America’s Nuclear Weapons Quagmire • Stimson Center
Joaquin Matamis
The United States is locked in a strategic and ideological battle with itself over the purpose and future of its nuclear arsenal
https://www.stimson.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/s4-icon-web-150x150.png
Stimson Center
Over the past decade, the United States has launched one of the most expensive nuclear arms races in history. As it stands now, this new nuclear modernization comes with a price tag of approximately $1.7 trillion over 30 years. To put this in perspective, adjusted for inflation to 2023 dollars, the four years of the Manhattan Project cost approximately $30 billion.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the United States is set to spend some $756 billion on nuclear weapons modernization programs between fiscal 2023-2032, which averages out to $75 billion a year on nuclear weapons. That is more than two Manhattan projects every year for the next eight years.

Put in other terms, it is nearly all the money the United States spent on nuclear weapons and delivery systems for World War II, spent every year, for the next eight years. When combined with the Department of Defense’s conventional weapons portfolio over the same period, nuclear modernization will drive annual peacetime Pentagon budgets to unprecedented levels.

If you compare the technical obstacles faced by the United States during the nuclear development of the 1940s, to the higher costs for the relatively marginal benefits of the current American nuclear modernization program, it begs the question: what are the American people really getting for all of this new nuclear weapons spending?

Nuclear weapons proponents have framed these expenses as part of a modernization effort to update and refurbish aging systems developed in the 1970’s and 80’s or as a necessity to maintain U.S. global nuclear dominance. But this branding masks a serious escalation in disruptive nuclear posture changes, one that includes new weapons and missions that were eliminated by former presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush after being identified as unnecessary and destabilizing to both strategic stability and nuclear deterrence.

Set against this backdrop, it appears that the United States is in a new global nuclear arms race, a new Cold War 2.0, with the United States set firmly in the driver’s seat. But amidst increased global nuclear risks, the United States is inflicting unnecessary self-harm by expending resources on systems that may actually erode strategic stability and drawing resources away from other critical national security priorities – with very little real future security benefit to show for it.

The Problem

Fundamentally, the problem with rapid new nuclear weapons development is that it is strategically destabilizing. If one nation learns that a rival is rapidly developing systems that could overwhelm or defeat its defenses, a realist response dictates that that nation must do the same to offset any strategic advantage its rival might gain to maintain deterrent parity.

The alternatives are to consider attacking that rival before they have produced new weapons that can defeat your existing forces, or to find a way to negotiate with those rivals to produce verifiable diplomatic agreements to limit the production and deployment of new and destabilizing forces.

History provides many examples of this dynamic. The United Kingdom and Germany engaged in a serious naval arms race that contributed to the tensions preceding World War I. It eventually led to the Washington Naval Treaty which sought to limit the development and deployment of new and more powerful warships. The Cold War nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union saw rapid and escalatory weapons development on both sides that led to several near misses and the constant fear that one side would try for a “Bolt out of the Blue” first strike to destroy the other before a new weapon or technology could be developed. Luckily for the world in the latter case, with each nuclear near miss, cooler heads prevailed, and diplomats were able to craft verifiable treaties to limit the most dangerous and destabilizing weapons.

But the underlying truth remains that deterrence isn’t bolstered by rapid weapon development. Deterrence relies on reliability and constancy, a foundational belief in maintaining a reliable force strong enough to ensure that any opponent pondering a strike would face a reprisal too devastating to make any such attack worthwhile.

The United States already maintains the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal, a high-tech array of weapons systems that currently consists of a deployed force of some 1670 strategic nuclear warheads. These weapons can already destroy all human civilization. The overwhelming majority of these warheads are much more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, which measured 15 and 21 kilotons respectively. The most powerful weapon currently in the arsenal is the B83 gravity bomb, clocking in at 1.2 megatons, or 80 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Even the smallest – the bomber launched ALCM cruise missile – is able to “dial its yield” up or down between 5-150kt. On top of this, the U.S. maintains a hedge of 1938 strategic warheads of all types in reserve, ready to be uploaded onto launchers in the event of a crisis. Finally, we maintain some 100 weapons, variously termed as tactical, battlefield, or non-strategic, forward deployed at six NATO air bases that are meant to be carried by conventional fighter craft in the event of a full-scale war in Europe.

