OPINION – President-elect Joe Biden’s national security transition team should be developing plans for extending the New START strategic nuclear arms treaty with Russia, but also preparing to undertake its own, wide-ranging, Nuclear Posture Review that rethinks the Trump administration’s aggressive nuclear weapons building program.
First up must be the 2010 New START agreement, which runs out on February 5, 2021, just 16 days after Biden becomes President. Russian President Vladimir Putin wants a simple extension while up to now, President Trump has been seeking a variety of new arrangements.
Trump’s last proposal to Moscow involved a short extension tied to a freeze of both strategic and tactical nuclear weapons. The latter are not covered in the current treaty and would involve new and complex verification procedures. Although Trump’s top negotiator, Marshall Billingslea, thought late last month that he had a deal, one never came through.
Of course the Trump administration could in the weeks before January 20, reach some interim arrangement with Moscow, but it would seem that Putin would want some assurance that Biden would honor it. That would imply some coordination with the Biden team that does not appear to exist at the present time.
The precedent of former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s 2016 pre-inauguration discussions with Russia’s ambassador Sergei Kislyak seems to rule out the Biden team attempting to have any talks with Russians other than through Trump officials.
Meanwhile, last Friday’s firing of the chief of the nation’s nuclear weapons building complex, National Nuclear Security Administration Administrator Lisa E. Gordon-Hagerty, reflects leadership, production and financial problems at NNSA that will face the incoming Biden administration.
Gordon-Hagerty, who has headed NNSA since June 2018 and had long experience at the agency, was forced to resign by Department of Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette, according to Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The two had clashed over her demands for additional funds to meet the needs of the expanding nuclear program.
“That the Secretary of Energy effectively demanded her resignation during this time of uncertainty demonstrates he doesn’t know what he’s doing in national security matters and shows a complete lack of respect for the semi-autonomous nature of NNSA,” Imhofe said of Brouillette in a statement released Friday.
A hearing before Imhofe’s committee last September 17, laid out many of the problems facing the Trump nuclear weapons program and the reasons why it’s time for a new Biden Nuclear Posture Review.
First off, as Imhofe complained, the currently pending House Appropriations bill cuts $2 billion out of the NNSA’s proposed fiscal 2021 money for nuclear weapons. Such a reduction, Imhofe said, would delay modernization work on the B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb which is deployed at NATO bases in Europe for both U.S. and allied aircraft. In addition, cuts were applied to the W93, which is a proposed new-design warhead to replace both the W76 and W88, two current submarine-launched warheads that will need to be modernized in 15-to-20 years.
That bill and the House fiscal 2021 Defense Authorization bill also make changes in the National Weapons Council (NWC), a shared Defense Department and Energy Department group that coordinates funding and production of nuclear weapons. For example, one provision would make the two department secretaries co-chairmen of the NWC which currently is headed by a Defense under secretary and meets once month. With the agencies’ most senior officials in charge, Critics like Imhofe have said meetings would not happen as often. And cooperation would suffer.
Another provision takes away from NNSA its semi-autonomous status and instead proposes that “each officer or employee of the Administration [NNSA] shall be responsible to and subject to the authority, direction, and control of the Secretary [of Energy].”
In their joint statement on September 17 before the Imhofe committee, Ellen M. Lord, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment and Adm. Charles A. Richard, Commander, U.S. Strategic Command, took issue with those provisions.
They said, “Should they be enacted in the final bills,[they] would significantly jeopardize DOE/NNSA’s ability to meet DoD requirements, threaten the critical infrastructure and technical skills required to provide an effective and credible nuclear deterrent, and prevent the NWC from carrying out its statutory role to coordinate nuclear weapons activities between the two departments.”
Defense Secretary Mark Esper sent Imhofe a letter on September 11, which said, “grave damage to the nuclear deterrent mission” would be done “by underfunding NNSA's nuclear weapons activities by $2 billion in FY 2021. A cut of this magnitude would prevent NNSA from delivering on its nuclear modernization commitments and would jeopardize DoD and DOE/NNSA's shared efforts to deliver the capabilities needed to maintain our Nation's nuclear deterrent in the most cost-effective manner possible.”
Gordon-Hagerty pointed out that the large 18 percent increase the Trump administration sought for 2021 over 2020 related to the ongoing warhead life extension programs. Over past years, it generally had only one modernization or extension program but to date, it has had four, “and if authorized and appropriated, there will be a fifth with the W93.”
What the Biden team should question in a new Nuclear Posture Review is not just each program, but the size of those programs.
The B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb modernization, which will consolidate four previously different versions, is to have its first production unit scheduled for the end of 2021 and the final one in 2026. There then is the alternative W88, a variant on a warhead for the sub-launched Trident missile. It’s first production unit is also scheduled for the end of 2021.
There is also the W80-4 warhead for a new Air Force Long-Range Standoff (LRSO) program, an air-launched nuclear cruise missile that the Trump administration has rushed to complete. Critics question whether the weapon is needed, since it would be carried by the new, stealth, B-21Raider strategic bomber. Each aircraft will cost more than $500 million and the Air Force wants at least 100.
There’s the W87-1 modification program, which will include insensitive high explosive and thus enhanced safety, but not new military capability. It is to be fielded in 2030 for the new Air Force ICBM, the so-called Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, that will replace the Minuteman III ICBM.
Then there is the W93, which in the fiscal 2021 budget is just being initiated with $53 million for a concept study. “Starting this effort in FY 2021 is essential to maintain synchronization with the Navy’s program to design and build the new Mk7 reentry body [the aeroshell housing the warhead],” Gordon-Hagerty told the Imhofe committee.
The NNSA’s biggest and most controversial costs relate to the plutonium pits programs at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The pits serve as triggers for thermonuclear weapons.
“The nation must be able to produce no fewer than 80 pits per year within 2030 to support improving warhead safety and to avoid the risk of plutonium aging causing a loss in confidence in the performance of the U.S. nuclear stockpile,” Gordon-Hagerty told the Imhofe hearing. Funds totaling $1.44 billion are being sought just for the Savannah River facility in the fiscal 2021 budget. The Government Accountability Office in September estimated the Savannah River element alone would cost $4.6 billion to complete, but found that the overall pit program costs are not yet fixed because key details of the proposed W87-1 warhead have yet to be finalized.
There also remains the question of how many will be needed, given we are looking at requirements for 2030 and later.
That is why, among all other reasons, a Biden 2020 or 2021 Nuclear Posture Review is needed.
The Cipher Brief is a strictly non-political media publishing platform dedicated to national security issues. Many of our deeply experienced experts share differing opinions on issues of policy and national security. Opinions do not represent all Cipher Brief Experts, of course. If you have an experienced perspective you’d like to share on a national security-related issue, we’d love to hear from you. Please email us at Editor@thecipherbrief.com.
