America Beefs Up Potential Response as Threat of Russian Nukes Loom 

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

OPINION — Back in late February, four Boeing B-52H strategic bombers from the 23rd Expeditionary Bomb Squadron (23rd EBS), based at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, arrived for deployment to the Moron Air Base in Spain to undertake what are called Bomber Task Force missions.

For the next five weeks, these U.S. B-52Hs, which have worldwide precision navigation capability and can be armed with nuclear or precision-guided conventional weapons, used Moron as a base for a variety of operational and training exercises. 

While flying sorties in Northern Europe, the 23rd EBS participated in a bilateral training exercise with the Norwegian Royal Air Force F-35s and performed close-air-support training with Norwegian joint-terminal attack controllers. A week later, the 23rd EBS aircraft conducted simulated close-air-support training with French and Spanish controllers. And days after that, the B-52Hs flew south through Europe and over the continent of Africa, conducting a low-altitude flyby over the Volta region, Ghana in support of Exercise Flintlock, U.S. Africa Command’s premier and largest annual special operations exercise.

From Moron Air Base, the 23rd EBS altogether took part in more than 30 missions, described by the squadron’s director of operations, Lt. Col. Joseph Cangealose as “everything from close air support, stand-off weapons, mining, mid-air interdiction and dynamic targeting.” 

These U.S. Bomber Task Force missions, which are carried out worldwide, enable U.S. B-52H aircrews to familiarize themselves with air bases and operations in different geographic combatant command areas of operations and reinforce U.S. interoperability capability with NATO and other allies and partners.

They are part of the Air Force’s relatively new – and not highly publicized — Agile Combat Employment (ACE) concept which involves temporarily moving U.S. aircraft away from large airbases and towards a model where variable-sized Air Force units operate from multiple small, dispersed airfields across combat theaters to complicate enemy targeting.


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Last Tuesday, at a Senate Armed Services Strategic Subcommittee hearing on fiscal 2024 posture for Defense Department nuclear forces, Gen. Thomas A. Bussiere, Commander of
Air Force Global Strike Command, in his prepared statement, characterized ACE as moving to “operations from dispersed locations to increase survivability while generating combat power.”

He described recent ACE deployments in Alaska, the Indo-Pacific area as well as the one to Spain where the B-52 bombers each transported a mobile maintenance team and a Bomber Onboard Cargo System (BOCS) that enabled on-the-ground practicing for re-arming and, if necessary, repairing the aircraft anywhere that has enough runway.

Bussiere added that his command also “is leading the way in accomplishing multiple site surveys of airfields and air bases worldwide to determine their suitability to support bomber operations in peacetime and during contingencies.” Last year, he said, his command “surveyed 14 bases,
eight countries, and three geographic combatant commands with scheduled Bomber Task Force
missions to execute this year.”

Bussiere said a modernized protected communications system for nuclear and non-nuclear command and control, called Global Aircrew Strategic Networking Terminal (Global ASNT), has been established at 18 operating U.S. bases along with eight transportable terminals that could support Strategic Command nuclear alert missions from locations abroad. 

Raytheon, the company that produces the Global ASNT, describes the system as providing communications support to nuclear bomber, missile and support aircraft crews in austere environments. Bussiere told the Senators that 42 additional Global ASNT mobile terminals are planned to be released to another 25 locations worldwide this year.

While these B-52H Bomber Task Force missions get little publicity here in the U.S., the Russians follow U.S. use of its strategic aircraft. For example, on March 20, Tass reported Russia’s Western Military District Air Defense radars detected two U.S. Air Force B-52H strategic bombers over the Baltic Sea flying towards the Russian border, so an Su-35 fighter was scrambled to intercept them.

In response, the next day the U.S. Air Forces in Europe released a statement that said two B-52s were conducting a long-range Bomber Task Force mission with NATO allies in Estonian airspace and during the flight remained some 50 nautical miles from Russian airspace. “At no point did B-52s make contact with Russian aircraft,” the U.S. Air Forces announcement said.

Hans Kristensen, Director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project, tracks nuclear weapons capable delivery systems. Kristensen told me last week, “More [U.S.] bombers [are] flying closer to Russia and into areas where they hadn’t been since the 1980s.”

Last Tuesday, U.S. Strategic Command concluded Global Thunder 2023, a week-long annual exercise that involved more than 100,000 personnel worldwide. It included an increase in bomber aircraft flights with key allied personnel and partners in order to validate the nation’s nuclear command, control, and operational procedures.  