Perhaps ironically, in order to find Senate support for the ratification of the landmark New START arms control treaty in 2010, the Obama Administration agreed to a seemingly modest $88 billion new nuclear weapons programs, originally billed as a modernization plan to fix or update the aging legs of the nuclear triad. But once the doors had opened to modernizing some elements of the nuclear arsenal, vested interests and parochial constituencies began lobbying for more money for additional weapons programs.

The result was a flood of new weapon systems and program proposals, totaling over $1.7 trillion in new nuclear weapons spending. This includes every leg of the U.S. strategic triad, a belt-and-suspenders approach to strategic deterrence that comprises a diverse force of land-based missile ballistic missiles, manned strategic bombers, and stealthy second-strike ballistic missile submarines.

The move to modernize all three legs of the triad simultaneously is curious considering that up until 2010 there had been serious discussions regarding reducing the nuclear triad down to a dyad by cutting the land-based ballistic missile force. That once-serious consideration now seems almost unthinkable in today’s politics, with a bipartisan coalition of U.S. senators proposing that we instead increase the number of deployed silo-based U.S. Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) by 50 in the FY2025 budget.

But the nuclear modernization plan has now grown from just updating older systems, to the development of entirely new ones as well.

The U.S. is currently in the process of updating its nuclear pit production facilities, the factories and laboratories where the actual nuclear bomb cores are made, in the hopes of meeting a congressional requirement to build 80 new bomb cores a year by 2030. That policy has been matched by new requirements to build a brand-new generation of nuclear warheads, the first new nuclear warheads the United States has designed or built since the 1980’s, which may ultimately force the question of whether the United States intends to conduct new explosive nuclear testing in the coming decades.

Indeed, there have already been congressional attempts to prepare the Nevada Test Site for a resumption in explosive nuclear testing, and both former President Donald Trump’s final acting Secretary of Defense, Christopher Miller, as well as Trump’s final national security advisor, Robert O’Brien, have put forward proposals to prepare to resume explosive nuclear testing in a potential second Trump administration.

And other nuclear powers have taken notice.

Challenges of a New Global Nuclear Arms Race

Since the launch of the new modernization plan, every single nuclear-armed nation has begun redeveloping or expanding their nuclear arsenals. While some experts may argue what the specific cause of this may be, the U.S. decision to spend nearly two trillion dollars on recapitalizing its nuclear arsenal was a significant factor. China’s leaders recently decided to add hundreds of nuclear weapons to its arsenal after decades of maintaining a minimum deterrent posture of approximately 250 nuclear warheads.

This response by our nuclear adversaries to build more nuclear weapons has only been further encouraged by continued U.S. missile defense and defeat policies following the George W. Bush administration’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002. Since that time, the Bush administration and subsequent administrations collectively spent nearly $200 billion on ballistic missile defense initiatives between 2002 and 2023.

Current national missile defense, also called Ground-based Midcourse Defense or GMD, systems are only capable of deploying 40 interceptors in two sites on the West Coast and Alaska. That is not nearly enough to defeat a potential Russian or Chinese nuclear attack. With a successful intercept rate in highly-scripted tests of only about 50%, the very notion that America possesses a ballistic missile defense is destabilizing. Nuclear adversaries must assume that their own nuclear deterrent might be ineffective given the amount of money the United States devotes to missile defense every year. America’s rivals are therefore incentivized to build more nuclear capacity and capability. Despite the fact that American scientists have repeatedly called into question the future efficacy and cost effectiveness of our national missile defense system, the Biden administration is spending nearly $30 billion a year on missile defense and defeat programs, the majority of which is for national missile defense against nuclear-armed long-range missiles.

U.S. spending in both the nuclear modernization and missile defense realms, as well as other recent foreign policy decisions, have significantly hampered efforts to create new arms control agreements, with both the Russians and Chinese accusing the United States of calling for limits to their arsenals while simultaneously working to maintain its own nuclear dominance.

