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-Caveat Lector- Our Hidden WMD Program
Why Bush is spending so much
on nuclear weapons
By Fred Kaplan
Slate, April 23, 2004The budget is busted; American soldiers need more armor; they're running out of supplies. Yet the Department of Energy is spending an astonishing $6.5 billion on nuclear weapons this year, and President Bush is requesting $6.8 billion more for next year and a total of $30 billion over the following four years. (This does not include his much-cherished missile-defense program, by the way.) This is simply for the maintenance, modernization, development, and production of nuclear bombs and warheads.
Measured in "real dollars" (that is, adjusting for inflation), this year's spending on nuclear activities is equal to what Ronald Reagan spent at the height of the U.S.-Soviet standoff. It exceeds by over 50 percent the average annual sum ($4.2 billion) that the United States spent —again, in real dollars— throughout the four and a half decades of the Cold War.
There is no nuclear arms race going on now. The world no longer offers many suitable nuclear targets. President Bush is trying to persuade other nations —especially "rogue regimes"— to forgo their nuclear ambitions. Yet he is shoveling money to U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories as if the Soviet Union still existed and the Cold War still raged.
These are the findings of a virtually unnoticed report written by weapons analyst Christopher Paine, based on data from official budget documents, and released earlier this month by the Natural Resources Defense Council.The report raises anew a question that always springs to mind after a close look at the U.S. military budget: What the hell is going on here?
Specifically: Do we really need to be spending this kind of money on nuclear weapons? What role do nuclear weapons play in 21st-century military policy? How many weapons do we need, to deter what sort of attack or to hit what sorts of targets, with what level of confidence, for what strategic and tactical purposes?
These are questions that haven't been seriously addressed in this country for 30 years. It may be time for a new look.
Ten years ago, spending on nuclear activities amounted to $3.4 billion, half of today's sum. In President Clinton's last budget, it totaled $5.2 billion, still one-third less than this year's. (All figures are adjusted for inflation and expressed in 2004 dollars.) Have new threats emerged that can be handled only by a vast expansion or improvement of the U.S. nuclear arsenal? Has our nuclear stockpile deteriorated by a startling degree? There's no evidence that either is the case.
Yet Paine quotes a statement from the National Nuclear Security Administration —the quasi-independent agency of the Energy Department that's in charge of the atomic stockpile— declaring, as its goal, "to revitalize the nuclear weapons manufacturing infrastructure." Its guidance on this point is the Bush administration's Nuclear Posture Review of December 2001, which stated that U.S. strategic nuclear forces must provide "a range of options" not merely to deter but "to defeat any aggressor."
The one aspect of this reorientation that's attracted some attention is the development of a "robust nuclear earth-penetrator" (RNEP) — a warhead that can burrow deep into the earth before exploding, in order to destroy underground bunkers. The U.S. Air Force currently has some non-nuclear earth-penetrators, but they can't burrow deeply enough or explode powerfully enough to destroy some known bunkers. There's a legitimate debate over whether we would need to destroy such bunkers or whether it would be good enough to disable them — a feat that the conventional bunker-busters could accomplish.
There's a broader question still over whether an American president really would, or should, be the first to fire nuclear weapons in wartime, no matter how tempting the tactical advantage.
The point here, however, is that this new nuclear weapon is fast becoming a reality.
As chronicled in a recent report by the Congressional Research Service, when Bush started the RNEP program two years ago, it was labeled as strictly a research project. Its budget was a mere $6.1 million in Fiscal Year 2003 and $7.1 million for FY 04. Now, all of a sudden, the administration has posted a five-year plan for the program amounting, from FY 2005-09, to $485 million. The FY05 budget alone earmarks $27.5 million to begin "development ground tests" on "candidate weapon designs." This isn't research; it's a real weapon in the works.
Paine's report cites other startlers that have eluded all notice outside the cognoscenti. For instance, the Energy Department is building a massive $4 billion-$6 billion proton accelerator in order to produce more tritium, the heavy hydrogen isotope that boosts the explosive yield of a nuclear weapon. (Tritium is the hydrogen that makes a hydrogen bomb.) Tritium does decay; eventually, it will have to be refurbished to ensure that, say, a 100-kiloton bomb really explodes with 100 kilotons of force. But Paine calculates that the current U.S. stockpile doesn't require any new tritium until at least 2012. If the stockpile is reduced to the level required under the terms of the most recent strategic arms treaty, none is needed until 2022.
