Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
5/29/2015
As developments over the past year seem to have strengthened NATO’s desire to keep U.S. tactical nukes in Europe, the “burden” for those weapons should be shared, a top nuclear policy analyst said during a speech in Washington late last week. “[T]here’s absolutely no reason the United States of America should bear the sole burden of providing a nuclear umbrella over the alliance,” Frank Miller, a Principal at the Scowcroft Group, said during a Peter Huessy Breakfast Series speech. “The involvement of allied forces implicates them in their own defense as it implicates us in their defense.”
The United States is the only state known to provide nuclear weapons to NATO for sharing. Miller noted that members that joined NATO post-Cold War did so largely to get under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, and that allies’ desire to stay shielded has increased. “Indeed over the last twelve months, the attachment to [tactical nuclear] weapons has grown,” he said. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) estimates that the United States maintains about 500 tactical nuclear warheads—all of them B61 gravity bombs—which can be delivered by fighters and bombers. The last year has involved the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Crimea, fighting of Russian separatists and Ukrainian loyalists in eastern Ukraine, and nuclear saber-rattling by Russian President Vladimir Putin. NATO members who joined after the Cold War include the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania and Croatia.
U.S. Bombers Need New Cruise Missiles, Miller Says
Miller also cited the importance of outfitting U.S. bombers with cruise missiles, in addition to gravity bombs, as U.S. and Russian bombers are counted as one warhead under New START regardless of how many cruise missiles and gravity bombs the aircraft actually carry. New START caps the number of strategic deployed warheads on ICBMs, SLBMs, and heavy bombers at 1,550. “If you’re going to maintain some sort of rough parity with the Russian force of Blackjacks and Bears, you need bombers that have standoff weapons, so [LRSOs are] important in many different aspects,” he said.
