It will cost about $1.2 trillion in current dollars to modernize and maintain the U.S. nuclear arsenal over 30 years, including $261 billion in Department of Energy spending, the Congressional Budget Office said this week.
Even fairly major changes to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) part of that portfolio would shave only about $10 billion from that figure, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said in its 73-page report, “Approaches for Managing the Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2017 to 2046.”
The current modernization program does not include increasing the number of warheads in the arsenal, but U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry on Thursday suggested it could.
In an energy policy discussion in Washington, D.C., hosted by NBC and Axios, Perry said nuclear modernization could mean any number of things, including higher numbers, increased kill tonnage, and greater efficiency.
“I think it’s all of the above,” said Perry. “I think what the president wants is a country who has the nuclear deterrent in place to keep America safe.”
Perry spoke two days after the CBO published its report, which immediately prompted lawmakers on either side of the aisle to stake out negotiating positions for future budget battles over the U.S. nuclear arms plan.
“This report confirms what the Committee has understood for some time,” a spokesperson for Rep. William McClellan “Mac” Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, wrote in an email Tuesday. “It will cost roughly 6 percent of all spending on national defense to modernize and maintain our nuclear deterrent — the cornerstone of America’s national security. The price is affordable and the mission is imperative. Those who might argue otherwise ignore the enormous cost of facing an increasingly insecure world with an eroding and uncertain deterrent.”
The ranking Democrat on the committee had a different read on the price tag, which covers roughly $400 billion in moderization spending and $800 billion for operations and stockpile sustainment.
“Congress still doesn’t seem to have any answers as to how we will pay for this effort, or what the trade-offs with other national security efforts will be if we maintain an arsenal of over 4,000 nuclear weapons and expand our capacity to produce more,” Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.) said in a prepared statement.
In the report, CBO considered options to reduce the cost of nuclear deterrence. These hypothetical courses of action include eliminating so-called legs of the nuclear triad — intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and nuclear-armed aircraft — and maintaining a smaller triad.
The report also looked at cutting the NNSA’s interoperable warhead program out of the current 30-year arsenal modernization cycle, which began in 2017 and would end in 2046.
The interoperable warhead program, introduced by the Barack Obama administration in 2013, aims to replace the four warheads now used on U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles with three new warheads that could be used on both missile types.
The NNSA contends this approach could reduce the total number warheads in the U.S. arsenal by paring back the number of spares the agency would have to keep in reserve.
The interoperable warhead program is still officially on the books, though first-production dates of these weapons have already been delayed after the NNSA and its Pentagon partners pushed some interoperable work aside in favor of upgrades for existing warheads.
If the NNSA halted all work on the interoperable warhead program until after 2046 and stuck to life-extension programs in the current modernization round, the agency could save between $300 billion and $800 billion annually starting in 2020, the CBO said.
The nonpartisan office said it based its cost estimates for future life-extension programs on the W76 life-extension program: a roughly $4-billion, 20-year effort to add 40 years of service life to a warhead used on the U.S. Navy’s submarine-launched Trident II D5 ballistic missile. The program began in 2000, and the NNSA delivered the first upgraded W76 to the Navy in 2009.
Whether eliminating the interoperable warhead program this cycle would save money in the long run “depends on whether DOE chose to pursue the [interoperable warhead] concept or to continue with individual [life-extension programs] in the next modernization cycle,” according to the CBO report.
Meanwhile, the biggest savings cases the office examined would require the White House to flip-flop on its stated goal of bulking up the nation’s nuclear deterrence and instead reduce the U.S. arsenal to 1,000 warheads: 55 percent below the deployed strategic warhead limit allowed under the 2010 New START arms control accord with Russia.
According to the CBO, the government could save about $140 billion over 30 years by eliminating ICBMs altogether and limiting the arsenal to a total of 1,000 deployed warheads. A 1,000-warhead triad — with fewer submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and bombers — would save roughly $65 billion, the Congressional Budget Office said.
The NNSA, a semiautonomous branch of the Department of Energy, maintains the U.S. arsenal’s nuclear warheads — including their non-nuclear components — at three national laboratories and five assembly and testing sites across the country.
Ongoing NNSA warhead programs include:
- A life-extension program for the B61 nuclear gravity bomb that would homogenize the different versions of the weapon, thereafter to be known as the B61-12.
- A program called Next B61-12 to extend the life of the standardized B61-12 bomb.
- Life-extension programs for the W76 and W88 warheads used by the submarine-launched Trident family of ballistic missiles.
- A life-extension program to upgrade the W80 warhead for use on the next-generation air-launched cruise missile, the Long-Range Standoff weapon.
- The interoperable warhead program, which if continued would include life-extension for the W78 warhead used on the Minutenan III ICBM.
The Donald Trump administration — which is in the middle of a Nuclear Posture Review that could change the course of the modernization program — requested a combined $1.8 billion for the NNSA’s warhead life-extension programs in fiscal 2018. That is more than a 20-percent increase compared from what Congress appropriated for 2017.
The administration plans to wrap up its Nuclear Posture Review by the end of the year or early 2018.
Deployed warheads are only a fraction of those in the U.S. stockpile. In January, then-Vice President Joe Biden (D) said the U.S. had around 4,000 warheads in total.