Similar questions are raised about the Energy Department's plans to spend billions on new plutonium pits, high-energy fusion lasers, and supercomputer systems.
There is some debate within the administration over such matters, but it's a peculiar debate. For instance, some Pentagon officials favor spending $2 billion over the next five years to do a complete makeover on the W-76 warhead inside the U.S. Navy's Trident I missile—giving it an option to explode on the surface, improving its accuracy so it could blow up a blast-hardened missile silo, and so forth. The Trident I is an old missile; it's scheduled to be warehoused in the next few years. But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has advocated "modernizing" even the "reserve stockpile" of nukes. Opposing this view, many Energy Department officials want to spend less money on these "legacy" weapons and invest it instead on a new generation of smaller, more agile nukes.
The official inside debate, in other words, is whether to build new nuclear weapons that are more usable in modern warfare or whether to do that and make the old nuclear weapons more usable, too. A broader debate —over whether to go down this twisted road generally— has not yet begun.
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED] .----------------------Washington Post March 4 2006"... Donald Rumsfeld's second tour of duty as defense secretary marks a period of dramatic change during which the United States has been simultaneously fighting a global war against Islamic extremists, conducting campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, making preparations to preempt North Korea and Iran if necessary, and undertaking strategies to contain China over the next two decades, while dramatically changing the structure and rhythm of the Army and beginning a revolution in both special operations capabilities and unmanned vehicles. This is an extraordinary level of change, and the QDR is best seen as one more building block in this new architecture of 21st-century American security."--Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, now on the Defense Policy Board, to which he was appointed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
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THE 2006 QUADRENNIAL DEFENSE REVIEW: CHINA, AND INDIA
Guest Column by Dr. Harsh V. Pant
Feb 22, 2006
http://www.saag.org//papers18/paper1705.html
The latest Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) was released by the Pentagon two weeks back. The US Department of Defense publishes a QDR every four years in response to the demand by the US Congress for a comprehensive examination of national defense that expresses the defense strategy of the United States and establishes a defense program for the next 20 years. The last QDR was also published under the leadership of Donald Rumsfeld but it had come out before the momentous events of September 11, 2001 had shaken the US security strategy to its core. Many had hoped that the new QDR would radically change US defence strategy and force posture in response to changing security demands.
But the latest exercise has turned out to be something of a damp squib with the new military strategy calling for only incremental changes in military priorities as opposed to a major shake-up of the US force posture. Rumsfeld himself has called the document “a way point along a continuum of change that began some years past and will continue some years hence.” This is despite the fact that Rumsfeld had made transformation of US armed forces his top priority when he had assumed the office of the US Secretary of Defense. While the QDR envisions a partial adjustment of the US armed forces to what it calls a “long war” against global Islamic extremism, it dodges almost all the hard decisions that many had thought that only Rumsfeld could make, given his stature within the Bush Administration.
The QDR comes to some rather obvious conclusions – terrorists are the primary threat to US security, China has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the US, and rogue states seeking WMDs and natural disasters remain significant threats to the US. Some significant shifts in the US force posture include an increase in the number of special operations forces and building of futuristic weapons to defeat terror groups and potential new adversaries like China.
The build-up in the strength of the Special Operations Forces has been going on since 2001 and a further 15 percent increase has been advocated by the US Department of Defense. This is understandable given the need to tackle rogue states and terrorists trying to acquire WMDs. The Special Operations Forces are now expected to sneak into dangerous territories to tag, track, and even disarm nukes. In a way, this harks back to Rumsfeld’s agenda for the US military to make armed forces more mobile and lethal, more capable of dealing with emerging threats from terror groups and insurgents, including WMDs while still being able to dominate conventional battlefields. Rumsfeld had long argued that the US armed forces lack the capability to strike quickly anywhere in the world on a short notice with conventional weapons. Keeping this in view, the latest QDR advocates the purchase of hundreds more unmanned aerial vehicles such as the Predators that have carried out strikes on Al-Qaeda militants.
