One week into his term, President Donald Trump signed a national security memorandum that calls for rebuilding the U.S. military and requires the development of a new Nuclear Posture Review.
The Jan. 27 order directs the development of a National Defense Strategy, encompassing a new Nuclear Posture Review “to ensure that the United States nuclear deterrent is modern, robust, flexible, resilient, ready, and appropriately tailored to deter 21st-century threats and reassure our allies.”
The president signed it at the Pentagon following the swearing-in ceremony for new Defense Secretary James Mattis.
The Nuclear Posture Review establishes the nation’s nuclear policy for five to 10 years. The last review was crafted under former President Barack Obama and highlighted the prevention of nuclear terrorism as a policy goal, as well as the reduction of the number and role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security strategy.
The April 2010 Nuclear Policy Review also outlined the U.S. position under the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with Russia – including maintaining the nuclear triad and setting a level for reductions in strategic delivery vehicles. Obama’s NPR further said the United States would not conduct nuclear testing or develop new nuclear warheads, noting that U.S. policy would entail implementation of the Stockpile Stewardship Program and its weapons life-extension activities to allow for major nuclear stockpile reductions.
Michaela Dodge, a senior policy analyst for defense and strategic issues at The Heritage Foundation, said by email that while Obama’s NPR assumed a low potential for conflict with Russia, “I don’t think the notion will carry over the next NPR considering Russia’s bellicose international actions since then.”
The two nations have been at odds following Russia’s incursion into Crimea in 2014, which led the U.S. and other Western nations to impose sanctions that created further tension in the bilateral relationship. This week Nikki Haley, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, condemned Russia for renewed fighting in eastern Ukraine.
“I expect continuity in terms of emphasizing the importance of a strategic triad and hopefully continued support for nuclear weapons modernization,” Dodge added.
The policy that will be laid out by the NPR “is a huge unknown,” according to James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“None of Trump’s core national security team have much experience—if any—with nuclear weapons,” he said by email.
Mattis is a retired Marine Corps general, but it is the Air Force and Navy that operate the nation’s ICBMs, strategic bombers, and ballistic missile submarines. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, is a retired Army lieutenant general and former head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency.
Acton also highlighted Trump’s “overtly contradictory statements on nuclear weapons in recent weeks.” Just before Christmas, Trump tweeted that the “United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” In a follow-up, off-air conversation with MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski’s he reportedly said the United States would win any nuclear arms race.
A draft version of Trump’s new presidential memorandum that was circulating last week featured slightly different language from the final version, calling for a Nuclear Posture Review to ensure reliability of the “U.S. nuclear triad” – the final version did not explicitly mention the triad, but rather the “nuclear deterrent.”
“I wouldn’t make too much of the changes,” Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said by email, saying the draft “was not particularly well-written.”
The draft addressed separately the nuclear triad, nuclear planning, and nuclear infrastructure, with duplicative criteria, Lewis said. “Someone came along and combined triad, planning and infrastructure into a single category called the ‘nuclear deterrent’ and then provided a single list of criteria: ‘modern, robust, flexible, resilient, ready, and appropriately tailored to deter 21st-century threats and reassure our allies.’”
However, Dodge suggested the difference in wording “reflects that tactical nuclear weapons will be considered also, as they should.”
The nuclear triad refers to the United States’ three strategic nuclear platforms; the U.S. currently deploys tactical nuclear weapons, or short- and medium-range nonstrategic systems, in several NATO countries. This B61 gravity bomb is undergoing refurbishment as part of the U.S. nuclear modernization program.
The order also directs a 30-day military readiness review and the development of a Defense Department budget request for fiscal 2018.
Mattis on Tuesday issued a memorandum based on the presidential order with guidance on rebuilding the U.S. military through budget preparations over the next several years. These include preparation of a fiscal 2017 budget amendment to address “warfighting readiness shortfalls across the joint force”; an accelerated fiscal 2018 budget review to improve the president’s budget request for that year; and production of a 2018 National Defense Strategy to enhance the effectiveness of the military.