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Analysis: Cold War-Era Nuclear Debate Returns

Council on Foreign Relations

August 1, 2007
Prepared by: Michael Moran

Underneath the Iraq war debate and other more celebrated issues, a showdown looms between the Bush administration and Congress over a plan to modernize the nation’s arsenal of strategic nuclear warheads. President Bush has asked for $88 million to fund the “Reliable Replacement Warhead,” a program meant to ensure the aging point of the thermonuclear sword remains sharp. The philosophical and scientific argument, laid out in this widely read 2005 paper (PDF) and endorsed by the leaders of U.S. nuclear research labs, holds that the U.S. nuclear deterrent, without modernization, will become increasingly unreliable and even dangerous over the next decade.

To date, the Reliable Replacement Warhead exists only on paper and had received less than $10 million in funding, rendering it almost nonexistent in the realm of defense budgeting. The Senate in June approved a $66 million expansion (DefenseNews). But the House cut the funding completely. “Currently there exists no convincing rationale for maintaining the large number of existing Cold War nuclear weapons, much less producing additional warheads,” the House Appropriations Committee said in a report following its vote. The disagreement sets up a classic “conference committee” clash between House and Senate negotiators, who each year have to reconcile differing approaches before submitting a final budget for the president’s signature.

Yet disagreements on the wisdom of the Bush administration’s approach don’t follow national-security typecasts. Scientists diverge, as a paper from the Naval Postgraduate School notes, on the question of whether modernization is needed for safety reasons.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.