Fifteen? Fifty? What do we imagine would be on the list of fifty targets for those fifty American nuclear blasts, each ten times the size of Hiroshima?
Our current arsenal of nukes is about 5,000 weapons. Of those, between 2,000 and 2,500 are deployed and ready to use—about the same number as Russia has ready. Thanks to the New START treaty negotiated in President Obama’s first year in office, that number is slated to eventually go down to 1,500 in both countries. But to get the Senate to agree to the deal with Russia reducing our total number of ready-to-launch nukes, President Obama also agreed to a huge new increase in the size of America’s nuclear weapons infrastructure. Fewer weapons, but
Actually, it wasn’t enough. Republicans in the Senate thought this treaty-ratification fight was a good chance to monetize the nuclear-bomb infrastructure going forward. They evinced furrow-browed concern that the Obamanauts were not serious and might allow the whole reinvestment in nukes idea to “peter out.” Six months later, the Obama folks came back with more goodies. They added another whopping 10 percent to the next annual budget request, reiterated their promise to keep nuclear subs continuously patrolling both the Atlantic and the Pacific, and to stand ready—in a phrase that seemed to have migrated from the previous administration—to “surge additional submarines in a crisis.” They agreed to spend whatever it took to keep the ICBMs and the B-52s ready to fly for another full generation.
Settle in, Missileers, it’s gonna be at least another few decades.
The Obama administration said it was even ready to fund a new remote-controlled long-range nuclear bomber. How did eighty to one hundred nuclear-armed drones sound? Nuclear-armed flying robots. On remote control. What could possibly go wrong? “The most robust, sustained commitment to modernizing our nuclear deterrent since the end of the Cold War” was what the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration called Obama’s treaty-ratification goodie bag. “My predecessor put it best, saying he ‘would have killed’ for budgets like this.”
A couple of months after the Grand Bargain that bought the START treaty ratification, in 2011 a team of Air Force generals was back on Capitol Hill to share with a handful of senators the wonderful strides they had made in the three years since all that bad press that surrounded the six lost nukes; they were happy to explain just exactly what America was getting for the extra $650 million Congress had appropriated to shore up our nuclear program in the wake of Minot-to-Barksdale. For instance, there were the new posts manned by the generals testifying that day. (“The positions Lt. Gen. Kowalski, Maj. Gen. Chambers, and Brig. Gen. Harencak now hold were all established as a result of that mistake,” the subcommittee chairman noted by way of introduction.) The generals assured the congressional oversight committee that the Air Force’s relatively new oversight bureau, the Nuclear Weapons Center, was being spectacularly collaborative. The Pentagon had even invented a new someone with whom the Nuclear Weapons Center could exercise teamwork. “One of our most vital collaborations is with the newly created office of the Program Executive Officer (PEO) for Strategic Systems. The PEO… has assumed the responsibility for the development and acquisition of future systems and for modernization efforts while [the Nuclear Weapons Center] focuses on day-to-day operations and sustainment.” The Nuclear Weapons Center commander assured Congress that they were also being more proactive and forward-looking! They’d find problems before they hit the crisis stage; they’d train their personnel properly and give them working equipment and tools. (Let’s hope somebody thought of safety leashes for the socket wrenches.) They’d already merged databases so we’d no longer accidentally ship nuclear parts to warehouses in Taiwan or less-friendly countries. Oh, and they were determined to fix that problem with the sophisticated and complex Mk21 fuzes. They’d work that out.
Sadly, only two senators showed up for the hearing: the subcommittee’s chairman and its ranking member. And even those guys didn’t feel that we had too many nuclear doodads to keep track of. This was not what was keeping them up at night. In fact, Republican senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama was mostly worried that the new nuclear arms reduction treaty was like some bureaucratic seductress beckoning us toward dangerous cuts in our nuclear forces. For the senator’s money, the president seemed awfully eager to actually comply with this new treaty.
Sessions wanted the generals to know he was going to make sure their new positions were safe and sound, that he was going to see to it that there was plenty of arsenal to keep them all busy for a very long time. “Last month, along with forty of my colleagues,” Senator Sessions told the military men, “I sent a letter to the president regarding our desire to be consulted on any further reduction plans to the nuclear stockpile. The New START treaty was only signed a few weeks ago, yet the administration is moving forward in my opinion at a pace that justifies the phrase ‘reckless,’ pursuing more reductions at an expedited and potentially destabilizing pace.”
Yeah, slimming down the stockpile of our thousands of nuclear weapons, that would be reckless. That would be unsafe.
EPILOGUE
You Build It, You Own It
If the military drifts away from its people in this country, that is a catastrophic outcome we as a country can’t tolerate.
HAVING GROWN UP IN THE SUBURBS IN CALIFORNIA, WHEN I moved to rural New England I was surprised by how much god-awful work it takes to keep a still-life landscape looking unchanged. Leave stuff alone and it blows up. Not metaphorically, literally: if you leave wet hay in a silo, the decomposition of the plant material can make the hay (and your silo) catch fire. And when the trick isn’t keeping things dry, it’s keeping things wet. The logging company I buy firewood from turns its sprinklers on big piles of logs (hey, that’s my firewood!) to stop them from spontaneously combusting on cold days. Rot’s the problem there too—simple, inexorable decay. Rot makes heat, and if there’s dying wood in the middle of that big pile, cold air hitting that rot-generated heat can create a chimney effect. If that channels enough heat over the dry layers of wood in there, then
Our place in Hampshire County looked like a horror-movie haunted house when we moved in—broke-down busted, overgrown, spongy stairs, clapboards gaping like black teeth. It looked like that because it had been abandoned for… one winter. One long winter untended rendered the place virtually uninhabitable. In our beautiful, unforgiving little hamlet, we developed a shorthand for explaining what had caused the need for a repair of some kind: “The earth took it back.”
It is unsettling to realize that the earth takes back even nuclear missiles, that they’re growing wing fungus down in Shreveport. But stuff left sitting around, unused, still needs attention; there’s a cost and a duty that attend to everything we own. If we built it, we’re responsible for it, unless we take it down and take it apart. Maybe it’s a variation on Colin Powell’s cautionary “Pottery Barn Rule”—you not only own it if you break it, you own it if you build it too. If you’ve
That’s not to say that some of it isn’t amazing. A fact that’s underappreciated in the civilian world but very well appreciated in our military is that the US Armed Forces right now are absolutely stunning in their lethality. Deploy, deploy, deploy… practice, practice, practice. The US military was the best and best-equipped fighting force
