Weapons

Nuclear Weapons: Trust But Modernize

The United States is planning to modernize its nuclear deterrent over the next 25 years, an effort already two decades late in implementation. That delay, a procurement holiday, resulted in all elements of our nuclear enterprise—the warheads, the communications, the submarines, the land based missiles and the bombers and their associated cruise missiles–reaching the end of their service life nearly simultaneously.

The new modernization effort will thus take many years to complete and it is going to cost $27 billion this year. By the middle of the next decade probably $36 billion a year. In embarking on this effort, the new administration has said let’s have a “Nuclear Posture Review”, a review also done previously in 2010, 2003, and 1994.