Budget Squabble Threatens U.S. Nuclear Modernization Efforts

The debate pits congressional Republicans against the OMB and White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney.

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A few days before the 2008 election, Defense Secretary Robert Gates gave a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about nuclear weapons. His remarks were part explanation, part warning. 

Even as the United States sought to reduce its nuclear arsenal, and insisted others do the same, he argued, it would be important to maintain a robust, modernized nuclear capability to serve as a deterrent to potential bad actors. In language meant to sound alarms, Gates made his case forcefully. 

“The problem is the long-term prognosis, which I would characterize as bleak. No one has designed a new nuclear weapon in the United States since the 1980s, and no one has built a new one since the early 1990s. The U.S. is experiencing a serious brain drain in the loss of veteran nuclear weapons designers and technicians. Since the mid-1990s, the National Nuclear Security Administration has lost more than a quarter of its workforce. … Our nuclear weapons were designed on the assumption of a limited shelf life and that the weapons themselves would eventually be replaced. Sensitive parts do not last forever. At a certain point, it will become impossible to keep extending the life of our arsenal.”

Rogue regimes like North Korea and Iran were seeking the bomb, Gates explained, and nuclear states like Russia and China were working hard to modernize and improve their existing capabilities. 

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  1. Avatar photo
    Jason

    Hopefully we'll act before a crisis. I seem to remember about a decade or so ago there was some command and control or a flyover type accident - per the timing of the Gates speech you provide, clearly that did not spur progress.

    I admire Gordon-Hagerty here. There's a tough balance to walk from within the bureaucracy around where the objective line is for simple Yes or No to the stated mission, or where accepted and presumed risks in their totality create potential risk to mission that's harder to measure other than in increased uncertainty. The expression of the explicit cost (reduced size and changed, presumably suboptimal, composition of the stockpile) is the data point necessary.

    In defense of the legislators, that clarity is often lacking (organizational immaturity often comes into play within the non-defense agencies with limited means of measurement/risk analysis.

    In defense of the bureaucrats, legislators will naturally forget the previously assumed/downside risks (from prior budget shortfalls) already piled under the new risks they are asking the bureaucrats to accept on our behalf, and then bureaucrats will take the fall. The totality of the risks already assumed rarely stays in a single unbroken narrative.

    In defense of both, there's too often an institutional lack of curiosity and capability within both branches to calculate and understand both currently assumed risks (cost/downside risk already accepted) and the increasing cost of inaction (e.g. think of the FBI HQS running debacle).

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