President Donald Trump said that he just wants to have the U.S. nuclear arsenal in “tip-top shape,” pushing back on a report that he wanted to increase the stockpile tenfold. He added that he wants modernization and total rehabilitation. Trump considers the increase in the stockpile unnecessary.
James Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, also said that the reports about the alleged increase in the nuclear arsenal are false. Nuclear experts also think that the move would be absurd and inconceivable.
Jeffrey Lewis, publisher of the blog “Arms Control Wonk” and the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies said that this is like saying, “I’d like a moon base, please.” According to Lewis, there are many reasons why the U.S. has decreased its nuclear stockpile, CNN reports.
“One factor is that a lot of those warheads existed for things we now do with conventional weapons,” Lewis said.
Trump would have to ask the Congress for big increase in funding, if he wants to increase the nuclear arsenal. But, there are also many things that need to be reconsidered before the move. “It’s not like you can just go to the store and buy 30,000 nuclear weapons. You’d have to build an entire infrastructure to produce and sustain that stockpile. So that’s not a one-year decision by Congress, that’s a multi-year, multi-trillion dollar commitment that has to be made every year by the Congress,” Lewis says.
Other experts say that new reactors and new plutonium handling facilities would be required and they would cost more than 100 billion dollars. There could also be diplomatic problems because of the treaties and commitments, like the one with Russia, that says that they can’t deploy more than 1,550 nuclear warheads. Greater stockpile could be allowed only if Trump renegotiates the New Start Treaty, signed by President Barack Obama in 2011, with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, but that is only a theory.
The actual nuclear arsenal is under a modernization process and Pentagon is reviewing U.S. policy on nuclear weapons. The final report is expected to be presented to Trump by the end of the year.
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