By Emelie Rutherford
The Obama administration’s new nuclear-weapons direction will not likely significantly alter the Navy’s plans to buy a dozen new ballistic-missile Ohio-class submarines starting later this decade, a naval analyst said.
The Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) unveiled yesterday calls for reducing U.S. nuclear-force levels while still maintaining a strategic deterrent that includes the triad of ballistic-missile submarines, nuclear-capable aircraft, and ICBMs, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at the Pentagon.
The NPR jibes with the new Strategic Arms Reduction (START) treaty President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev are set to sign tomorrow.
The administration is crafting this new nuclear policy as it also is grappling with paying for the $85 billion SSBN-X Ohio-class submarine program, which is set to begin in the fiscal year 2011 budget this October.
Ronald O’Rourke, a specialist in naval affairs at the Congressional Research Service, said yesterday he does not see a major impact on the Navy’s SSBN program resulting from the START treaty. The agreement lowers for each country the allowed tally of deployed strategic warheads, as well as launchers, nuclear-armed missiles, and heavy bombers.
O’Rourke, speaking at a “Sea Power in the 21st Century” event at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, noted the reduction in strategic nuclear weapons called for in the treaty is not a deep-percentage drop.
“If the NPR is broadly consistent with the numbers that are in that treaty, then my understanding is we are not looking at a deep reduction in numbers, but rather a fairly mild one compared to the numbers the United States was previously planning toward,” O’Rourke said. “And what that would mean is that you are not necessarily looking at a scenario in which numbers of strategic nuclear weapons on the U.S. side are so deeply reduced that it would necessarily cause a rethinking or a complete change in the anticipated numbers of these SSBNs or in the number of (missile) tubes.”
He said the number of tubes on the ships potentially could drop, but said he did not expect any great reduction.
The Navy plans to buy 12 SSBNs from FY ’19 to FY ’33 at a cost of $6 billion to $7 billion each in FY ’10 dollars; that figure is roughly half of the Navy’s annual shipbuilding budget.
Some lawmakers fear the SSBN program will hamper plans to increase the size of the Navy’s fleet.
Gates last month acknowledged the submarine effort “will suck all the air out of the Navy’s shipbuilding program” in the latter part of this decade.
“Some tough choices are going to have to be made, either in terms of more investment or choices between the size of surface fleets you want and the submarine fleets,” Gates told the House Appropriations Defense subcommittee on March 24.