Nuclear and Hypersonic Superiority
Quoted in New York Times about America's strategic deterrent lagging Russia, China, and others.
I’m quoted in the New York Times (which knows its audience much better than the flagging Wall Street/Kiev Journal) by science reporter Bill Broad in an article about resuming nuclear testing. I provide some supporting arguments for the essay that former Trump national security advisor Robert O’Brien published last month. Among many other steps to establish “Peace through Strength,” O’Brien called for responding to Chinese and Russian advances in nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles, as well real-world testing by the U.S. to assure the deterrent’s safety and reliability. Trump posted a link to O’Brien’s article on his social media account.
If you’re interested, I enclose the NYT article below, followed by some talking points making the case for building and testing new weapons and delivery systems to match our adversaries—as well as updating our dumb protocols for command in a crisis in order to help ensure these weapons would never be used.
Trump Advisers Call for U.S. Nuclear Weapons Testing if He Is Elected
A former national security adviser says Washington “must test new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the real world,” while critics say the move could incite a global arms race that heightens the risk of war.
By William J. Broad
July 5, 2024, 5:02 a.m. ET
Allies of Donald J. Trump are proposing that the United States restart the testing of nuclear weapons in underground detonations should the former president be re-elected in November. A number of nuclear experts reject such a resumption as unnecessary and say it would threaten to end a testing moratorium that the world’s major atomic powers have honored for decades.
In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Robert C. O’Brien, a former national security adviser to Mr. Trump, urges him to conduct nuclear tests if he wins a new term. Washington, he wrote, “must test new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the real world for the first time since 1992.” Doing so, he added, would help the United States “maintain technical and numerical superiority to the combined Chinese and Russian nuclear stockpiles.”
At the Cold War’s end, in 1992, the United States gave up the explosive testing of nuclear arms and eventually talked other atomic powers into doing likewise. The United States instead turned to experts and machines at the nation’s weapons labs to verify the lethality of the country’s arsenal. Today the machines include room-size supercomputers, the world’s most powerful X-ray machine and a system of lasers the size of a sports stadium.
In his article, Mr. O’Brien described such work as just “using computer models.” Republican members of Congress and some nuclear experts have faulted the nonexplosive testing as insufficient to assure the U.S. military establishment that its arsenal works, and have called for live tests.
But the Biden administration and other Democrats warn that a U.S. test could lead to a chain reaction of testing by other countries. Over time, they add, resumption could result in a nuclear arms race that destabilizes the global balance of terror and heightens the risk of war.
“It’s a terrible idea,” said Ernest J. Moniz, who oversaw the U.S. nuclear arsenal as the secretary of energy in the Obama administration. “New testing would make us less secure. You can’t divorce it from the global repercussions.”
Siegfried S. Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons lab in New Mexico where J. Robert Oppenheimer led the creation of the atomic bomb, called new testing a risky trade-off between domestic gains and global losses. “We stand to lose more” than America’s nuclear rivals would, he said.
It’s unclear if Mr. Trump would act on the testing proposals. In a statement, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, Mr. Trump’s co-campaign managers, did not directly address the candidate’s position on nuclear testing. They said that Mr. O’Brien as well as other outside groups and individuals were “misguided, speaking prematurely, and may well be entirely wrong” about a second Trump administration’s plans.
Even so, Mr. Trump’s history of atomic bluster, threats and hard-line policies suggests that he may be open to such guidance from his security advisers. In 2018, he boasted that his “Nuclear Button” was “much bigger & more powerful” than the force controller of Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader.
A U.S. detonation would violate the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, long considered one of the most successful arms control measures. Signed by the world’s atomic powers in 1996, it sought to curb a costly arms race that had spun out of control.
During the Cold War, China set off 45 test explosions, France 210, Russia 715 and the United States 1,030, with the goal of uncovering flaws in weapon designs and verifying their reliability.
Nuclear experts say that the test disparities give Washington a military edge because it keeps other powers from making their arsenals more diverse and deadly.
