WASHINGTON — The U.S. hasn’t produced any new nuclear weapons since the Cold War ended almost 20 years ago, but the country still maintains an arsenal of some 9,200 warheads that could deliver a destructive force 400 times greater than the force of all explosives used in World War II, according to former Department of Energy adviser Robert Alvarez.
Proponents of maintaining a nuclear arsenal that large, like former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, cite reasons like deterrence, the defense of allies worldwide and the need to keep pace with other nuclear powers like Russia, that continue to modernize their nukes.
But there are also a myriad of groups that advocate nuclear disarmament.
On Oct. 29, a panel of nuclear weapons experts met at the politically progressive Institute of Policy Studies in Washington to discuss the elimination of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The IPS panel was convened to discuss steps the Obama Administration can take on its own to enhance the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and eliminate nuclear weapons without bilateral agreements or backing from Congress.
“About 3,500 to 4,200 [nuclear weapons] have essentially been discarded by the military,” said Alvarez, now an senior nuclear policy scholar at IPS. “They’re not needed. But they’re just sitting around and there’s no interest in taking them apart.
“When you do have intact or semi-intact warheads, it’s not quite like having a stockpile of our conventional artillery shells,” he continued. “It’s like having a very large collection of a zoo of wild animals that you have to watch a lot and spend a lot of money and time maintaining and surveilling.”
The Department of Energy, which manages the U.S. nuclear weapons program, plans to allocate $9 billion dollars per year to upgrade nukes and modernize strategic delivery systems over the next 20 years.
In fact, panelist Marylia Kelley, director of the Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment in Livermore, Calif., pointed out that when adjusted for inflation, the U.S. spends almost 30 percent more on nuclear weapons than it did on average during the Cold War, when the perceived need for nuclear deterrence was at its height.
According to Alvarez, a study this year by two military professors determined that an arsenal of just 311 nuclear warheads is sufficient to provide deterrence (Forsyth, Saltzman and Schaub, 2010).
Yet funding for dismantlement of the current oversized arsenal is being cut by almost half over the next five years, while maintenance and life extension operations for the existing nukes will increase to $1.5 billion per year. The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration defended the cut in an article published by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, saying it would not prevent the NNSA from meeting prior dismantlement requirements.
Unilateral elimination of nukes by presidential decree, as was done in 1991, was one potential solution discussed by the panel to quell nuclear spending.
After the end of the Cold War, the President George H.W. Bush ignored the Nuclear Weapons Council and made a unilateral decision to drastically reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal. As a result, an unprecedented 5,000 U.S. nuclear weapons were removed from their stations around the world.
Since then, however, Alvarez believes that the NWC– a joint Department of Defense and DOE organization that makes nuclear policy recommendations to the president — has made a significant effort not to have its advice sidestepped again.
“Because these people care about this one issue, this is what they do and this is where they are in the structure – they are important,” said Zia Mian, a nuclear policy maker and researcher on the International Panel on Fissile Materials at Princeton University. “The public does not care and the political leadership does not care. This is just one more issue for them. And so as a consequence, those who care the most have the most leverage.”
Alvarez said that the greatest challenges going forward for advocates of nuclear disarmament would be getting enough citizens and politicians on board with a large scale disarmament plan and removing the common notion that nukes are necessary because, “they keep us safe.”
“I think that if we had the will to do it, we could certainly remove 90 percent of our weapons for deployment in five years,” Alvarez said, referring to retiring the active nuclear stockpile. “We could probably dismantle all of them in 20.”
Alvarez said it would cost about as much to dismantle the weapons as it does to maintain them — $9 billion per year. But the difference, of course, would be that after a generation spent dismantling, the cost savings would be enormous and come rapidly, rather than having the costs continue to increase annually for maintenance purposes, as they do now.
