U.S. nuclear arsenal faces crisis

by Frank James

How much have you heard on the presidential campaign trail about the growing weaknesses in the U.S. nuclear arsenal?

I don't recall hearing much about it at all, which probably says more about the way we view things in the post-Cold War world than we did during that anxious period of modern history.

But still it's no less true that the U.S. has real problems with a nuclear arsenal that's aging and a growing shortage of people who know how to turn that around.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates tried to drive home that point yesterday during a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The inescapable conclusion from what he said it that our nuclear arsenal faces a crisis.

Here's a lengthy excerpt from his speech:

There is another element equally important to our arsenal's credibility: the safety, security, and reliability of our weapons. Let me first say very clearly that our weapons are safe, reliable and secure. 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 Congress has so far refused to fund the program beyond the conceptual phase, and this year funding was cut even for that. The reason, I believe, lies in a deep-seated and quite justifiable aversion to nuclear weapons, in doing anything that might be perceived as lowering the threshold for using them or as creating new nuclear capabilities. Let me be clear: The program we propose is not about new capabilities -- suitcase bombs or bunker busters or tactical nukes. It is about safety, security and reliability. It is about the future credibility of our strategic deterrent and it deserves urgent attention. We must take steps to transform from an aging Cold War nuclear weapons complex that is too large and too expensive to a smaller, less costly, but modern enterprise that can meet our nation's nuclear security needs for the future.

This is a crisis one would expect would have received more attention and discussion from the presidential nominees, certainly in the time during the campaign before the economic and financial meltdown became nearly their sole focus. Even those who are opposed or ambivalent to nuclear weapons should recognize the dangers in such a situation.

But it has received little to no public attention from the candidates.

One of the most compelling parts of Gates' presentation is the notion that because the U.S. is uncertain about the reliability of the nuclear arsenal, it has to maintain more weapons just because there's the fear that some of the older designs that have been updated by nuclear experts, won't work.

So the best way to reduce the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpiles, he's arguing, is to modernize them. But that's a discussion that we didn't hear in the debates or elsewhere.

During the 1960 campaign, candidate John F. Kennedy pummeled then Vice President Richard Nixon when the Democrat alleged that the Eisenhower Administration had allowed a nuclear missile gap with the Soviets to occur, with the Russians being ahead of the U.S. in the nuclear race.

Once he became president, Kennedy learned that there was no missile gap, the U.S. had superiority. Nevertheless, he had expended plenty of verbiage on it during the campaign.

Forty eight years later, we now have a real problem with our arsenal which has received very few words. It would seem that this deserves a lot more attention than William Ayers or the Keating Five have received during the campaign.

(Photo: A Trident II, or D-5 missile, launched from an Ohio-class U.S. submarine in an undated file photo. Credit: Lockheed Martin/REUTERS)