In 2017, Mr. Trump’s presidential inauguration revived the possibility of new testing. In addition to discussing a restart, officials in his administration called for reductions in the preparation time for a U.S. nuclear test resumption. The federal agency in charge of the nation’s nuclear test site ordered the required time for preparations to drop from years to as little as six months.
Nuclear experts saw the goal as unrealistic because testing equipment at the sprawling site, in the Nevada desert, had fallen into disrepair, or vanished.
Last year, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, recommended that the United States eliminate the preparation time. Its policy guide for conservative presidential candidates called on Washington “to move to immediate test readiness.”
In his Foreign Affairs article, Mr. O’Brien argued that the Biden administration had responded weakly to Chinese and Russian buildups of nuclear arms. The explosive testing of American arms, he said, would strengthen the U.S. arsenal and help deter America’s foes. His article zeroed in on the safety and reliability of new designs, not ones tested during the Cold War.
“It would be negligent to field nuclear weapons of novel designs that we have never tested in the real world,” said Christian Whiton, who served as a State Department adviser in the George W. Bush and Trump administrations and provided background research for Mr. O’Brien’s article.
Asked for examples, Mr. Whiton cited two new American weapons that he said were in need of explosive testing. Both are thermonuclear weapons, also known as hydrogen bombs. And both have a destructive force that is many times more powerful than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima.
The first of the cited bombs, the W93, is to fit atop submarine missiles. The Biden administration announced its development in March 2022, and Mr. Whiton called it “a completely new design.”
But the Biden administration’s work plan for the W93 says otherwise. The warhead, it notes, will rely “on currently deployed and previously tested nuclear designs.” Moreover, its makers, at the Los Alamos lab, have insisted that the warhead can be fielded safely and reliably without recourse to more explosive tests.
Charles W. Nakhleh, the lab’s associate director for weapons physics, said in a Los Alamos publication that the alternatives to live detonations “will enable us to field the W93 without needing any additional nuclear testing.”
The other weapon Mr. Whiton cited is the B61-13, a variation of a bomb first deployed in 1968. The Biden administration announced its development in October, and Mr. Whiton called it “heavily redesigned.” Even so, the official plan says that its nuclear parts are to be salvaged from an older B61 version and recycled in the new model.
“The idea that it’s a big redesign doesn’t hold water,” said Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a private research organization in Washington. “They’ve already tested the part that goes bang.”
Mr. Whiton, however, believes that even modest changes “ought to be proved in the real world.” He also argued that the United States would have to develop new warheads to counter an emerging class of superfast weapons — known as hypersonics — that China and Russia are developing. “It’s likely that new warhead designs will be necessary,” he said, and will require new testing.
Despite the conflicting claims and uncertain election outcomes, nuclear experts say that China and Russia are readying their test sites for new detonations, perhaps in case the United States restarts its program, or alternatively to race ahead on their own. Dr. Moniz, the former secretary of energy, said he fears that Washington will go first if Mr. Trump wins a second term.
Mr. Whiton, the former State Department adviser, cast doubt on the idea that a U.S. detonation would set off a global chain reaction. He noted that Russia and China were already building up their arsenals without recourse to new testing.
“It is unclear if existing and aspiring nuclear states would follow us,” he said of a global reaction. “If they do, the downside is that they might improve their capabilities marginally.”
The upside, Mr. Whiton said, is that the United States could study the foreign detonations for clues about their hidden characteristics. It could, for example, monitor the faint rumbles in bedrock from an underground test to estimate a device’s power.
Mr. Whiton added that such readings would, in turn, “help us update our deterrent properly.”
The trouble with Mr. Whiton’s point, a number of nuclear experts say, is its unstated corollary: that the world could descend into the rounds of costly moves and countermoves that characterized the Cold War. In this century, they warn, a nuclear arms race could prove to be more global, innovative, deadly and unpredictable.
“China has much more to gain from resumed testing than we do,” said Dr. Hecker, the former Los Alamos director. “It would open the door for others to test and reignite an arms race to the peril of the entire world. We shouldn’t go there.”
