“Nuclear Weapons at Any Price? Congress Should Say No,” May 13, 2024 op-ed, Scientific American

Bipartisanship seems rare in Congress these days. But one place to consistently find agreement between Democrats and Republicans is support for modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal—currently numbering almost 5,000 nuclear warheads, plus the triad of missiles, submarines and bombers to deliver them. Unfortunately, that consensus also seems to extend to turning a blind eye to the exploding costs, which helps explain why the original $1 trillion modernization program proposed in 2010 today has a price tag approaching $2 trillion. That estimate is likely to escalate even further by 2050—the supposed end date for modernization.

Supporting nuclear modernization at any price is neither necessary nor affordable. Instead, Congress needs to improve, and be held accountable for, fiscal oversight of the nuclear arsenal.

Congress should first start by looking at the intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). In January of this year, the Air Force announced that the price tag for its new ICBM—the Sentinel—had increased by more than 37 percent. This triggered a review mandated by the Nunn-McCurdy Act—a 1982 law that sought to rein in the spiraling cost of military spending. Sentinel’s increased cost—from $96 billion to $130 billion over the next 10 years—is a “critical breach” of the act and should lead to termination of the program. To avoid this, the secretary of defense must explain the cause of the cost growth and restructure the program, which he is expected to do in coming months.

But the Sentinel “critical breach” underplays modernization’s inflation. In 2015 the U.S. Air Force put the price of a new ICBM program at $62 billion and argued that a new missile would be cheaper than maintaining the current Minuteman III ICBMs. A year later an independent Pentagon evaluation had argued that costs could go as high as $150 billion—yet the official estimate put the price at $85 billion. Congress failed to investigate why the budget request was based on the lower figure. So far, no hearings are planned to investigate the Sentinel cost overrun or to consider the options for restructuring or eliminating the program. For perspective, Congress has held two hearings on UFOs in the last two years.

Not to be outdone, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)—the part of the Department of Energy in charge of making warheads for the nuclear arsenal—announced on April 18 that building the facilities to make plutonium pits for those warheads would cost $28 to $37 billion—a significant jump over the 2018 estimate of $8.6 to 14.8 billion. But that increase doesn’t capture the full picture of the cost inflation that has plagued pit production.

Until 1989, pits were made at Rocky Flats, a U.S. government facility operated by a contractor that was raided by the FBI and subsequently closed after numerous environmental and safety violations. Since that time, only a handful of pits have been made, all at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which itself has a history of safety problems.