As North Korea dug tunnels at its nuclear test site last fall, watched by US spy satellites, the administration of US President Barack Obama was preparing a test of its own in the Nevada desert.
A fighter jet took off with a mock version of the nation’s first precision-guided atom bomb. Adapted from an older weapon, it was designed with problems such as North Korea in mind — its computer brain and four maneuvering fins let it zero in on deeply buried targets, such as testing tunnels and weapon sites, and its yield, the bomb’s explosive force, can be dialed up or down depending on the target, to minimize collateral damage.
In short, while the North Koreans have been thinking big — claiming to have built a hydrogen bomb, a boast that experts dismiss as wildly exaggerated — the US Department of Energy and the Pentagon have been readying a line of weapons that heads in the opposite direction.
Illustration: Tania Chou
The build-it-smaller approach has set off a philosophical clash among those in Washington who think about the unthinkable.
Obama has long advocated a “nuclear-free world.” His lieutenants argue that modernizing existing weapons can produce a smaller and more reliable arsenal, while making their use less likely because of the threat they can pose. The changes, they say, are improvements rather than wholesale redesigns, fulfilling the president’s pledge to make no new nuclear arms, but critics, including a number of former Obama administration officials, look at the same set of facts and see a very different future. The explosive innards of the revitalized weapons might not be entirely new, they argue, but the smaller yields and better targeting can make the arms more tempting to use — even to use first, rather than in retaliation.
General James Cartwright, a retired vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff who was among Obama’s most influential nuclear strategists, said he backed the upgrades because precise targeting allows the US to hold fewer weapons, but “what going smaller does is to make the weapon more thinkable,” he said.
As Obama enters his final year in office, the debate has deep implications for military strategy, federal spending and his legacy.
The B61 Mod 12, the bomb flight-tested last year in Nevada, is the first of five new warhead types planned as part of a nuclear revitalization estimated to cost up to US$1 trillion over three decades. As a family, the weapons and their delivery systems move toward the small, the stealthy and the precise.
Already there are hints of a new arms race. Russia called the B61 tests “irresponsible” and “openly provocative.” China is said to be especially worried about plans for a nuclear-tipped cruise missile and North Korea last week defended its pursuit of a hydrogen bomb by describing the “ever-growing nuclear threat” from the US.
The more immediate problem for the White House is that many of its alumni have raised questions about the modernization push and missed opportunities for arms control.
“It’s unaffordable and unneeded,” said Andrew Weber, a former US assistant secretary of defense and former director of the Nuclear Weapons Council, a body that oversees the US’ arsenal.
He cited in particular an advanced cruise missile, estimated to cost up to US$30 billion for roughly 1,000 weapons.
“The president has an opportunity to set the stage for a global ban on nuclear cruise missiles,” Weber said in an interview. “It’s a big deal in terms of reducing the risks of nuclear war.”
Last week, Brian McKeon, the principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, argued that anyone who looks impartially at Obama’s nuclear initiatives in total sees major progress toward the goals of a smaller force and a safer world — themes the White House highlighted on Monday in advance of the president’s State of the Union address.
“We’ve cleaned up loose nuclear material around the globe and gotten the Iran deal,” removing a potential threat for at least a decade, McKeon said.
He acknowledged that other pledges — including treaties on nuclear testing and the production of bomb fuel — have been stuck and that the president’s hopes of winning further arms cuts in negotiations with Russia “ran into a blockade after the events in Ukraine.”
He specifically defended the arsenal’s modernization, saying the new B61 bomb “creates more strategic stability.”
Early in his tenure, Obama invested much political capital not in upgrades, but in reductions, becoming the first president to make nuclear disarmament a centerpiece of US defense policy.
In Prague in 2009, he pledged in a landmark speech that he would take concrete steps toward a nuclear-free world and “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy.” The Nobel committee cited the pledge that year in awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize.
A modest arms reduction treaty with Russia seemed like a first step. Then, in 2010, the administration released a sweeping plan Obama called a fulfillment of his atomic vow. The US, he declared, “will not develop new nuclear warheads, or pursue new military missions or new capabilities.”
The overall plan was to rearrange old components of nuclear arms into revitalized weapons. The resulting hybrids would be far more reliable, meaning the administration could argue that the nation would need fewer weapons in the future.
Inside the administration, some early enthusiasts for Obama’s vision began to worry that it was being turned on its head.
In late 2013, the first of the former insiders spoke out. Philip Coyle and Steve Fetter, who had recently left national security posts, helped write an 80-page critique of the nuclear plan by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group that made its name during the Cold War, arguing for arms reductions.
