Ex-Air Force Chief Touts Warhead

By Jon Fox
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — A U.S. plan to create a nuclear warhead easier to produce and maintain could lead to a five-fold reduction in U.S. nuclear stockpiles, a former head of the Air Force said today (see GSN, May 10). 

Gen. Larry Welch, who served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke strongly in favor of the Reliable Replacement Warhead during a breakfast meeting of the National Defense University Foundation.

The RRW program, which is aimed at designing a new nuclear warhead to initially replace the payloads on some of the U.S. submarine-launched ballistic missiles, has drawn criticism within the arms control community and skepticism in Congress (see GSN, May 3).

Administration officials have argued that the new warheads would be easier to maintain and produce, eventually reducing the need for costly maintenance programs for the existing weapons.

Legislators, however, have called for the program to progress incrementally and have expressed concerns that a new warhead would require nuclear testing before it could enter the U.S. arsenal (see GSN, March 30).

The new warhead would permit the United States to significantly draw down its reserve of nondeployed nuclear warheads by as much as a factor of five, Welch said.

“The problem is right now, there’s lots of focus on reducing the deployed stockpile without talking about the real issue,” he said.  “The real issue is the nondeployed stockpile.  That’s where the large numbers are.”

The ratio of deployed to nondeployed warheads remains classified but Welch noted that the relationship is “quite large.”

According to the most recent figures published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist the United States maintains just more than 5,500 deployed nuclear warheads plus more than 4,200 in nondeployed reserves.

The large reserve stockpile is a result of “diverse types of weapons in the deployed stockpile that are of various lines in which we have various levels of confidence in the long term,” Welch said.

By mixing in the Reliable Replacement Warhead — if carried out to the extent planned, the program could result in as many as three new warheads for various weapons systems — the large stockpile maintained in part as a hedge against any system failing could be drawn down, Welch argued. 

“We maintain a quite large nondeployed stockpile to compensate for that,” he said.

It is an argument Bush administration officials have made in pushing for the RRW program (see GSN, March 5).

Without altering the current judgment about how many deployed warheads are needed to maintain nuclear deterrence, the United States could significantly reduce its warhead reserves, Welch said.  “Once you do that you probably ought to talk about the deployed stockpile”

The deployed stockpile, however, should remain on its current path to a maximum of 2,200 warheads as provided for under the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, Welch said, adding that he has heard no logical argument to support further reductions (see GSN, March 2).

“I think it’s exactly what we ought to have it. … We arrived at it very carefully,” he said.

Welch was a member of the Joint Chiefs when the number of deployed U.S. warheads was reduced from 10,200 to 6,500 and part of the study to recommend a further reduction from 6,500 to 3,500.

Those changes were supported by a changing global threat environment, he said.  Any further reductions would have to be preceded by careful consideration of security needs, including taking stock of Russian weapons, said Welch.  “I want to hear the logic for 1,000.”

Regarding nuclear weapons in general, Welch described a nuclear weapon-free world as a quaint fantasy and the provision of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty calling for eventual disarmament as baffling.

Complete U.S. disarmament simply cannot happen, he said.

“Imagine we are at zero and other people aren’t,” he said.  On the treaty obligation for complete nuclear disarmament, Welch said: “You just can’t.  Don’t ask me how that got written into a serious article that people have agreed to.”

As long as the capacity exists in the world to destroy the United States with a devastating nuclear attack and that power is not in the hands of a confirmed U.S. ally, the United States will need to maintain its land- and sea-based nuclear deterrent, Welch said.

“It’s not a disease that will be eradicated.  It’s a fact of life,” he said, arguing that nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented.   “We will not be able to expunge the knowledge from the minds of human kind on the planet.”

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