What is the Cost of a Modernized Nuclear Deterrent?
By Peter Huessy, Senior Fellow, NIDS & Senior Fellow, Maven Warrior
The assessment of the how much the United States should pay for nuclear deterrence involves looking at both the legacy nuclear systems America maintains and the replacement or modernized platforms and warheads scheduled for acquisition. On top of which operating and maintaining a nuclear force is also part of the cost and this includes security forces, operating crews, and the bases from which the US forces are deployed. In addition, the National Nuclear Security Administration builds and maintains the thousands of nuclear weapons deployed and on alert as well as in the hedge stockpile of weapons that could be added to the nuclear force if needed.
A number of organizations publish such studies and have concluded that over the next three decades, the United States plans to spend as much as $1.7 trillion on nuclear deterrence and an average of $75 billion a year for the next decade. These numbers further give the impression that the US is planning to spend far more than is affordable and with smart choices can significantly reduce such costs as well as show some restraint in securing nuclear deterrence, a restraint that will also lead China and Russia to limit their already undertaken nuclear buildups.
The current legacy systems of the MMIII ICBMs, the B52 and B2 strategic bombers, and the Ohio class submarines have been in or will be in the US force when they are retired some 42-70 years. It is remarkable that the Navy and Air Force and the supporting aerospace industries have engaged in truly heroic efforts to keep these forces at the ready for ongoing deterrence, especially given the growing difficulty of sustaining systems that are not just decades beyond their certified life-cycle but becoming increasingly costly to sustain.
The current RDT&E and Acquisition budget request for new ICBMs, new submarines and submarine launched missiles, and the portion of the new strategic bombers that are designated for the nuclear force, plus a rough estimate for the costs of nuclear , control and communication, comes to under $19 billion annually. And over 30 years hardly reaches the highly exaggerated $1.7 trillion often used by nuclear abolitionists.
As a number of senior military officials have explained, if we do not sustain these legacy forces we are out of the nuclear business. But the ability of keeping the legacy forces for much longer is in serious question and thus as Admiral Richard and General Mattis and others have explained we have two choices. First, sustain the legacy systems as long as possible but forgo modernization and in the process disarm over time and get out of the nuclear deterrent business. Or second, modernize and stay in the nuclear business with the added cost of the new platforms, not the cost of the operations and maintenance we are already spending.
Forgoing modernization is thus not in the cards unless one is willing to unilaterally disarm. Some analysts do not even think that is a problem they have also concluded US conventional military capability is of such a magnitude that nuclear weapons are no longer needed.
However, in there zeal to cut nuclear expenditures, most nuclear program cost estimates include current operations and maintenance and personnel for the current legacy forces. However, these costs are a given and cannot be considered part of any new “modernization effort. That is part of the explanation for the high numbers used by abolitionists and nuclear critics.
But the idea that hundreds of billions can be cut without effect from the nuclear budgets is a dangerous fallacy. Cuts to either current operations and maintenance or modernization take us down a gradual disarmament path. Avoiding disarmament requires one to support modernization which is simply replacing old legacy forces with newer technology.
The new technology is also designed to make the cost of subsequent sustainment and maintenance less expensive such as being able to forgo the redoing of the reactor cores on the submarines or being able to sustain the ICBMs without having to open up the silo doors. The new technology also would enable ICBM warheads to penetrate to their targets, and bombers to better get through air defenses, and allow submarines to stay on patrol longer and be more survivable.
There are critics that think the United States “modernization” is synonymous with what is termed “nuclear warfighting,” or the idea that nuclear weapons far from being viewed as stopping conventional and nuclear conflict have now become seen as instruments of actually conducting war.
Such allegations are silly but they are also dangerous, as they make a number of Americans who swallow such baloney actually believe their leaders want to risk blowing up the world. The United States deterrent strategy holds at risk those key elements of an adversaries power they most value. That would include leadership, military forces, the security forces that keep them in power, and the defense production industry. That has been the US strategy for seven decades and has been adopted by each of the past 13 administrations dating back to the Eisenhower administration.
