Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
11/14/2014
The United States can afford nuclear modernization, but where it falls on President Obama’s list is a matter for debate and will determine which projects will get done. That was the message that Clark Murdock, Director of the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, delivered this week at CSIS’ annual Global Security Forum in Washington. “The question is what does the Administration, what does the Department of Defense, require to be their top priorities,” he said. “You can protect strategic modernization if you want to. The dollars are there.” At about 4-5 percent, the nuclear triad occupies a small portion of the total defense budget, Murdock noted.
Which Programs Are Safe?
There is a long list of modernization priorities for the nuclear enterprise, from the weapons complex and nuclear arsenal to the nuclear submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear-capable bombers that are designed to deliver the weapons. As concerns persist about the future viability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent, most modernization programs should survive the near term, said Robert Hale, who served as under secretary of defense (comptroller) from 2009 to 2014, at the Global Security Forum. “All of those programs will get looked at on a tight budget, but I think there’s a pretty strong level of concern over the nuclear forces right now, that much of the operating budgets in some of the smaller procurements are likely to win support,” he said. Nuclear modernization plans should move forward as planned until at least 2016, Hale said.
Although Murdock told NS&D Monitor after the event that it was too difficult to predict which modernization programs would survive 30 years of presidential administrations, he said that the Air Force would most likely follow through with building nuclear capabilities into new bombers. “Having a nuclear-capable bomber is a relatively small percentage of the overall cost of the bomber—somewhere between 10 and 15 percent,” he said. “Since they’re going to have a new bomber anyway for conventional reasons, they added on costs of having the dual-capable as not very great.” Murdock added that because many people believe that intercontinental ballistic missiles could extend to 2030, that there “doesn’t seem to be much pressure around the specific elements of modernization of the triad.”
Obama Spends More than Predecessor
The Obama Administration has invested more into nuclear modernization than the George W. Bush Administration, Murdock noted, as President Obama agreed to spend $84 billion on nuclear weapons modernization until 2020 to rally Congressional support for the New START Treaty with Russia. “That was part of the deal that they struck with Sen. [Jon] Kyl and the Senate Republicans over New START ratification, and right now, a few things have been slipped to the right—the bomber’s been slipped to the right, the Ohio-class submarine has been slipped a couple of years to the right. Nevertheless, [the Administration] has fully mostly fully funded the commitments that they made in the deal for New START ratification,” Murdock said. The Bush Administration decided to forgo modernizing the Minuteman 3 missile after a 2002 proposal by then-Air Force Chief of Staff John Jumper and a 2004 need statement from Air Force Space Command.
