If the New START nuclear arms-limitation treaty expires in February, and the United States decides to boost its deployed nuclear weapons, the Department of Energy could face billions of dollars in one-time and recurring costs, the Congressional Budget Office reported Tuesday.
While the study, “The Potential Costs of Expanding U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces If the New START Treaty Expires,” purports not to estimate the cost to the Energy Department for producing, sustaining, and storing new warheads, it does provide some rough figures.
Those best guesses are low-fidelity, the nonpartisan office warned, because most details about the nation’s nuclear arsenal are classified. Also, it is not clear to the Congressional Budget Office whether the unclassified costs of refurbishing nuclear weapons — in what DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) usually calls life-extension programs or alterations — maps exactly to the potential cost of manufacturing, from scratch, a new copy of an existing warhead design.
That said, the Congressional Budget Office estimated it would cost between $9 million and $12 million to make one brand new copy of any existing warhead in the arsenal — or, if the warhead needs a new plutonium nuclear-warhead core, or pit, between $15 million and $20 million for one copy.
At that rate, it would cost DOE between $45 billion and $65 billion to produce 3,000 new warheads, all with new pits, according to the report. The document looks at the cost of expanding deployed U.S. warheads to the levels permitted under previous bilateral arms control agreements, up to the 6,000 allowed under the START I treaty signed by then-President George H.W. Bush and then-Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991.
For the Pentagon, flexing up to the START I maximum, 6,000 warheads on 1,600 strategic delivery vehicles, would require a one-time investment of roughly $410 billion to $440 billion, the Congressional Budget Office said, plus additional annual upkeep costs ranging from about $24 billion to $28 billion. That is the most expensive option identified in the report.
The cheapest would be to expand the arsenal into SALT II territory — 3,000 warheads — by putting multiple warheads on all current and currently planned intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. That’s doable for a one-time Pentagon fee of about $100 million, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The office prepared the recent report at the request of a pair of Democratic lawmakers: House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“The Trump administration’s unwillingness to continue the decades of strategic arms control by failing to extend the New START Treaty is driving the United States toward a dangerous arms race, which we cannot afford,” Smith and Menendez wrote Wednesday in a joint statement. “While this report only begins to account for the costs of the Administration’s preposterous claims that we can ‘spend the adversary into oblivion,’ it is further proof of why New START is essential to U.S. and international security.”
The two said that “[i]f the United States lets the New START Treaty expire, Russia, which is already ahead of America’s nuclear modernization program, would use a U.S. exit from the New START Treaty to quickly expand its arsenal without any legal constraints for the first time in 50 years,” the two wrote Wednesday.
New START limits the U.S. and Russia to deployment of 1,550 strategic nuclear weapons on a mixture of intercontinental ballistic missiles, heavy bomber aircraft, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Then-President Barack Obama and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the treaty in 2010. It went into effect in February 2011, and both sides reached the prescribed limits in February 2018. The current expiration date is Feb. 5, 2021.
New START can be extended for up to five years if the U.S. and Russian presidents agree. Russia has said it would extend the treaty, but not if the U.S. insists that Moscow first commit to pursuing a trilateral nuclear arms-control treaty that also includes China. The Donald Trump administration has said it wants to force such a treaty, but China has said it will not participate in nuclear arms-control talks.
In a press conference last week, after returning from New START negotiations in Vienna, Austria, with Sergei Ryabkov, the deputy Russian foreign minister, Marshall Billingslea, Trump’s special presidential envoy for arms control, accused China of a “secretive crash nuclear buildup.”
Ryabkov, after last week’s meeting with Billingslea, told the privately owned Russian news service Interfax that the Kremlin is not desperate to extend New START, and that future talks with other nuclear-armed powers, including China, should not influence the current treaty negotiations between Washington and Moscow.
In Washington, there is bipartisan support for extending New START, and bipartisan support for future talks geared at a follow-up agreement that could cover types of weapons the current pact does not. Among those are Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons — relatively smaller nukes designed to win a battle, rather than wipe out an adversary’s capability to wage war.
