The New York Analysis of Policy and Government’s two-part overview of Russia’s relatively little-reported national security challenges to the United States concludes today.
It is stunning how, in the hotly contested American presidential contest, little mention is made about former secretary Hillary Clinton’s sale of massive interests in uranium (the basic ingredient of nuclear weapons) to Russia.
Robert Monroe, a former director of the Defense Nuclear Agency writes in The Wall Street Journal that “… one of the most important issues in the 2016 election should be the precarious decline of America’s nuclear forces…Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military strategy focuses on early use of these weapons in conflicts large and small. China is in the midst of an immense strategic modernization. India and Pakistan are expanding and improving their nuclear arsenals. North Korea issues nuclear threats almost weekly. The Mideast is dissolving into chaos, and Iran’s advanced nuclear-weapons program has been on the front pages for two years.” He notes that “Since the dawn of the nuclear era, 12 U.S. presidents—six Democrats and six Republicans—have specifically stated nuclear superiority as U.S. policy. Mr. Obama reversed it upon taking office and has accelerated the deterioration of America’s nuclear arsenal.”
Monroe advocates a return to realism in the setting of our nuclear defense strategy, a sharp reversal of the Obama/Clinton naïve policies. To address these multiplying threats, “U.S. nuclear policy must undergo radical changes.”
He notes that “Since the dawn of the nuclear era, 12 U.S. presidents—six Democrats and six Republicans—have specifically stated nuclear superiority as U.S. policy. Mr. Obama reversed it upon taking office and has accelerated the deterioration of America’s nuclear arsenal.” He includes in his recommendations the modernization of America’s increasingly obsolescent nuclear arsenal. “President Obama’s policy doesn’t permit research, design, testing or production of new, advanced nuclear weapons. Our current nuclear weapons—strategic and tactical—were designed and built decades ago to meet different threats, and have gone untested for decades.” Monroe also calls for a refutation of the essentially pacifist Obama/Clinton policies and a “• A return to legitimate deterrence in U.S. foreign policy.”
The Center for Security Policy quotes General Kevin P. Chilton, who served as Commander of the United States Strategic Command: “Other declared nuclear powers continue to modernize their nuclear weapons, delivery platforms, and infrastructure. Conversely, the US has effectively eliminated its nuclear weapons production capacity and allowed its infrastructure to atrophy. We no longer produce successive generations of nuclear weapons and we have discontinued underground testing.”
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The Heritage Foundation’s analysisof the health of the dwindling U.S. nuclear arsenal found it to be only “marginal,” and notes further worries, as well.
“The National Nuclear Laboratories are beset by talent and recruitment challenges of their own. Thomas D’Agostino, former Under Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Security and Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), stated that in about five years, the United States will not have a single active engineer who had ‘a key hand in the design of a warhead that’s in the existing stockpile and who was responsible for that particular design when it was tested back in the early 1990s.’ This is a significant problem because for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, the U.S. will have to rely on the scientific judgment of people who were not directly involved in nuclear tests of weapons that they had designed and developed and were certifying… our ability to reconstitute nuclear forces will probably decline with the passage of time…Fiscal uncertainty and a steady decline in resources for the nuclear weapons enterprise have [also] negatively affected U.S. nuclear weapons readiness… Certain negative trends could undermine U.S. nuclear deterrence if problems are not addressed. From an aging nuclear weapons infrastructure and workforce, to the need to recapitalize all three legs of the nuclear triad, to the need to conduct life extension programs while maintaining a self-imposed nuclear weapons test moratorium, to limiting the spread of nuclear know-how and the means to deliver nuclear weapons, to adversaries who are modernizing their nuclear forces, there is no shortage of challenges on the horizon.”
Dire military threats, and urgent national security challenges are apparently far too trivial for the media to cover.