Press alert August 25, 2020

Permalink * Prior press releases

CBO today, on the potential costs of expanding US nuclear forces in a post-New-START environment

Contact: Greg Mello, 505-265-1200 (office) 505-577-8563 (cell)

Re: The Potential Costs of Expanding U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces If the New START Treaty Expires

(As pdf: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2020-08/56475-START.pdf)

Colleagues:

It is always important when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) provides cost estimates for U.S. nuclear forces, even if (as in this case), there are necessary lacunae due to a) classification and b) the huge uncertainty of future costs.

For reference, prior CBO and other cost estimates were reviewed in a May 2020 update for disarmament diplomats (see pp. 6-13).

In general, CBO found today that DoD could more than double the number of warheads deployed by the U.S. relatively cheaply and quickly using existing delivery systems, if sheer numbers of warheads were deemed important. (Is there anyone who does think that?)

For better or worse, that has been the basic idea of the "hedge" arsenal all along.

CBO also compares the different methods of counting warheads under three treaties. New START counts heavy bombers as "one warhead," even if they can carry up to 20 warheads (on up to 43 B-52Hs) or up to 16 warheads (on up to 20 B-2As). As a result, the present number of warheads deployed and rapidly deployable in a crisis (we see no difference in these) under New START is currently grossly underreported in treaty compliance documents by both the U.S. and Russia.

If we remove 400 ICBM warheads from the total as unrealistic (see below), CBO states that up to 4,220 existing U.S. warheads could be deployed on existing U.S. delivery systems.

The larger population of deployable warheads CBO uses is comprised of currently deployed warheads and reserve warheads, mostly, with a small number assumed to come from retired-but-intact warhead stores (some of which are being returned to deployment anyway to replace surveillance warheads taken from the stockpile).

CBO finds that options requiring additional new delivery system units would however be very expensive, as anyone might expect.

National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) costs were not included. The costs and schedule requirements -- both -- for adding work to NNSA's warhead complex would be large and perhaps impossible. NNSA's present workload is if anything more than it can do (more recently here) and difficulties in the planned production of plutonium warhead cores ("pits") have yet to be fully considered in agency plans (more broadly, see here).

Overall, U.S. nuclear modernization efforts face many critical difficulties (pp. 3-4, elsewhere in that paper).

Expanding the U.S. nuclear arsenal beyond current force levels would encounter significant official resistance, including from within DoD. Not so long ago, "[s]enior Obama administration officials...agreed that the number of nuclear warheads the U.S. military deploys could be cut by at least a third without harming national security", independent of any foreseeable actions by Russia.

Beyond its headlines, a moment's perusal suggests that a close study of this paper would yield interesting details, such as these two:

• Clarity that the proposed new Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) program of record includes the capability of carrying up to three multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs) on each missile, i.e. up to 1,200 warheads on 400 missiles.

CBO claims that the entire current 400 (or if all silos are used, 450) Minuteman III fleet could in a pinch also carry up to three MIRVs. However, only the W78 warhead is available for MIRVing MMIII, and there only roughly 780 of these. (The retired W62 warhead, the only other extant option, lacks current safety features among other issues.)

Thus CBO makes it look as if GBSD would not expand the number of possible warheads on U.S. ICBMs. But it would, as we learn in this document, after discarding the unrealistic 1,200 or 1,350 warhead option for MMIII. 

• The admittedly-crude estimate -- crude, but all such estimates are crude, and CBO is a newsworthy source -- that the marginal cost of producing plutonium warhead cores ("pits") for new warheads like the W87-1 might be roughly a very large 30-40% of the total cost of producing the warheads (excluding the large costs of research, development, surrogate testing, and production engineering). These costs are very attractive to pork-barrel politicians -- more so in New Mexico than South Carolina.
  

Greg Mello