Original article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/05/science/nuclear-testing-trump.html
China’s Nuclear Buildup and Russia’s Hypersonic Advantage
My additional talking points:
Unfortunately China has already started a nuclear arms race with its arsenal expansion and Russia has demonstrated hypersonic missile capabilities that call into question our missile defenses and reaction protocols.
While Russia’s nuclear arsenal appears stable in number and just larger than America’s, China is undertaking a rapid buildup of its nuclear arsenal. The United States needs to have at least parity and preferably dominance to the combined arsenals of China, Russia, and North Korea, plus any future nuclear-armed adversary like Iran.
Given the broken nature of U.S. defense procurement, where cost overruns and delays are the rule rather than the exception, we need to proceed now with new warhead design and testing to have a viable deterrent in the 2030s.
The Senate overwhelmingly rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that would have prohibited U.S. testing (thank you Jesse Helms!).
It would be negligent to field nuclear weapons of novel designs that we have never tested in the real world. We could not be sure if they were safe and reliable. Neither could our adversaries, which means they would fail their main purpose of deterrence.
We should test completely new nuclear weapons designs like the W93 warhead intended for the Columbia class of ballistic-missile submarines. We should also test heavily redesigned bombs like the proposed B61-13, which would modify the primary fission stage of an old warhead—an apparently modest change that nonetheless ought to be proved in the real world.
Furthermore, gravity bombs like the B61 are no more resilient than the planes that carry them and once-mostly-invincible ICBMs are now increasingly vulnerable to missile defenses. It is likely that new warhead designs will be necessary for delivery by new hypersonic cruise missiles in the future since China and Russia are pursuing this technology.
Warheads placed on ballistic missiles carried by submarines are the most expensive conceivable delivery method. We need nuclear-armed hypersonic cruise missiles that can be placed on existing attack submarines and surface ships or deployed on land or airborne systems. We should reprise 1980s plans to deploy mobile (and therefore more survivable) land-based ICBMs.
We need to clean up the the line of presidential succession, eliminating the Speaker of the House and president pro tempore of the Senate. These legislative branch baby kissers have no place in executive office in a crisis in which the president and vice president are incapacitated. Succession should run through the original 1789 Cabinet offices (i.e., real ones) and then through governors of states that voted for the incumbent president, ranked by population.
Nuclear-release authority succession should run from the president to the secretary of defense to the commanders of the unified combatant commands, beginning with the heads of Strategic Command and Northern Command or their executive officers. They are geographically dispersed and therefore survivable. In a crisis that incapacitates Washington, our forces cannot wait for the Secret Service to round up the under secretary of agriculture or whoever is left atop the existing line of succession.
The idea that computer models and subcritical tests are advanced enough to prove a design are as believable as weather or climate models. In other words, the claims aren’t convincing. Recall that America’s largest nuclear test, Castle Bravo, had a 15-megaton yield three times larger than expected because of a false assumption about an isotope of lithium that was not revealed until real-world testing. We tempt fate by assuming we can fully recreate the physical world on a computer.
Parodying the parody. Homer as a B-52 pilot in “Homer the Vigilante” (S5-E11). China appears to have rebuilt its nuclear weapons test site. Other reporting indicates Russia is refurbishing its primary test site. Since 1992, when the United States voluntarily halted testing, China, France, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have tested nuclear weapons. Some suspect that China and Russia have conducted more recent low-yield tests in secret. Unfortunately the idea that other countries will not develop or test nuclear weapons by following our example has been disproven.
The United States and Britain conducted over 800 underground tests in the continental United States during the Cold War. A small number of additional low-yield nuclear tests would have little impact on test sites and pose no radiation danger to the public.
If you depended on something mechanical for your survival, would you take a mechanic’s word that it works fine despite no testing since 1992, or would you want to test it on occasion?
As everyone knows, I speak only for myself. A late Happy Independence Day to you! We’ll meet again…