US allies and adversaries, the report warned, might see the modernization “as violating the administration’s pledge not to develop or deploy” new warheads. The report, which urged a more cautious approach, cited a finding by federal advisory scientists — that simply refurbishing weapons in their existing configurations could keep them in service for decades.
“I’m not a pacifist,” Coyle, a former head of Pentagon weapons testing, said in an interview, adding that the administration was planning for too big an arsenal.
“They got the math wrong in terms of how many weapons we need, how many varieties we need and whether we need a surge capacity” for the crash production of nuclear arms, he said.
The insider critiques soon focused on individual weapons, starting with the B61 Mod 12. The administration’s plan was to merge four old B61 models into a single version that greatly reduced their range of destructive power. It would have a “dial-a-yield” feature, whose lowest setting was only 2 percent as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
The plan seemed reasonable, critics said, until attention fell on the bomb’s new tail section and maneuvering fins. The Federation of American Scientists, a Washington research group, argued that the high accuracy and low destructive settings meant military commanders might press to use the bomb in an attack, knowing the radioactive fallout and collateral damage would be limited.
Last year, Cartwright echoed that point on PBS NewsHour. He has huge credibility in nuclear circles — he was head of the US Strategic Command, which has military authority over the nation’s nuclear arms, before serving as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In a recent interview in his office at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, Cartwright said the overall modernization plan might change how military commanders looked at the risks of using nuclear weapons.
“What if I bring real precision to these weapons?” he asked. “Does it make them more usable? It could be.”
Some of the biggest names in nuclear strategy see a specific danger in the next weapon in the modernization lineup — the new cruise missile, a “standoff weapon” that bombers can launch far from their targets.
“Mr President, kill the new cruise missile,” read the headline of a recent article by Weber and William Perry, a secretary of defense under former US president Bill Clinton, and an author of the plan to gradually eliminate nuclear weapons that captivated Obama’s imagination and endorsement.
They argued that the cruise missile might sway a future president to contemplate “limited nuclear war.”
Worse yet, they said, because the missile comes in nuclear and non-nuclear varieties, a foe under attack might assume the worst and overreact, initiating nuclear war.
The critique stung because Perry, now at Stanford, is a revered figure in US Democratic defense circles and a mentor to US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter.
McKeon, after describing his respect for Perry, said the military concluded that it needed the cruise missile to “give the president more options than a manned bomber to penetrate air defenses.”
In an interview, James Miller, who helped develop the modernization plan before leaving his post as US undersecretary of defense for policy in 2014, said the smaller, more precise weapons would maintain the nation’s nuclear deterrent, while reducing risks for civilians near foreign military targets.
“Though not everyone agrees, I think it’s the right way to proceed,” Miller said. “Minimizing civilian casualties if deterrence fails is both a more credible and a more ethical approach.”
Cartwright summarized the logic of enhanced deterrence with a gun metaphor: “It makes the trigger easier to pull, but makes the need to pull the trigger less likely.”
Administration officials often stress the modernization plan’s benign aspects. Facing concerned allies, US Department of Energy Deputy Administrator Madelyn Creedon argued in October last year that the efforts “are not providing any new military capabilities,” but simply replacing wires, batteries, plastics and other failing materials.
“What we are doing is just taking these old systems, replacing their parts and making sure that they can survive,” she said.
In a recent report to US Congress, the Department of Energy, responsible for upgrading the warheads, said it was the fastest way to reduce the nuclear stockpile, promoting the effort as “modernize to downsize.”
The new weapons would let the nation scrap a Cold War standby called the B83, a powerful city buster. The report stressed that the declines in “overall destructive power” support Obama’s goal of “pursuing the security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
However, that argument is extremely long term — stockpile reductions would manifest only after three decades of atomic revitalization, many presidencies from now. One of those presidents might well cancel the reduction plans — most of the candidates now seeking the US Republican nomination oppose cutbacks in the nuclear arsenal — but the bigger risk to the modernization plan might be its expense — upward of US$1 trillion if future presidents go the next step and order new bombers, submarines and land-based missiles, as well as upgrades to eight factories and laboratories.
“Insiders don’t believe it will ever happen,” Coyle said. “It’s hard to imagine that many administrations following through.”
Meanwhile, other veterans of the Obama administration ask what happened.
“I think there’s a universal sense of frustration,” former US undersecretary of state for arms control Ellen Tauscher said.
She said many who joined the administration with high expectations for arms reductions now feel disillusioned.
“Somebody has to get serious,” she said. “We’re spending billions of dollars on a ‘status quo’ that doesn’t make us any safer.”
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