A Democratic House with a Democratic Armed Services Committee chairman who is openly skeptical of the established nuclear modernization program is perhaps the most plausible consequence of the 2018 midterm elections for those who watch the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Reps. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.) are not in particularly competitive races. In that respect, they are much like most other nuclear-adjacent politicians running for re-election this year — especially those whose geographically remote House districts have been politically stable for many cycles.
However, Thornberry might be turning over his gavel to Smith come January, if the Democrats convert their polling leads into election wins and retake the House of Representatives the night of Nov. 6.
At deadline Friday for Defense Daily, the polling aggregator RealClearPolitics showed Democrats with more than a seven-point lead in an average of several generic ballots: ballots that ask likely voters whether they are more likely to pull the lever for Democrats or Republicans in the midterms. The ballot is widely considered a reliable indicator of who will win the House.
Thornberry, like most Republicans, is all-in on the vitamin injection President Trump’s administration has proposed for the 30-year nuclear weapons modernization program set in place by the Barack Obama administration.
Smith, maybe more so than most Democrats, is not.
In the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review published in February, the administration proposed building a low-yield, submarine-launched nuclear warhead; studying a low-yield nuclear sea-launched cruise missile; unretiring the B83 gravity bomb; and marching on with the Obama-era program to — among other things — upgrade the warheads and replace the missiles that make up the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile fleet.
In September, Smith — ranking member of the powerful committee that sets House policy for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) every year in the annual National Defense Authorization Act — told Defense Daily the U.S. wants to buy more intercontinental ballistic missiles than it needs.
In May, in a speech on the House Floor, Smith prefaced his support for the chamber’s version of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act by explaining what a terrible idea he thinks it is to build a low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead. The Trump administration says the United States needs the weapon to check similarly powerful Russian threats. Congressional Democrats say existing nuclear weapons already do that, and that Russia cannot tell the difference between a low-yield submarine missile launch and a city-destroying high-yield submarine missile launch.
Add to that Smith’s regular refrain that the roughly $1-trillion nuclear modernization and maintenance program is going to take a bite out of more urgent military spending, and the stage is set — in the event of a Democratic House takeover — for the first two-sided public debate on nuclear-weapons policy since the start of the Trump administration.