Some other proposals in the QDR include a substantial increase in civic affairs specialists and linguists, the establishment of a 2, 600 member force by the US Marine Corps for training foreign militaries, conducting reconnaissance and carrying out strikes, and doubling the procurement of attack submarines and arming submarine-carried Trident missiles with conventional warheads.
But Rumsfeld who a year or two back used to talk about cancelling some major arms purchases in order to direct those scarce resources towards building a smaller, lighter, faster, hi-tech force, has now acceded to maintain every conventional weapons system in the pipeline. And it is clear that even with the 40 percent increase in defence spending during the Bush administration, there will not be enough money to pay for four dozen weapon systems currently under development. Rumsfeld flinched from making some of the hard choices that his successor will inevitably have to face. What is referred to as the “iron triangle” of defence contractors, the US Congress and the military brass seemed to have succeeded in bending Rumsfeld to its wishes.
Despite the lukewarm reception that the 2006 QDR might be receiving in the US, it holds great significance for India. First, it once again underlines the rising military prowess of China that many in India are in the habit of ignoring, in thrall as they are of the Sino-Indian bonhomie of recent years. It should bring them back to the world of realpolitik when even the world’s mightiest power has started adjusting its defence strategy and force posture to deal with the rising dragon in Asia. The defence review specifically calls for boosting the number of naval ships in the Pacific Ocean. It would put six of the US Navy’s 12 aircraft carriers and 60 percent of its submarine forces in the Pacific at all times to support engagement, presence, and deterrence. The Pentagon is considering buying new classes of weapons suited to a 21st century battle in the Pacific that would feature cyber-warfare, space weapons, satellite-guided missiles, ship-borne anti-missile defences, unmanned bombers launched from carrier decks and small, sub-hunting warships. The US is also actively expanding, diversifying and bolstering its bases in Asia so as to move them closer to China while at the same time reducing their vulnerability to attack. The US Navy has accelerated its schedule for building its next generation of cruisers by seven years and is considering more small, anti-submarine vessels.
Theatre-range ballistic missiles, land-attack cruise missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles, surface-to-air missiles, land-based aircraft, submarines, surface combatants, amphibious ships, naval mines, nuclear weapons, and possibly high-power microwave devices have been identified by the US Congress as some of the major elements of China’s military modernization that have potential implications for the future of US naval capabilities. The primary focus of China’s military modernization is to be able to deploy a force that can succeed in a short-duration conflict with Taiwan and act as an anti-access force to deter US intervention or delay the arrival of US naval and air forces. But the broader agenda is to attain Chinese military’s dominance in Asia-Pacific and to replace the US as the regional hegemon. Today, the Chinese armed forces are already considered strong enough to delay and punish the US Navy in any confrontation over Taiwan. The US National Intelligence Council has made it clear that “China will overtake Russia and others as the second-largest defence spender after the United States over the next two decades and will be, by any measure, a first-rate military power.”
While a concern with China’s rising military power is palpable throughout the defence review, it is instructive to note the importance that the QDR has attached to India’s rising global profile. India is described as an emerging great power and a key strategic partner of the US. Shared values such as the two states being long-standing multi-ethnic democracies are underlined as providing the foundation for increased strategic cooperation. This stands in marked contrast to the unease that has been expressed with the centralization of power in Russia and lack of transparency in security affairs in China. It is also significant that India is mentioned along with America’s traditional allies such as the NATO countries, Japan and Australia. The QDR goes on to say very categorically that close cooperation with these partners (including India) in the war on terrorism as well in efforts to counter WMD proliferation and other non-traditional threats ensures not only the continuing need for these alliances but also for improving their capabilities.
This is a very strong statement of India’s importance for the US in the emerging global security architecture. At a time when critical debate is taking place in India on the Indo-Us nuclear pact of July 2005, it should be borne in mind that India stands at a critical juncture in its foreign policy when it has the ability to shape the global strategic landscape for years to come. It would be a pity if this opportunity is lost in the minutiae of technicalities. India should think big and seize the moment because such opportunities come, but rarely, in the uncertain domain of global politics.
[The writer is with the Department of Defence Studies at King’s College, London. The views expressed are author's own]
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at:
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