Although development and expansion of the nuclear arsenal has occurred under administration of both parties (authorization of the LGM-34 ‘Minuteman’-land based ICBM occurred under Kennedy and the troubled WS-120 “Missile Experimental” (MX) program which eventually became the LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’ was finally authorized under Carter although eventually deployed under Reagan), it has become a talking point among neoconservatives that maintaining a vast nuclear arsenal and the nuclear triad are crucial not only to strategic deterrence but to maintaing the status of the USA as the dominant superpower. I don’t think it makes much sense in any practical, evidential sense any more than the wholesale revulsion toward immigration reform, fear over recognition of LGBTQ rights, or the contradictory belief in the value of free markets while promoting the dubious merits of a tariff-based trade war, but if we’re being honest, for conservative voters it is about ideological identity rather than any factual benefit. However, for wealthy corporate backers of policy ‘think tanks’ it makes a lot of sense insofar as they want to get the government to pay them for extracting the expensive low-grade uranium ore and all of the enrichment activites to build weapons since most nations will not sell uranium to the US to be used for weapons manufacture.
In our Enduring Stockpile we have been downgrading and retiring older weapons that are not single point safe, have fire-resistant pits, or insensitive high explosive in the implosion lenses. That leaves newer versions of the W-61 (used in various gravity bomb and retired cruise missile applications), W-87 (formerly in the Peacekeeper Mark 21 reentry vehicle, now mounted on remaining Minuteman III ICBMs), and the W-88 (on the Trident II D-5 Fleet Ballistic Missile SLBMs) largely in Active Service with others in the Hedge Stockpile (not installed in a delivery system but maintained and available for immediate service), as well as a smattering of other weapons in the Inactive Reserve. None of the newer weapons have been tested in toto; explosive lens assemblies and trigger systems are tested, and there has been limited testing of pits, but the overall reliability and performance of these weapons is based upon simulation and aging surveillance testing. For some, this equates to a lack of testing and amazingly there is still a contingent of advocates who are agitating for a resumption in underground testing of whole physics package assemblies. The Reliable Replacement Warhead program, intended to provide a next generation of highly failsafe weapons, was cancelled a few years ago due to cost overruns and a perceived lack of need, and quite frankly, we no longer have the infrastructure to manufacture nuclear weapon materials on a production scale.
This article in Foreign Policy from 2009 makes some interesting points, and while I don’t necessary fully agree with their conclusions it makes a case for why we don’t need to rebuild the infrastructure to produce nuclear weapons, nor engage in deliberate attempts to negotaite arms reductions with existing nuclear powers (although preventing proliferation should still be a key priority in foreign policy for a multitude of reasons). From the article:
*Instead, nukes have done nothing in particular, and have done that very well. They have, however, succeeded in being a colossal waste of money — an authoritative 1998 Brookings Institution study showed the United States had spent $5.5 trillion on nukes since 1940, more than on any program other than Social Security. The expense was even more ludicrous in the cash-starved Soviet Union.
And that does not include the substantial loss entailed in requiring legions of talented nuclear scientists, engineers, and technicians to devote their careers to developing and servicing weapons that have proved to have been significantly unnecessary and essentially irrelevant. In fact, the only useful part of the expenditure has been on devices, protocols, and policies to keep the bombs from going off, expenditures that would, of course, not be necessary if they didn’t exist.*
For what it is worth, although Russia has been on a tear developing new delivery systems and maneuvering reentry vehicles that very likely can defeat current or any proposed anti-ballistic missile defense systems, it is highly unlikely that they can fund mass production and sustained deployment without bankrupting their country, and in fact it was the buildup of a large nuclear arsenal in the late ‘Sixties through the ‘Seventies (which finally lead to the supposed “missile gap” that Kennedy campaigned to the White House on in 1960) which helped to contribute to the economic failings of the Soviet Union. China has never shown the ambition to have an overwhelmingly large nuclear arsenal; they have a relatively modest sized arsenal of weapons in protected missiles and delivery systems suitable for general strategic deterrence without subscribing to the sort of overwhelming counterforce strategy of the the US-USSR “Cold War”.
Nobody is going to “win” in a nuclear exchange regardless of the size and modernity of their nuclear stockpile, and spending trillions more dollars standing up a new manufacturing infrastructure and building new weapons (not to mention the attendant environmental contamination problems with mining, refining, and processing uranium into weapons grade materials) makes no sense whatsoever. The existing weapons provide a reasonable sized arsenal, albeit at what is still a very high cost for maintenance, and the effort should be toward ensuring that there is never call to consider using it.
Stranger
