Given the enormity of the US nuclear arsenal, arguments for more funding are a challenge, as there is no real case to be made that they need more such weapons. The angle now appears to be that the newer versions would be somewhat safer.
An unclassified white paper sent to Congress earlier this year warned that land-based missiles, because of their design to launch minutes after an enemy attack, were vulnerable to being fired by mistake. New missiles would presumably correct this.
Absent in official assessments is that the US has had those nukes for decades without any such accidents. This is coupled with the Pentagon also wanting more powerful nukes as part of the deal, costing even more.
If this argument proves successful, it may also encourage the Pentagon to slip flaws into their future designs as a way to ensure that they can get more funding for an ultimate successor.
This is a huge lie wrapped in a tissue paper thin truth.
The truth is that explosives age badly. All explosives age badly. Simple rifle ammo is reliable for only a decade or so, and most accurate for less. Explosives like dynamite are infamous for their dangers as they age. In the early 20th Century, battleships blew up in Italy, France, Britain, and Japan just from explosives aging badly.
We must not have a nuclear accident because the high explosive part that sets off the bomb got old and just went off. It could happen. It has. It has many times, but not yet inside a nuclear bomb.
Nuclear initiators, the highly radioactive things that make nuclear weapons work efficiently, are very time sensitive. They decay. The effects of decay are less of what is wanted, and some little-understood decay products mixed in.
We must not have a nuclear accident because the highly radioactive short-half-life initiator became very much more radioactive that it was supposed to be, and just went off.
So yes, very old bombs, decades old, are not safe. They need to be re-built or replaced.
However, the lie wrapped in that truth is that the proposal is NOT to re-build or replace aging explosives and initiators, nor purify the bomb stuff itself (mostly plutonium).
The real proposal is to build a whole new arsenal of very much more expensive weapons of entirely new design, pushing design limits for precision guided weapons and any other technology they can think to push.
The huge expense is to do all that new stuff. The expense is not the safety stuff that is their excuse. The expense is the arms race stuff they pretend they are not doing.
Worst of all, they are trying to make nuclear weapons more usable, on the path to using them. That is nuts. Worse, it is evil.
From Webster’s New World Dictionary: “enormity …. great wickedness … a monstrous or outrageous act; very wicked crime.”
That describes the preparation and use of nuclear weapons all right.
So our Department of Offense recognizes that those old weapons pose a “danger.” Maybe that’s progress. But the real danger is nuclear war and the threat of human extinction. A trillion-dollar “modernization” won’t eliminate those perils.
These would be more helpful measures:
1. Take those nuclear-armed missiles off “high alert.”
2. Reaffirm the INF Treaty, which Trump has unilaterally — and unconstitutionally — knifed.
3. Renew the New START Treaty,
4. Enact legislation to criminalize any president’s use of a nuclear weapon in the absence of a congressional
declaration of war plus specific congressional authorization for such nuclear use.
5. Join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (drawn up at the UN in July 2019).
What better ways to commemorate the 75th anniversary of President Truman’s enormity of August 6 and 9, 1945?