WASHINGTON — The United States should reduce its nuclear arsenal to both protect against proliferation, especially among nonstate actors, and to help deal with shrinking Department of Defense budgets, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said recently.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., was the featured speaker at a recent Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation panel discussion. Steven Pifer, director of the Brookings Institution Arms Control Initiative, reiterated Feinstein’s call for more “creative thinking in considering budgets for nuclear weapons, which he considered inevitable.
Pifer said the current force structure of land, sea and air forces will remain in effect until the 2020s. However, he said that decisions taking place now will affect what takes place after that.
Feinstein said the U.S. should “maintain a much smaller nuclear deterrent at an affordable cost.”
“The risks of maintaining a large nuclear arsenal today far outweigh the national security benefits. Just look at it very practically. Large quantities of nuclear material pose a proliferation risk as non-state actors are still looking to acquire these materials for nuclear devices,” she said.
Pifer said that new ballistic missiles cost about $6 billion to $7 billion each, with about $18 billion in operational costs over the 40-year life of a submarine.
“So if you could cut two submarines, you could probably save $12 to$15 billion in construction costs, and $38 to $40 billion in operational costs,” Pifer said. “And I would argue that’s significant money.”
Meeting Russia halfway
The New Start Treaty, a nuclear weapons reduction treaty, calls for strategic nuclear missile launchers to be reduced twofold by both the United States and Russia by 2018.
According to Pifer, Russia is further along in its process of reducing current weapons, at least when it comes to deployed strategic warheads as well as deployed strategic missiles and bombers.
But the U.S. would like to modify the treaty to ensure that Russia’s reductions are in the types of weapons in which it now has an advantage by setting aggregate limits.
“The advantage of that aggregate limit is that it would force a tradeoff between the area where the Russians have a numerical advantage which is nonstrategically tactical, and the area where the Americans have the advantage, which is reserve strategic weapons,” Pifer said.
However, he said it is unlikely Russia will agree to such a plan.
Pifer argued that there’s more room for limiting American and Russian reductions before a discussion about limiting those weapons of third countries is made.
“America and Russia have about 4,500 weapons in their arsenals – not counting those in the dismantling queue – and the nearest country in terms of numbers would be China with about 300 weapons,” Pifer said.
