- Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Our nuclear deterrent needs modernization, especially given the threats we face from an aggressive China and an expansion in the number of nuclear competitors worldwide. The good news is that the federal government is making tremendous strides to meet the challenges of nuclear deterrence.

The deterrent is made up of five distinct parts: the land, sea and air legs of our nuclear weapons delivery systems, the control system that makes that triad operational, and the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nuclear Security Enterprise, which makes the nuclear warheads themselves.

The Air Force is moving out smartly both with its new stealth bomber and with its new intercontinental ballistic missile program. The Navy is replacing the Ohio-class submarines with new technological marvels of submarines sporting life-of-ship nuclear reactors. The Nuclear Security Administration is building new infrastructure for nuclear and non-nuclear component production. The collective efforts are heroic and merit our esteem.

Notwithstanding these accomplishments, sustaining our nuclear deterrent is very much in doubt because it is unlikely that the nation will succeed in meeting all of its requirements, and even if it did, the resulting deterrence could prove inadequate to meet our defense needs.

Our current plan requires that all five elements of our deterrent be successfully modernized. Each part of that effort will be enormously complicated, technically challenging and ferociously expensive. The expected combined cost exceeds half a trillion dollars.

Each of the five projects is a “megaproject,” defined as a project whose cost exceeds $1 billion. The recent history of megaprojects does not engender confidence. The success rate for megaprojects is on the order of 35%, meaning that little more than one-third of all megaprojects meet cost, schedule and scope parameters.

To have even a 50/50 chance that all five of the efforts are completed successfully, the probability of success for each element must be 87%, which is more than twice the rate of success for megaprojects. In other words, we need to roll a seven every time.

An early indication of the success of modernization efforts was reported by The Washington Times on Feb. 5. The delivery of the new ICBM, the Sentinel, is experiencing higher costs than expected. Cost increases and other future program disruptions — which are inevitable — may cause Congress, the media and the public to reconsider their commitments to modernization of the deterrent and potentially cause competition for resources across the elements of the modernization effort.

To succeed — and we must succeed — our political leaders must assert and retain resolve over decades. We can defer no longer. We have no margin for error. Gen. Anthony J. Cotton, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, testified on Feb. 29: “It is important to note that we do not have residual … capacity to manage emerging risks.” His words were specific to warheads, but they could have just as easily been cited for all five parts of the nuclear deterrent.

If this were simply about national resolve to meet the current and future deterrence requirements, we might prevail. But the problem is not that simple.

First, some things may not get done on time. Second, our current approach does not fully reflect China’s massive nuclear breakout. China’s emergence puts pressure on our nuclear force structure. The adverse pressure may be especially pronounced if Russia and China enter into a more formal military alliance.

Last, our current plan does not address the asymmetric nuclear advantages our rivals enjoy. Russia boasts a 10-to-1 advantage over us in the tactical nuclear weapons that Russia threatens to use on Ukraine. The U.S. need not match our rivals’ nonstrategic nuclear weapons one-for-one, but we need to have the capability to deter low-intensity nuclear conflict. Otherwise, our rivals can control nuclear escalation dynamics.

Ensuring the requisite nuclear deterrence will require us to sustain our will to modernize our nuclear deterrent against the inevitable headwinds we will experience like the Sentinel cost overrun. The ability to sustain such resolve across decades does not seem promising in light of Sen. Roger Wicker’s remarks in response to Gen. Cotton’s testimony: “Unfortunately, the current administration has naively maintained the status quo. While the United States has stayed complacent, Russia and China have advanced by leaps and bounds in their nuclear and space programs.”

• David S. Jonas is a partner at Fluet in Tysons, Virginia, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown and George Washington University law schools. He served as nuclear nonproliferation planner for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as general counsel of the National Nuclear Security Administration. Patrick Rhoads leads nuclear research at the National Strategic Research Institute. These are the opinions of the authors and are not necessarily those of any organization.

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