Even more concerning for global strategic stability are growing calls in the United States for entirely new nuclear missions and systems. Already, the United States is in the process of developing, producing, or deploying at least three new weapons systems that can be alternatively called: less-than-deterrent, non-strategic, tactical, or battlefield nuclear weapons. These are weapons that are not meant to reinforce the deterrence-first approach that many Americans have come to believe the U.S. nuclear arsenal is based around today. Instead, they are part of a murkier Cold War-style nuclear warfighting strategy meant to fight and “win” a limited nuclear war at the theater level.

These weapons include the W76-2 low-yield warhead produced and deployed during the Trump administration and is now deployed on Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines; the Long-Range Stand Off Weapon (LRSO) for the strategic bomber force debated during the Obama administration; and the new nuclear sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) that will be deployed on conventional attack submarines – reversing a landmark decision by the George H. W. Bush administration to pull nuclear weapons out of conventional warfighting forces.

This class of weapons is incredibly dangerous considering they are viewed as being smaller and less destructive and have been argued as being more usable. Add to that the fact they are traditionally meant to be deployed alongside conventional forces, and their mere possession can be seen as increasing the likelihood of their use under pressure or in crisis situations.

They also pose a significant discrimination problem to enemy leaders, by building uncertainty into U.S. missile launches, forcing them to constantly evaluate if they are under a conventional or nuclear strike.

This is a significant problem for the LRSO and SLCM-N, as both are based on the conventional U.S. cruise missile platform, a common weapon in today’s U.S. arsenal. Therefore, if the United States finds itself in a conflict with Russia or China, the leaders of those countries will have to debate whether any U.S. cruise missile launch is carrying a conventional or nuclear payload while under attack and extreme pressure to act. In such a scenario the likelihood of a nuclear response, even against a conventional attack, rises sharply. That would be massively destabilizing in a world in which the resumption of great-power conflict seems like a growing threat.

Likewise, should the United States decide to launch a single low-yield W76-2 warhead from an Ohio or future Columbia-class nuclear missile submarine, an adversary could well assume it was under attack from a 90-455kt nuclear weapon, not an 8kt one, as that is the primary armament of those platforms. These submarines are meant to serve as the secure second-strike force stealthily patrolling within range of enemy targets at all times, and thus supposedly ensuring the bedrock of America’s deterrent.

Putting a less-than-deterrent nuclear weapon on them greatly confuses their role and puts an even larger target on their backs, ultimately undercutting their primary mission.

Regardless, the assumption that there are more usable nuclear weapons just because they have a smaller explosive yield is misguided. Nuclear deterrence and strategic stability are essentially unprovable concepts that all nuclear powers have, thus far, adopted. If a nuclear weapon is ever used again, there is no stopping potential escalation. Once the nuclear taboo has failed, it is likely gone forever.

Senator Edward Kennedy drove this issue home in 2003 when he argued on the Senate floor, “Some may say that smaller weapons are less dangerous than the larger weapons already in our arsenal. But these nuclear weapons are actually more dangerous… [and they are made] more usable by lowering the thresholds for the first use of nuclear weapons.”

Kennedy warns that this view is deceptive, “Nuclear war is nuclear war is nuclear war. We don’t want it anywhere, anytime, anyplace. Make no mistake, a mini-nuke is still a nuke. Is half of Hiroshima OK? Is a quarter of Hiroshima OK? Is a little mushroom cloud OK? That is absurd.” Forcing an adversary to critically analyze whether or not they are under a small nuclear attack or a large nuclear attack and choose a discriminate response in the short minutes between the detection of any launch and its impact isn’t rational, and regardless of the attacker’s intent, providing any casus belli for nuclear response and escalation allows for an all too real road to Armageddon.

Low-yield nuclear weapons do not reinforce U.S. deterrence, quite the contrary, they may make nuclear use more likely. A return to these sorts of less-than-deterrent or tactical nuclear forces, and recent proposals to build even more of them, would be incredibly dangerous.

The world almost didn’t survive the nuclear brinkmanship of the last Cold War and the United States should be in no rush to replicate the nuclear weapons and strategies of that period today.

Nuclear Brass Tacks

On the whole, the extremely high costs of these weapons will be a significant factor in the coming defense spending crisis. Spending $1.7 trillion dollars on new nuclear weapons over 30 years – about the total cost of all U.S. student debt – is unsustainable. The U.S. defense industrial base has so far proven itself incapable of actually absorbing all of the new nuclear spending. Even if it could, the risks of rampant waste and production delays challenge the industry’s ability to produce these weapons. It thus becomes difficult to say whether or not the United States is actually reaping any benefit from this modernization effort while actively encouraging its rivals to also make new nuclear investments to maintain their own perceived deterrent.

