WASHINGTON, D.C. – House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (OH-10) recently penned an op-ed in The New York Times about why the United States must invest in its nuclear arsenal and build a cohesive strategy around integrated missile defense as authoritarian regimes increase their nuclear weapon capabilities.
We Must Invest in Our Aging Nuclear Arsenal
After decades of global nuclear arms reductions, every nuclear state run by an authoritarian regime is heavily increasing its weapons and capabilities. The global balance of nuclear power is changing, and the United States and its allies must also change their mind-set and invest in their own nuclear arms and missile defense.
In the United States, we have long maintained a nuclear triad consisting of nuclear-capable bombers, ballistic missile submarines and ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. All three legs now require substantial modernization and billions of dollars to keep pace with our adversaries. Maintaining a credible and effective nuclear deterrent will help prevent them from even considering a nuclear strike against America or its allies.
The most pressing threat comes from China. It is undertaking an alarming nuclear buildup, with the goal of doubling the number of nuclear weapons. “The explosive growth and modernization of its nuclear and conventional forces can only be what I describe as breathtaking,” Adm. Charles Richard, the former commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, said in 2021. “And frankly, that word ‘breathtaking’ may not be enough.” The Biden administration recently announced that it was realigning its nuclear posture to address China’s growing arsenal. But saying that we are realigning does not mean we are directing enough money toward the threat.
Elsewhere, North Korea has provocatively tested nearly 100 missiles over the past two years, presumably to perfect its ability to hit the United States with an ICBM and attack South Korea. It is also seeking to build a fleet of nuclear-armed submarines, which would allow its military to get closer to targets, evade radar systems and potentially strike allies and American bases in South Korea and Japan.
In the Middle East, which already sits on the edge of a regional war, Iran has drastically reduced the time it would take to develop a nuclear weapon as it increases the size of its uranium stockpile and develops and operates advanced centrifuges. In July, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Iran’s breakout time — the amount of time needed to produce enough material for a nuclear weapon — is down to one or two weeks. Iran has also launched a North Korean-derived ballistic missile that can travel nearly 2,000 miles and strike Central Europe, a development that seems to have a pointed message for the West: Iran will not stop until it has a missile that can travel across the Atlantic and hit the United States.
Russia, as it pursues its war on Ukraine, is not only aggressively modernizing all three legs of its nuclear triad. It is also developing a nuclear weapon to launch into space that could destroy satellites and grind our economic, international security and social systems to a halt. The Biden administration, after being challenged by a group of bipartisan members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence this year, declassified its intelligence about this weapon but has not released any further information about Russia’s space-nuke program since then. Russia’s use of an antisatellite nuclear weapon in space would be a catastrophic attack on Western economic and democratic systems.
Our current nuclear arsenal is insufficient to face these fast-evolving threats. Minuteman III missiles, the ground-based portion of our nuclear triad first deployed in 1970, are especially in need of attention; they are aging rapidly and are likely to become less reliable. Any operational problems could undermine the missiles’ effectiveness in deterring potential adversaries, particularly in a high-stakes situation where dependability is paramount.
After conducting an extensive analysis of alternatives in 2014, the Air Force decided to replace the old Minuteman III missile system with a new one called Sentinel that was designed to meet current and future threats. In January, the Department of Defense announced that the program came in 37 percent over budget and is significantly behind schedule. (The cost overrun has since jumped to 81 percent.) Many in the disarmament community jumped at the news as an opportunity to try to get cancellation of the program. But the roadblocks the Sentinel program has hit do not change the fact of the sizable growth of our adversaries’ nuclear programs. The Department of Defense must do whatever it takes to expedite and fully fund this critical component of our nuclear deterrent. Without it, our adversaries could be dangerously emboldened.
That threat also requires Democrats and Republicans alike to give priority to a new integrated missile defense system that can sense threats early and intercept them at every stage of flight. Our current missile defense systems protect the United States from some incoming missiles but may not be able to effectively handle large-scale or multidirectional attacks. Complicating matters further, Russia and China are developing advanced weapon systems like hypersonic missiles, which are harder for our defense systems to track because of their high speed and maneuverability.
Over the past decade, the United States has tested components and parts of a coordinated missile defense architecture. During a test in 2021, the Patriot missile defense system, which Ukraine is successfully using to protect Kyiv from conventional Russian missiles, used sensing data from the F-35 aircraft to track and intercept a would-be nuclear-capable missile. The technology has been successfully tested. Now, we must fully integrate advanced aircraft such as the F-35 into a more interconnected missile defense network to be ready to intercept all threats, including hypersonic missiles, at all stages of flight.
In addition to being able to adequately detect new nuclear threats, there must be a concerted effort to coordinate with our allies on technologies that can defeat them. The United States has, independently and with allies, worked to develop a high-energy laser missile defense system that can intercept various weapons, including rockets, artillery, mortars and drones. Once deployed, this tool will provide an effective and significantly less expensive option than more extensive air-to-air intercept methods and could in the future be deployed to intercept larger nuclear-capable missiles.
The United States has spent decades assembling various components of its layered missile defense architecture. The time is now to fully integrate these systems, invest more in our nuclear-arms program and protect the homeland from an increasing array of threats. Only through this kind of decisive action and cohesive strategy can we make certain that our nation’s defense is as formidable as the challenges we face.