U.S. Nuclear Weapons

By Daryl G. Kimball and Tom Z. Collina

The following piece was originally published in The Christian Science Monitor on January 19, 2012.

In order to reach its goal of at least $480 billion in Pentagon savings over the next decade, the Obama administration must scale back previous schemes for a new generation of strategic nuclear weapons delivery systems.

In November 2010, as the Senate neared the end of its debate on the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the Obama administration submitted to Congress an update to its “1251 report,” outlining how it planned to maintain and modernize U.S. strategic nuclear forces under the treaty.1

The Pentagon is looking at bringing the U.S. nuclear arsenal below the levels set in the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), as well as scaling back new weapon systems, administration officials said last month.

Volume 2, Issue 16, December 2, 2011

The supercommittee’s Nov. 21 failure to reach agreement on a deficit reduction plan has triggered deep, automatic reductions in future U.S. defense spending. At the same time, some in Congress are finally beginning to examine how much the United States plans to spend on nuclear weapons in the years ahead.