If existing nuclear forces are not modernized, the U.S. will lose its existing deterrent capabilities in the 2020s and 2030s, the Pentagon’s No. 2 official said Thursday.
“The choice that we’re facing quite frankly…is not [between] keeping the existing force or modernizing the force,” Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said Thursday during a full House Armed Services Committee hearing on nuclear deterrence policy. “The choice right now is modernizing the force or losing deterrent capability in the 2020s and 2030s. That’s the stark choice that we face.”
While other Pentagon officials have warned that fiscal austerity could impinge on nuclear modernization efforts, Work was the first to cast nuclear modernization as an all-or-nothing proposition with little margin even for life extension efforts.
“Without additional funding dedicated to strategic force modernization, sustaining this level of spending will require very, very hard choices that will impact the other parts of the defense portfolio, particularly our conventional mission capability,” Work said. “This modernization we have delayed, and we cannot produce further any delays without putting the safety, security and effectiveness of our forces at risk.”
As part of ongoing nuclear modernization efforts, the Energy Department is working to increase its capacity for plutonium pit production capability to 80 pits per year (ppy), as part of a Congressional directive and approved by the Nuclear Weapons Council.
Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) pressed Deputy Energy Secretary Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall to describe the Energy Department’s rationale behind requiring the development of 80 plutonium ppy. She said DoE is working toward a “fully responsive nuclear infrastructure” to adapt to today’s “dynamic threat environment.”
After Sherwood-Randall offered to provide Garamendi a cost estimate after the hearing, he pressed further, saying, “We would want to know that at the outset. There seems to be some shortage of money for all of this.” Garamendi also criticized Sherwood-Randall’s representation of DoE’s rationale for the 80 ppy requirement. “Someday, we might want it, and therefore we’re going to build it now and we don’t have the money to do so,” he said.
Sherwood-Randall said constructing necessary infrastructure involves time and planning. “We can’t snap our fingers and produce the infrastructure,” she said.
But Garamendi proposed another option. Running multiple shifts at the existing facilities could produce far more pits than the 10 ppy that are produced today, he said. Sherwood-Randall said she would explore that option.