The currently planned modernized nuclear forces was cemented into the United States strategy during the period just before and during negotiations over the New START agreement of 2010. This arms control treaty pretty much mirrored the warhead numbers of the Moscow Treaty of 2002, but the treaty was far more detailed with verification measures lacking in the Moscow agreement. However, the verification measures of START I remained in effect through 2009 and thus the Moscow numbers could be verified and acted as a bridge to the New START agreement.
But the strategic nuclear force structure adopted was that of the New START treaty and vice versa. Critics of the modernization effort claim the administration was jammed up by the military into agreeing to an excessive build-up when in fact the adopted arms control numbers in New START were what the US could build to, no more and no less. As General Cartwright told me at the time, he was going to split the difference between the SNDVs the US had and those in the Russian forces but Russia insisted the US reduce those even further so Moscow would not have to build-up too far to match the US force levels.
The administration at the time met with Senator Jon Kyle to put the deal together. The Senate leaders pledged to support the New START agreement and the administration in return would support an across-the-board modernization of the nuclear forces including the Triad of nuclear platforms, the nuclear command and control and the NNSA warhead complex.
It is important to remember that the force being built was completely consistent with the New START treaty numbers of 1550 “official” allowable numbers. Given the strategic force modernization the US was undertaking was not going to exceed the force allowed by the New START agreement, it is thus impossible to describe such a force build was somehow instigating or creating an “arms race” unless the New START treaty itself was an “arms race” and not “arms control.”
As for the United States and the enthusiasts’ push for further US nuclear force reductions toward zero or abolition, the widespread conventional wisdom at the time of the New START agreement was that Russia and China would be cooperative with the United States both in preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and preventing the access to nuclear weapons by terrorist organizations, with little concern that either Russia or China were going to embark or already had embarked on building up their nuclear forces by many additional thousands of warheads.
In fact, four foreign policy and security leaders—George Schutz, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn and William Perry—had taken a message to the Amerian public calling for the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons. They urged the US to start a march “up the abolition mountain” even if the summit was not yet visible through the clouds of current challenges to strategic stability that still remained among the nuclear powers of the globe. Eventually Dr. Henry Kissinger would write with General Brent Scowcroft that such a move was not such a good idea, the latter telling me that the “four horsemen” as they came to be known had “got a little ahead of things,”
The cost of the nuclear force was not that of a nuclear force designed for “warfighting” but for sustaining deterrence at warhead levels some 90% less than the 10,000 plus sustained at the end of the Cold War just prior to the collapse of the USSR. Senator Dan Coats told the Senate that as the US was going to ratify the START 1 arms control agreement with Moscow, the US was facing a country with some 13,100 long-range strategic nuclear warheads [the US had some 10,200] that were now going to be restrained to 6000 by the START 1 agreement, and eventually to 1700-2200 and 1550 by the Moscow and New START agreements, respectively, or an implied cut of upwards of 85-90%.
In thus measuring the cost of the US nuclear modernization effort, one should not include the cost of sustainment and operations, as those costs will be incurred whether one modernizes or not. And given critics claim of wanting to sustain the legacy forces and not modernize, it hardly makes sense to include legacy force support in the “modernization” category. funding.
Modernization is a choice and it could involve upwards of replacing the platforms carrying 1550 warheads, (plus allowable bomber weapons for 60 strategic bombers including the B2 force and 40 B52s.) With the expiration of New START in 2026, the United States may face a growing Russian and Chinese nuclear force of both strategic and theater nuclear forces that some projections place at a combined 10,000 nuclear warheads by 2035-40, a decade and a-half hence, or equal in time to the distance from today back to the New START treaty ratification. Having a good metric for judging the cost of additional deployed warheads may be useful in making such decisions.