Indeed, national security establishment leaders have been so concerned with whether they can spend more money on nuclear weapons, there has been very little consideration of whether they should.

For instance, in the rush to greenlight the replacement for the 1970’s era Minuteman III ICBM, congressional boosters have prevented more skeptical colleagues from having independent researchers review the program in order to study the costs and potential benefits of upgrading and life-extending the current missiles already in the arsenal. The result has been a program that is significantly over budget and behind schedule, triggering a “critical” DOD and congressional review of the program after its runaway budget increased by more than 37%. The total program cost for the new Sentinel missile is now estimated to cost $140.9 billion, up from an original proposed cost of $77.7 billion, an 81% increase. The Sentinel program’s massive development overrun and delay will likely force the Air Force to also refurbish the Minuteman missiles, something they said was impossible while lobbying for the new program, while simultaneously building their Sentinel replacements.

Similar issues have been reported in the other two legs of the triad in 2024. The Navy announced that the new Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine is more than a year behind schedule, while the Air Force and its prime contractor Northrop Grumman have revealed that the B-21 stealth bomber program has also faced significant cost overruns and production delays.

With an arms race in full force, the Chinese building up their nuclear forces, and the Russians suggesting the development of new “exotic” nuclear weapons, some experts and lawmakers on Capitol Hill have suggested that the current $1.7 trillion modernization plan is “essential, although not sufficient” to ensure America’s nuclear dominance. Nuclear spending proponents have pointed to a recent report led by former NNSA deputy administrator Madelyn Creedon and former Senator Jon Kyl which, among other escalatory steps, suggested that new road mobile ICBMs and the deployment of new tactical nuclear forces in the Indo-Pacific and European theaters should be seriously considered. It is important to note that when questioned by Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) about how the United States would pay for these expansive changes to U.S. nuclear force posture, Senator Kyl said that commissioners had deliberately not speculated on that during the production of the report.

All in all, recent developments chart a grim course for the future of nuclear weapons issues in the 21st century. The sum of all decisions so far have amounted to paying record amounts of money for questionable new nuclear weapons systems, destabilizing global stability, and encouraging nuclear rivals to build and deploy their own new and destabilizing weapons, all with very little plan or coherent strategy.

If the goal is to maintain deterrence, that could be achieved more simply by focusing on updating the next generation of secure second-strike submarines. Instead, lawmakers have decided to redevelop every leg of the triad simultaneously, all while enabling the pursuit of entirely new and unneeded systems and missions that have weakened global deterrence and cast doubt on the United States Non-Proliferation Treaty commitments to responsibly reduce nuclear dangers and work towards a world without nuclear weapons. Quite the contrary, it is easy to understand how any foreign nation, having witnessed the United States commit $1.7 trillion dollars to new nuclear weapons, including new tactical nuclear weapons, might be concerned about the future trend of the global arms race and begin to consider whether they need a modernized nuclear deterrent of their own.

Conclusion

Among the lessoned learned from the first Cold War, the conflict demonstrated that simply possessing more nuclear weapons did not make the United States any safer. While humanity survived the last nuclear arms race, that outcome was far from certain, and the prospect of a new game of nuclear chicken in the Pacific or Europe should be viewed with as much cynicism as can be mustered.

From a realist perspective, the production, acquisition, and sustainment of these new systems, especially when viewed in context of the larger defense budget and acquisition bow-wave, is simply not sustainable. If the United States continues this course without making any corrections, Americans will look fondly back at the fiscal year 2025 $850 billion defense budget request and the $75 billion a year spent on nuclear weapons as budget overruns and delays cut into critical conventional systems development and drive up the sustainment costs of these systems significantly in the long run.

The United States does need to make serious strategic and budgetary decisions about its nuclear arsenal, but ultimately, should promote international strategic stability and cut waste, fraud, and contractor overreach in the defense budget as a whole. Otherwise, the U.S. government will continue to waste vital national resources in the name of increased security while actively undercutting its deterrent and global strategic stability.