You Might Want to Know-Extra: Are the Stockpiles of Nuclear Weapons Growing?
The previous You Might Want to Know ended with an assertion that the stockpile of nuclear weapons is growing again after a long period of decline.
A wise journalist friend helped me see that that claim needs to be unpacked and expanded.
The last report by the Federation of American Scientists on “The Status of World Nuclear Forces” says,
In contrast to the overall inventory of nuclear weapons, the number of warheads in global military stockpiles––which comprises warheads assigned to operational forces––is increasing once again. The United States is still reducing its nuclear stockpile slowly. France and Israel have relatively stable inventories. But China, India, North Korea, Pakistan and the United Kingdom, as well as possibly Russia, are all thought to be increasing their stockpiles…[emphasis in original].
The FAS report tells us that the vast majority—currently 90%—of all nuclear weapons is held by two of the nine countries that today have nuclear weapons—the United States and Russia.
Russia’s total of deployed weapons and weapons on reserve is about the same as that of the United States, though the United States has more weapons deployed. FAS says Russia may be increasing its stockpile. The United States is not. Kind of a dead heat.
The current combined inventory of those two—about 11,300 weapons—represents a massive decrease from the peak in the 1980’s of 70,000 and the total at the end of the Cold War—about 50,000. The vast majority of the decreases were achieved in the 1990’s, the decade after the end of the Cold War.
The United States and Russia seem to have come to understand the inanity of stockpiles larger than this.
Much smaller might make sense.
China may now be increasing the size of its stockpile, says the FAS report, but its current stockpile—about 350—is less than it was for many years—about 400. Until recently, China seems to have judged 400 or fewer adequate to deter a nuclear-armed adversary, if the adversary were rational, of course.
India, Pakistan and North Korea all have inventories even smaller than China’s. In fact their total added together is less than China’s. It’s hard to know what these countries will conclude is a sufficient stockpile for their purposes. Or even what their purposes are, exactly.
If Iran decides to join what has appallingly been called the Nuclear Club—which Iran will certainly be able to do if it decides to—other countries in that region may want to join too. Israel, which the FAS article estimates has 90 nuclear weapons, has declared that they will never allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. If Israel takes pre-emptive action to prevent Iran from joining the Club, what unfolds may prevent other countries in the region from doing any club-joining.
The real action for the last two decades has not been in increasing the size of stockpiles. The real action has been in developing what J. Robert Oppenheimer called the “arts of delivery.” Soon after the nuclear age began, and before Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles were developed, Oppenheimer had foreseen that this would be where the action was.
That’s certainly where most of the action has been since George W. Bush and Dick Cheney withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that President Nixon negotiated with the Soviet Union in 1972.
In the early 90’s, Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, and Boris Yeltsin, the then president of Russia, had agreed to remove Multiple Independently Targetable warheads from our land-based ICBMs, and had done it. Immediately after George W. Bush and Cheney withdrew from the ABM treaty, the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, put MIRVs back on their Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.
We haven’t put MIRVs back on our land-based missiles, perhaps because we never had to remove them from our submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
Since Bush and Cheney withdrew us from the ABM treaty, we’ve been paying our defense contractors a lot of money to work on anti-ballistic missile systems. As far as I can see, they haven’t been making much progress. Some against short-range missiles maybe, but not against ICBMs.
Nevertheless, since Bush and Cheney withdrew from the ABM Treaty, President Putin has been developing modes of delivery that would be more likely to defeat ABM systems. One is “hypersonic glide missiles.” These missiles would fly lower than ICBMs and be maneuverable and able to deliver their nuclear payloads more quickly than ICBMs.
China has been developing such missiles too and has shown off some in their military parades.
Both Russia and China say that they now have hypersonic delivery systems ready to go.
For what’s it’s worth, we’ve also developed hypersonic glide missiles. Also, not surprisingly, one of our defense contractors, Raytheon, is being funded to work on systems we hope would be able to defend against them, even though we don’t yet have anything that would be able to defend even against more than a few incoming ICBMs.
Russia claims to have developed another delivery system, one that no ballistic missile defense system would work against. It’s a “nuclear torpedo” they call the Poseidon. We used to have a submarine-launched ballistic missile called the Poseidon but it’s long gone. We have much better SLBMs now, the Tridents.
Russia’s Poseidon could be parked in a container anywhere on the ocean floor with, say, a 100 megaton warhead on it—which would have 6,667 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. Both of us know we could make a warhead that powerful if we wanted to. A torpedo, or mini-submarine if you like, could easily carry it, more easily than a missile could.
When needed, the Poseidon, which is powered by a nuclear reactor, could be activated and, guided only by artificial intelligence, move at slow, undetectable speeds over very long distances to its target. Its target might be an aircraft carrier battle group or a spot along, say, the west coast of Great Britain. Or the United States. The warhead would presumably be detonated in a place where, after the tsunami, the prevailing wind would spread the radioactive products downwind as widely as possible.
The other major action these days is “modernization” of our missiles. Under treaties we haven’t yet withdrawn from, we can’t legally increase the number of warheads or missiles but we can “modernize" them. We can, for example, install better guidance systems in the missiles, better arming, fuzing, and firing systems in the warheads, and design better re-entry vehicles for the warheads.
The Navy is replacing the multiple warheads on its Trident D5 missiles with ones that have Insensitive High Explosive inside them. Warheads have conventional high explosive inside them to start the chain reaction in the fissile fuel that produces the nuclear explosion. Using IHE for the conventional explosive is a safety measure.
The Navy will also be taking measures to extend the life of its Trident D5 missiles and the warheads on them like the W88 that yields over 400 kilotons. The Hiroshima bomb yielded no more than 15 kilotons.
The Air Force has decided that instead of extending the life of its land-based Minuteman III ICBMs, it will develop a new missile, called Sentinel. It’s apparently not clear to everyone why this is better than taking measures to extend the life of the Minuteman IIIs. The Sentinel program has been experiencing pretty serious delays also.
This kind of “modernization” will not increase our stockpile of nuclear weapons or the number of ICBMs we are allowed to have under the treaties that we haven’t yet withdrawn from. It will, we hope, improve our delivery systems.
This “modernizing” will be, as you can imagine, very expensive. Many billions of dollars.
Do you think it will be worth it? I mean to those of us who aren’t in the business?