Abstract
Some strange things have happened on the road from the end of the Cold War to today, but few less justifiable than the return of bloated U.S. nuclear weapons budgets in an era of terrorist threats and record deficits. How it came about is worthy of review.
To the denizens of the Energy Department's nuclear weapons complex, the sudden demise of the Evil Empire was disorienting, even demoralizing. As nuclear weapons budgets “decreased precipitously” in the period 1990-1995, Los Alamos Director Sig Hecker later recalled, “Our people were looking to get out of the nuclear weapons program. The production complex appeared hopelessly broken.”
But deliverance arrived–a “new paradigm” for nuclear weaponeering, called “Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship,” devised not by ideologues, but by centrist technocrats and senior scientific advisers seeking to ensure that the weapons labs would long outlive the conflict that spawned and nurtured them.
The old theology held that a nuclear arms race was necessary to prevent life-affirming democracies from capitulating to communist totalitarians, whose ruthless leaders could only be deterred by threats of personal incineration in their underground command bunkers.
While this theory has had a resurgence lately, with Saddam or Osama in the role of the bunkered implacable, the new paradigm initially dispensed with the requirement for a credible nuclear target–none being readily at hand at the time–or indeed for any tangible intersection with real world conflicts. The quest for new nuclear weapons knowledge had to continue, we were told, because of its intrinsic interest to those charged with maintaining the present base of knowledge. Without fresh “challenges,” the nuclear weapons stewards might lose focus, become bored, and wander off the reservation, and then where would we be? In other words, the nuclear arms race, at least technologically, would have to continue unilaterally, although quietly (without nuclear test explosions), so that the United States would always have a qualified cadre of people ready to … resume the arms race!
Portraying this tautological new paradigm as a “prudent hedge” against uncertainty appealed to middle-of-the-road Clintonites, who were looking for politically respectable ways to neutralize opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) negotiations thrust upon them by the Democratic Congress in 1992. They warmly embraced stewardship, as did many liberal and moderate mainstream supporters of the CTBT. Even traditional Republican boosters of the nuclear weapons complex seemed content to play along, using the program to shovel national security pork into their districts while they awaited the arrival of a more propitious political alignment, one in which they could dispense with arms control altogether.
From a low of $3.4 billion in fiscal 1995, U.S. spending on nuclear “weapons activities” rose steadily, reaching $5.19 billion (including allocated program administration funds) in fiscal 2001, the last budget prepared by the Clinton administration. Under the Bush administration, the upturn in nuclear weapons spending has continued, to $6.5 billion in fiscal 2004, far surpassing the $4.2 billion (in current dollars) that represents the average yearly Cold War expenditure on these activities.
As one might imagine, the political changeover in 2000 was relatively seamless for the stewardship program, as the existing paradigm was easily assimilated into the Bush administration's “capabilities-based” framework for developing future U.S. military power unconstrained by estimates of credible threats. Indeed, the nuclear weapons infrastructure per se was assigned a co-starring role, along with nuclear-conventional “global-strike” forces and missile defense, as a new “leg” of Rumsfeld's redefined strategic triad.
Until recently, the confluence of political interests supporting stockpile stewardship meant that it escaped congressional scrutiny for the better part of a decade. That is beginning, ever so slightly, to change, as members of Congress slowly gain an understanding of the Bush administration's aggressive nuclear program, including its current five-year plan to spend $485 million on development of a Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrating Warhead, and its proposal to spend $2-4 billion over the next 15 years on a “Modern Pit Facility” to manufacture new weapons.
Congress may also want to take a closer look at the National Ignition Facility, a bait-and-switch “demonstration” of fusion ignition that was originally promised for fiscal 2005 at a cost of $1.2 billion, but is now likely to cost $8.5 billion by the time it finally occurs in 2014, if it happens at all.
And then there is the 12-year, $2.5 billion effort by Los Alamos to “reconstitute” a capability by 2009 to fabricate a mere 20 plutonium pits per year. Where did all that money go?
And how about the poorly planned, exorbitant ($5 billion) crash program to develop nuclear weapons supercomputing centers at all three weapons laboratories, now with another $4 billion to be added through fiscal 2009?
And whatever happened to that key technological centerpiece of the stewardship program, the Dual Axis Radiographic Hydrotest Facility? Begun in 1988 at a projected cost of $30 million, it may eventually operate in 2007 after the expenditure of some $500 million, if the accelerator technology in the second axis can be made to work, which is by no means certain.
And let's not forget the new Tritium Extraction Facility at the Savannah River Site, first due to start up at the end of this year at a cost of $391 million. It will now cost at least $506 million, and startup has been pushed back a full three years, to late 2007.
Despite this compelling record of project mismanagement and technical bungling, or perhaps because of it, for fiscal 2005 the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is requesting $6.81 billion (including allocated administration funds) which, if Congress goes along, would represent a 31 percent annual increase in spending for nuclear weapons over the four years of this administration, and a doubling from the appropriated level a decade ago.
By my calculation, the NNSA under Bush is spending more than 12 times as much on nuclear weapons activities as it is on urgent global nonproliferation efforts to retrieve, secure, and dispose of weapons materials worldwide. As the old song goes, “Ain't it a shame?”