Obama to decide on cuts to US nuclear arsenal in October

Barack Obama is expected to make a final decision next month on possible cuts to the US nuclear arsenal, in an attempt to consolidate his legacy as a disarmer before leaving office.

Options on the table include reducing the number of deployed strategic warheads, slimming down the reserve stockpile, cutting military stores of fissile material available for making new warheads, and putting off some modernisation plans, including the a controversial air force programme for developing an air-launched cruise missile.

The president is due to consult his principal national security officials in October on which, if any, of the options are still feasible in the time left before he leaves office.

Some more radical options, like changing the US nuclear posture to rule out first use of nuclear arms in a conflict and taking some of the nation’s intercontinental ballistic missiles off hair-trigger alert, have faced such strong opposition from allies abroad and the Pentagon that they are no longer being seriously considered.

“We have paid a lot of attention throughout the administration,” an administration official said, pointing to the New Start Treaty with Russia in 2010, changes to US nuclear posture the same year that ruled out strikes on non-nuclear states, work on improving the security of nuclear stockpiles around the world, and last year’s agreement limiting the scope of Iran’s nuclear programme.

Unable to persuade the Senate to reconsider ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the White House has backed a United Nations security council resolution, due to be passed on Thursday, that reaffirms member states’ commitment not to conduct explosive nuclear testing. The administration official said there might be more steps to come before Obama leaves office in January.

“There are a whole lot of other steps the administration is looking at, and right now it is an open book as to what will be decided,” he said.

Nuclear disarmament was one of the signature ambitions of Obama’s first months in office. In a speech in Prague in April 2009, he pledged US commitment “to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”. However, he approaches the end of his eight years in office having made fewer reductions to the US arsenal than any president since the end of the cold war.

Furthermore, part of the price of persuading the Senate to accept the New Start Treaty was agreeing to a modernisation programme of air, land and sea delivery systems, as well as warheads, that is expected to bring the cost of the US deterrent to $1tn over 30 years.

Robert Einhorn, the state department’s special adviser on non-proliferation and disarmament from 2009-13, argues that Obama did the best he could in difficult circumstances.

“He has good a record on the nuclear issue but it probably falls short of his own hopes for progress,” said Einhorn, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “He was operating in an environment that was not at all conducive. Unfortunately the whole Prague agenda has become so politicised there is little room for manoeuvre and you have an international climate that is not terribly conducive.”

He added: “The US has been prepared to reduce our deployed stockpile a third below New Start. Russia has said it has zero interest.”

Disarmament advocates like Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, say unfavourable circumstances at home and abroad are only a partial excuse.

“Obama has missed multiple opportunities to realise lasting change in nuclear weapons policy,” Kimball said. “He has adjusted but not transformed the issue. Part of that is a failure of leadership and imagination. He now has a disappointing legacy.”

However, Kimball said it was not too late to improve that legacy, even in the last months of the Obama presidency.

The most far-reaching option still under active consideration is a one-third cut to the US deployed strategic arsenal, from the 1,550 warheads agreed with Moscow in the New Start Treaty to just over 1,000. Obama offered to make the reduction in a 2013 speech in Berlin, on condition Russia did the same. But Vladimir Putin has shown little interest in disarmament, instead emphasising his country’s nuclear might.

The Berlin offer was based on a US assessment that it could reduce its nuclear missile arsenal by a third and still “maintain a strong and credible strategic deterrent”. On the basis of that assessment, disarmers inside and outside the administration have argued that Washington should make the cut unilaterally for cost-saving reasons and to make a more convincing argument to non-weapons states that the US is sticking to its side of the bargain in the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

“What Obama could and should do now is act on our own determination on what it is that we need, and that we’re not going to tie our budget decisions and arsenal to Russia’s decisions,” Kimball said, pointing out that both presidents Bush made unilateral reductions to US nuclear force levels without being blocked by Congress. However, the current Obama proposal is strongly opposed by the Department of Defense, which is concerned it would send a message of weakness to Moscow.

“There would have been a small chance of that before, but what happened in Crimea and the Donbass wiped that off the table,” said Steven Pifer, a former senior state department official deeply involved in past relations with Moscow and arms control.

More politically palatable options on the table are a reduction to the “hedge” stockpile of more than 2,500 reserve warheads and military stores of hundreds of tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU) held for the production of future warheads. Both are widely considered being surplus to requirements.

In a 2013 Nuclear Employment Strategy document, it was decided that the warheads held in reserve as a hedge against technical failures in deployed weapons could also serve as a hedge against geopolitical surprises, rather than having two separate reserves. However, the consequent cut to the stockpile has not yet been made.

“I think there’s a chance they will announce a reduction of the hedge,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. “But they would in any case not cut the whole hedge, perhaps about 50% of it.”

Zia Mian, from the programme on science and global security at Princeton University, said fissile material stocks could also be cut. They are now believed to constitute 243 tons of HEU and 38 tons of plutonium.

“If say, a typical US warhead has 25kg of HEU and 4kg of plutnium, then if the US were to reduce to 1,000 operational warheads (as Obama says they can) and say 1,000 reserve warheads, it would need only 50 tons of HEU and eight tons of plutonium for its nuclear arsenal and the rest could be declared excess,” Mian said.

A further option known to be under consideration would be delaying some of the ambitious nuclear modernisation programmes that are still in their very early stages. A planned air force fleet of nuclear-capable B-21 stealth bombers is priced at $80bn, while proposed nuclear long-range stand-off cruise missiles are estimated to cost $30bn.

Critics have said it is unclear how such weapons will be funded when the major expenditure is due in the 2020s, and that each makes the other redundant. The cruise missiles have been described as potentially destabilising because they can be launched without warning and are impossible to distinguish from their conventional counterparts.

“If you now have the B-21 coming online able to penetrate enemy defences, why do you need a cruise missile, and if the B-21 is not going to penetrate, why is it being developed? The military is asking for things it may not need,” Pifer said.

“I would like to see them cancel the cruise missile. It would be a useful change, but I just can’t see them doing it in the last few months of the administration.”

Even staunch arms control advocates such as Joseph Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund said the administration may have left it too late to make meaningful changes.

“They took their eye off the ball,” Cirincione said. “If last year they wanted to do some of these things, it would have been easier. Now it’s not outside elements that are the only problem, but the politics during the presidential election. I would be surprised if they did anything controversial.”