More planned nuclear weapons programs will roll into production phases in the decade ending in 2028, increasing the total annual cost of these efforts by some $10 billion to $50 billion a year, the Congressional Budget Office said Thursday.
The spending estimate for 2019 through 2028 includes: the Department of Energy’s (DOE) bill for maintaining and upgrading nuclear materials and weapons; Department of Defense (DOD) procurement of the delivery vehicles and carrier craft used to deploy those weapons; DOE-made nuclear reactors to power new ballistic missile submarines; and Pentagon military command-and-control systems.
“[I]n the latest estimate, new programs are two years further along in the process of ramping up development, and some are entering the production phase — both of which tend to be characterized by higher annual costs,” the Congressional Budget Office wrote in the report, Projected Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2019 to 2028.
The 12-page document, the latest in a biennial series, should figure into budget debates on Capitol Hill this spring and summer. In November, Democrats retook the majority in the House of Representatives; Rep. Adam Smith (R-Wash.), the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has said he wants to trim the nuclear arsenal.
“The current U.S. plans to replace and upgrade the nuclear weapons enterprise are unaffordable,” Smith wrote in a statement Thursday.
Including all DOE and DOD programs, nuke spending will ring in at $494 billion between now and 2028, the Congressional Budget Office said. That compares with about $400 billion for the decade running 2017 through 2026. The Pentagon’s projected annual share of nuclear spending is just over $30 billion, while DOE’s is roughly $17 billion, the Congressional Budget Office said Thursday.
The latest decade-long figure averages out annually to about 7 percent of the Trump administration’s proposed 2020 defense budget. Republicans, who still have a majority in the Senate, have said they will fight to maintain that level of spending.
“[A]t no point does it [nuclear weapons] take more than 7 percent of the [annual] defense budget,” HASC Ranking Member Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) told reporters after a committee business meeting Thursday. “And you know, from my standpoint, it is a crucial foundation upon which the rest of our defense efforts are based. I think it’s important. I have no doubt that will be a topic we will discuss this year and next.”
The latest Congressional Budget Office report analyzes, among others, three planned weapons life-extension programs at DOE, development of a whole fleet of new ballistic-missile submarines for the Navy and bombers for the Air Force, and next-generation air-launched cruise missiles and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Of the $10 billion in increased annual spending charted for the next 10 years, just under $2 billion a year — most of it in the Pentagon’s budget — is attributable to the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program. After 2026, the Navy expects to pump out the replacement boats for the aging Ohio-class fleet much faster than it will before 2026, the Congressional Budget Office said.
General Dynamics Electric Boat, of Groton, Conn., is the prime on Columbia, on tap to build 12 vessels to replace the 18 existing Ohio-class boats. The budget office assumes Congress will authorize construction of one Columbia a year starting in 2026, meaning Thursday’s nuke-spending estimate includes the cost of five new subs. The 2017 report included the cost of only two subs.
On the civilian side of the arsenal, the Congressional Budget Office said it could cost nearly $1 billion a year, or $9 billion over the 10 years ending in 2028, for DOE to to produce fissile nuclear-warhead cores called plutonium pits — but “that estimate is very uncertain.”
Since the office checked in on the DOE plutonium programs in 2017, the White House has asked the agency to produce more pits that previously planned, and do so using a more expensive pit complex than previously envisioned.
To crank out the 80 pits a year the Trump administration wants by 2030 — the Barack Obama administration asked for up to 80 while Trump wants no fewer than 80 — DOE plans to upgrade pit infrastructure at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and convert a canceled plutonium disposal facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina into a second pit factory.
The Obama administration had planned to center pit production in Los Alamos.
The proposed Savannah River facility, which DOD supports, would be responsible for 50 pits a year by 2030. Los Alamos would produce the other 30. Los Alamos is preparing to ramp up pit production as soon as 2024, and DOE has lab management contractor Triad National Security studying whether it could begin a year earlier. The nation’s first nuclear weapons lab would make the pits in its PF-4 Plutonium Facility, which just in 2019 the agency is spending $220 to upgrade. From 2016 through 2024, the upgrades will cost between $2.5 billion and $3 billion, DOE estimates.
The Savannah River pit plant, on the other hand, is not yet funded. That facility would be located on the premises of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility that DOE formally terminated in October. The agency expects it will take until October to wind down construction and prepare the site for a new pit mission.
The Congressional Budget Office’s latest nuclear spending report was based on DOE and DOD’s 2019 budget requests. Baked into those documents were plans laid years ago by the Barack Obama administration, which in 2016 started a 30-year, $1-trillion nuclear arsenal modernization and maintenance plan that the Trump administration has augmented only modestly.
The Trump administration is nominally to release its 2020 budget request in February, and that document could change the outlook for nuclear weapons spending, relative to the new CBO report.
The Congressional Budget Office said its “projections are not meant to predict DoD’s and DOE’s future budgets, because Administrations typically change plans from year to year.”
Richard Abott, staff reporter for NS&DM affiliate publication Defense Daily, contributed to this report from Washington.