Obama’s new budget proposes more spending for nuclear armaments

Editor's note: This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.

The Obama administration has proposed to boost spending on the US stockpile of nuclear warheads at a higher rate than for many other military programs, according to White House budget documents published Monday.

In its proposal for fiscal year 2016, the White House calls for spending $8.85 billion on maintaining and rebuilding the nation’s nuclear warheads, an increase of more than eight percent over current levels, the documents state.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, is requesting a 4 percent increase over its overall 2015 spending of $560.3 billion, to reach $585.2 billion in 2016; this total includes both the “base” budget and a large, associated military account meant to finance overseas “contingency operations.”

The spending on warheads represents just a small part of a sweeping US effort to completely rebuild the United States “triad” of nuclear forces — including long-range bombers, subs and missiles — over the next three decades. A Congressional Budget Office report last month estimated the cost of this ambitious project at $355 billion through 2023.

Frank Klotz, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the semi-autonomous agency that runs the Department of Energy’s nuclear programs, defended the spending Monday in a conference call with reporters, saying that the stockpile of US nuclear warheads was the “smallest and oldest” that it has been since the Cold War and that the administration has a responsibility to refurbish them. “As long as we have this nuclear deterrent, it must remain effective,” he said.

The NNSA has shifted spending among some of its budget accounts since last year, making precise comparisons to earlier tallies difficult. But Klotz told reporters that besides the new spending for warheads, the current NNSA budget calls for a 3 percent increase in “core” nonproliferation programs, which are designed to reduce or eliminate nuclear materials and radiological threats.

NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Anne Harrington said the increase translated into about $40 million, but she declined to describe changes in nonproliferation spending in more detail.

According to the documents, the NNSA’s proposed $1.94 million nonproliferation budget includes $426.7 million for global efforts to secure nuclear materials, including weapons uranium and plutonium. It also seeks $345 million, or 18 percent of the total nonproliferation budget, for continued work on the mixed-oxide or MOX nuclear fuel plant under construction at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, part of a joint-US Russia effort to transform up to 34 tons each of their surplus weapons-grade plutonium into reactor fuel.

A Department of Energy report last year concluded that the final cost of the overall US MOX project would exceed $30 billion, considerably higher than initially expected. As a result, the White House last year sought a smaller appropriation — just $221 million — to place the half-finished plant on “cold standby,” essentially mothballing it.

But a defense bill approved by Congress and signed by the president in December authorized a $345 million budget for the MOX project in fiscal year 2015. Klotz told reporters the administration decided as a result to propose the same amount Congress had approved while it completes new congressionally-mandated studies of potential MOX alternatives.

The Department of Defense’s overall $585 billion budget request, meanwhile, increases spending on several major modernization programs for nuclear weapons. The White House is asking for $1.25 billion for the strategic nuclear Long Range Strike Bomber project, up from $914 million this year.

The proposed budget would also increase spending for development of a replacement to aging Ohio class ballistic missile submarines by $116 million, to $1.4 billion this year. And it calls for spending $75.2 million on a program to modernize or replace the nation’s fleet of Minuteman III ICBMs, an increase of $68.3 million.

Arms control advocates call the ambitious program both bloated and wasteful, and based on an outdated view of the importance of nuclear weapons to US security.

“It’s disappointing to see this administration has not put together a more cost effective, common sense approach” to modernizing the nuclear arsenal, said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington.

Arms control expert Kenneth Luongo, a former Department of Energy official and president of the Partnership for Global Security, said Russia’s withdrawal from cooperation on most other nuclear nonproliferation, which ended formally in December, has left some US programs stranded.

“The real problem is that this administration has not created any new nonproliferation programs and the old ones are dying,” Luongo said. “And that’s a huge challenge that they have not faced up to.”

Copyright 2015 The Center for Public Integrity.