The combined RDT&E and Procurements costs for the ICBM and Submarine/D-5 modernization package reaches $300 billion over the next 30 years with most of the actual building between 2030-2042, assuming the current schedule remains. But over 30 years the cost per year comes to $10 billion, which is some 3.2% of the $310 billion the US DoD spends on all RDT&E and Procurement for all services. When the DoD estimates what weapons it buys every year, it does not include the nearly $600 billion spent annually on operations, sustainment and personnel costs.
For strategic bombers, the US currently has 60 B2 and B52 bombers in the nuclear category. Of the 100 B21 bombers now scheduled for acquisition, some 20 are scheduled to be nuclear capable, which according to former US Defense official James Miller adds some 3% to the cost of a strategic bomber. Using 20% of the costs associated with the nuclear capable bombes then raises the 30-year cost estimates for all nuclear platforms to $325 billion, which comes to $10.8 billion a year, or 3.5% of the current defense budget.
A possible way of examining the modernization costs would be to determine what is the cost of maintaining an on-alert warhead for the submarines and the ICBMs, using the 30-50 years RDT&E and Acquisition costs or the modernization costs as opposed to total program costs including operations and maintenance that is also currently being undertaken for the legacy programs. What is new are the modernization costs for the replacement platforms.
The 1090 submarine warheads now in the force are on alert or able to hit their targets when deployed some 35-70% of the time depending upon your assumptions, given the actual alert rate is classified. Submarines can be in transit to and from their two bases in Georgia or Washington, or on patrol deep into the Pacific or Atlantic. For ICBMs, the alert rate reaches 98% of the 400 Minuteman missiles.
For the Sentinel ICBM and Columbia submarine combined, the cost per year/alert warhead comes to $9-11 million annually over 30 years. When looked at over the lifetime of the Triad platforms or through 2080, the costs come to an average of $7 million per alert warhead/year, also hardly prohibitive, and well within any affordability metric for the United States.
Since the US sustains day-to-day deterrence by keeping our nuclear systems on alert, (to avoid a surprise decapitation), the cost of having roughly day-to-day 1000-1200 strategic warheads are the cost of modernization, which every day would in total cost the United States some $11 billion annually. That is what we are planning to spend “extra” above and beyond what we are now spending for the current legacy forces, (although some limited RDT&E and Procurement Costs are associated with the legacy MM III ICBMs and Ohio-class submarines of around $.5 billion a year each.)
One could reasonable add the costs of the NNSA programs at the Department of Energy to the costs of sustaining nuclear deterrence, as without redoing the warheads in the US force, the United States would be going out of the nuclear deterrent business, as Administrator Jill Hruby explained at a late July NIDS nuclear seminar at the Capitol Hill Club. It is not that the NNSA is building new nuclear warheads because someone wants to go and fight a nuclear war. The NNSA is refurbishing and giving a life-extension to our warhead stockpile because without doing so, the US would be out of the nuclear deterrent business.
Making the case that the United States is planning to spend too much on nuclear deterrence over the next decades is implicitly making the case the US should be out of the nuclear business. Not modernizing is simply synonymous to slowly adopting unilateral nuclear disarmament because at some point, our legacy systems will not work anymore. This is precisely the point made some years ago by SASC member Senator Jean Shaheen (D-NH). We can “rust to obsolescence” and unilaterally disarm as PONI founder Clark Murdock warned or we can modernize. Those are the only two choices.
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[Authors Note: Although these cost estimates are over 30-45 years the costs are in current year dollars and thus that is what should be used for the overall defense budget estimates for the next three or five decades. When comparing what the United States spends each year compared to the rest of the world, it is rarely explained that over half of the US defense expenditures do not buy a single weapon, and if our adversaries supporter their troops the way the United States does, their estimated expenditures would come close to either match or exceed those of the United States. Another way to examine this is to estimate what would the United States spend to buy what China and Russia buy each year in terms of research, acquisition, sustainment, personnel and maintenance. AEI and the Heritage Foundation have done such estimates and have determined that the US defense expenditures do not actually exceed those of our two prime adversaries.]
