue building the SLCM-N, including $10 million to start work on a sea-capable variant of the W80-4 cruise-missile warhead at the National Nuclear Security Administration during the fiscal year that started Oct 1.
However, a spending bill passed by the House of Representatives this summer declined to fund the sea-launched cruise-missile or its warhead, which the Trump administration added to the arsenal in the 2018 nuclear posture review, claiming it was necessary to stop Russia from winning regional conflicts by rapid escalation to lower-yield nukes.
Biden came into office professing at least some curiosity about reducing the role of nuclear weapons in the U.S. national defense strategy. Early on in the administration, Biden sent former House Armed Services staffer Leonor Tomero over to the Pentagon to take Soofer’s old job as the deputy assistant secretary for defense for nuclear and missile defense policy.
But Tomero, who worked in the arms control community before working on the Hill, was out of a job by October, nominally because of a Pentagon reorganization that eliminated her position. The Nuclear Posture Review was subsequently placed under purview of the assistant secretary for space policy: a job to which Biden has nominated John Plumb, a think-tanker who is now chief of government relations at the Aerospace Corp.
The assistant secretary for space policy will require Senate confirmation. The post that Tomero and Soofer held did not.
Soofer said that was “irrelevant” to the nuclear posture review, not least of all because Congress has remained largely supportive of the $1-trillion nuclear modernization plan the Obama administration kicked off in 2016.
“There’s nobody down there [at the Pentagon] who writes the [Nuclear Posture Review] separate from those who oversee the process,” John Harvey, principal deputy assistant to the secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs during the Barack Obama administration, said at Tuesday’s virtual event.
“[T]he folks below the appointee or the Senate-confirmed level take the lead in developing the options and they raise those options up to the political level for confirmation,” said Harvey, who called Plumb “a real grown-up in this area” who “will do a wonderful job overseeing the posture review, once he gets in.”
