It will cost about $1.2 trillion 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 Tuesday.
In the report “Approaches for Managing the Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2017 to 2046,” the nonpartisan office also considered ways 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 biggest savings cases the report examined would require reducing 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 report, 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 CBO said.
“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 member of the House Armed Services Committee had a different read on the price-tag.
“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 (R-Wash.) wrote in the statement.
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is responsible for maintaining the arsenal’s nuclear warheads — including their non-nuclear components — at three national labs and five assembly and testing sites across the country.
Ongoing NNSA 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.
- A series of life-extension programs to produce three so-called interoperable warheads — to be called IW-1, IW-2 and IW-3 — which could be used either on intercontinental ballistic missiles or submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
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 warhead life-extension programs in fiscal 2018. That is more than a 20-percent increase compared from what Congress appropriated for 2017.
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.