Costs for U.S. Nuclear Weapon Programs Continue to Spiral Out of Control
In 2014, my colleagues at the Monterey Institute for International Studies and I authored a study called The Trillion Dollar Nuclear Triad. This report laid out comprehensively, for the first time, that the recently launched US nuclear modernization program–including building new nuclear-armed submarines, bombers, and long-range missiles as well as new nuclear weapons–would likely cost over $1 trillion during its 30-year time scale. Until then, no one had even an estimate for how much these programs would cost over their lifetimes. At the time, my co-authors and I were criticized by advocates for the nuclear modernization program as alarmist and accused of actively seeking to inflate estimates to undermine political support for these programs. Overall, proponents argued that these programs were necessary and that the cost was a mere fraction of the Pentagon’s overall budget, historically low when compared to the nuclear modernization of the 1970s and 1980s. What was originally described merely as a bow wave of costs has become a tsunami.
On April 25, the Congressional Budget Office released its latest estimate that costs of maintaining the current nuclear arsenal and modernizing the entire program would cost nearly $1 trillion over the next 10 years alone. As was once said, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. This is not an argument about statistics but about absolute numbers. By any measure, $1 trillion is an enormous amount of money to spend in 10 years, and any other U.S. Government or private effort on this scale would receive intense scrutiny and attention–in fact, the Sentinel ICBM modernization most recently triggered a critical breach of the Nunn McCurdy act in 2024. Moreover, if the nuclear budget is going to average 10% from the estimated $1 trillion annual defense budget for the next decade, the nuclear program is now eating the defense budget alive.
For those who may doubt whether oversight is necessary, one only needs to look at one of the more visible elements of the nuclear modernization program–the effort to replace the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile program. When we did our original estimate in 2014, there was no estimate for the cost of replacing the MMIII. We noted that past efforts to build comparable long-range missile systems were complex, expensive, and prone to large cost overruns. The example we cited was the “Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle, which involved the purchase of 150 space launch vehicles based on existing technologies. Originally slated to cost $30 billion, program costs now exceed $70 billion.”
The sole recommendation of this 2014 report was that the USG and Department of Defense in particular needs to create a stand alone nuclear budget to understand the complex nature of these programs and their costs, and keep them on budget and under control. While we did not push the recommendation in the report, we strongly suggested overall that the program was unlikely to meet schedule and cost milestones because it was going to put the constrained U.S. defense industrial capacity under stress and it would be better to stagger these complex multi-decade and multi-billion dollar programs.Ten years later, this recommendation is still needed.
To push these programs through and dismiss alternatives, the military and defense contractors and defense hawks in Congress argued the sky was falling, that Russia and China were modernizing, that nuclear war would be more expensive, so there was no margin for error or delay to consider alternatives. Ironically, the mismanagement of the modernization program now threatens to produce the very delay they were warning against.
In all of these areas, our report was not only rebuffed by advocates for the nuclear modernization program, but our recommendations were ignored. And over time, the consequences of plowing ahead with these programs despite predicted problems have come to pass. The MMIII replacement program, now dubbed Sentinel, was originally estimated to cost $62 billion. That program is now slated to cost $126 billion in the next 10 years alone, and over $140 billion in total. Those costs can also be expected to keep rising due to ongoing delays in the program. This program bypassed the normal programmatic reviews and procurement milestones, and was rushed to a single source contract during President Trump’s first term, with predictably bad results. It now seems likely that the Air Force will have to extend the life of the MMIII missile through 2050–something supporters of the new ICBM have argued would be impossible in both 2021 and 2023.
There is still no comprehensive budget from DOD laying out their costs or predicting the full cost of implementing the current U.S. nuclear weapons modernization program. This is akin to agreeing to buying a house without knowing the sales price, the mortgage rate, or the monthly payment. Yes, you need to live somewhere, but in an era where critical U.S. programs for defense, science, climate, health and international programs and even nuclear weapons security and safety are being cut, it is nonsensical that these programs continue without adequate oversight and knowledge of their true costs.
Whether the U.S. can afford these programs is a reasonable question. Knowing how much these new systems will cost, it is appropriate to ask: if the Pentagon can not produce even a budget on costs, how can they be expected to oversee and deliver what their advocates claim are critical national security programs? The inadequate oversight, cost management and even basic program accountability will result, as we predicted in 2014, “disarmament by default”, an unsustainable and dangerous way to manage U.S. national security.
Nuclear weapons budgeting is like agreeing to buying a house without knowing the sales price, the mortgage rate, or the monthly payment.
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Over the past year, the campaign to abolish nuclear weapons has experienced numerous wins that were celebrated at the Meeting of State Parties.
China is NOT a nuclear “peer” of the United States, as some contend.
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