The exercise used all three legs of the U.S. nuclear triad and their ability to react to a strategic threat in a given timeline. For example, at Minot Air Force Base B-52Hs were put on alert status and on April 12, air-launched cruise missiles were actually loaded on some aircraft.


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Looking at what is going on, it is conceivable that the Russians well could see recent B-52H Bomber Task Force missions, exercises such as Global Thunder 2023 along with the institution of ACE operations as U.S. responses to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s repeated nuclear saber rattling over the past years.

And while there is more and more talk about the need for the U.S. to increase its nuclear stockpile because it may someday face two nuclear peer competitors in Russia and China, last week’s Senate subcommittee’s testimony showed that the Pentagon and National Nuclear Security Administration are already doing more than enough to meet that future situation.

For example, the U.S is moving ahead with a new warhead, the W93, for submarine-launched ballistic missiles that will have variable yields. It will also have a new reentry body, the Mark7 when it is deployed on Trident II missiles in the late 2030s.

Despite the age of B-52s, their upgrading continues to keep the bomber viable to 2050. Underway is a program to provide the aircraft with new Rolls Royce engines beginning in fiscal 2031. Gen. Bussiere told the Senate subcommittee those engines are expected to provide “an increase of 20 percent to the B-52’s unrefueled range.”

The planes with new engines will become the B-52J, and also have a new radar system as well as a new cockpit with advanced communications, navigation and display systems, plus the deletion of one crew member station.

Bussiere also said the new air-launched, nuclear-armed Long Range Standoff missile (LRSO), to be carried by the B-52Js and next generation B-21 strategic bomber, had completed its February 2023 critical design review on time and remains on track for a 2030 initial operational capability. It will have stealth capability and a stand-off range of some 1,500 miles from its target.

At the same time, Senators were told that the National Nuclear Security Administration work on the W80-4, an upgraded warhead for the LRSO, has proceeded and is aligned to be ready at the same time as the missile.

In mid-2023, the first ICBM Cryptographic Upgrade IIs will reach initial operating capability. It is a new automated procedure for the annual code changing on each strategic ICBM. In the past, the change was done manually and took two persons five days for each ICBM squadron. The new procedure will now take those same two specialists eight hours to change codes working remotely from each squadron’s launch facility.

The Air Force is even providing better defenses for its nuclear forces. 

Bussiere told the Senators that the nation’s first Weapons Generation Facility (WGF) is under construction and 65 percent completed at F.E. Warren, Air Force Base, Wyoming, home for Minuteman III ICBMs with 150 of them deployed in surrounding missile silos.

The WGF, an underground, 90,000-square-foot, facility with three-foot thick reinforced concrete walls, and earth covered, four-foot thick reinforced roof slabs will provide “an ultra-secure combined nuclear maintenance and storage facility,” Bussiere said.

Currently, three other WGF projects are in design phase, one for an ICBM base and two for strategic bomber bases. The Warren WGF and the three others are expected to cost over $1 billion by the time they are completed.

With all these projects the U.S. still has 1,550 strategic warheads deployed on bombers, submarines and ICBMs at home and abroad. There are another 100 or more tactical nuclear bombs on NATO bases in Europe.

Beyond those, according to Hans Kristensen’s authoritative Nuclear Notebook released in January 2023, “approximately 1,938 [warheads] — are in storage as a so-called hedge against technical or geopolitical surprises…[and] approximately 1,536 retired — but still intact — warheads are stored under the custody of the Department of Energy and are awaiting dismantlement.”

I believe when it comes to a nuclear stockpile what the U.S. has and already is doing for the future make for more than enough to meet the nuclear challenge of Russia, China or both of them together.                                                            

In addition, the first two of 12 new Columbia strategic submarines are under construction, the new B-21 Raider strategic bomber is under development, a new Sentinel ICBM is on the drawing board and four existing warheads – for the D-5 sub-launched ballistic missile, the B-61 tactical bomb and LRSO air-launched cruise missile — are being upgraded or modified, plus that new W93 warhead is being designed.

Thermonuclear warheads and bombs originally were designed back in the 1940s as terror weapons to end a war, and not for fighting that war. The U.S. now has more powerful ones which remain justified more for deterrence purposes than for actual warfighting.

The Russia/China threat should not turn into a numbers game. Remember, just two nuclear bombs destroyed more than half of two large Japanese cities, killed an estimated 170,000 and did end that war. There is a reason thermonuclear weapons have not been used since.


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