The Defense Department plans to reduce the number of operational U.S. nuclear warheads from today's 6,000 to 3,800 over the next five years as part of the administration's new strategic policy, a Pentagon official said yesterday.
In announcing those reductions as one result of the Pentagon's year-long Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), Assistant Secretary of Defense J.D. Crouch told reporters the smaller number of deployed nuclear weapons would be augmented by introduction of missile defenses and precision-guided conventional weapons.
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Crouch said the traditional Cold War strategy that was based on threats posed almost totally by Russia is being replaced by a "capabilities-based approach" focused on different contingencies not necessarily associated with any particular country.
In this new era, Crouch said, "We expect to be surprised and so we have to have capabilities that would deal with a broad range of [threats]."
The review represented the first time the administration has spelled out how it plans to carry out the president's promise to reduce the operational U.S. nuclear arsenal. At his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in November, President Bush said that by 2012, the number of deployed U.S. warheads would come down to between 1,700 and 2,000.
The initial warhead reductions disclosed by Crouch in yesterday's briefing parallel those that had been planned during the Clinton administration. Of the warheads set to be taken out by 2005, 500 would come from the 50 Peacekeeper ICBMs, each of which carries 10 warheads; 800 would come from the 96 missiles carried on four Trident submarines that have been designated for decommissioning, and 1,000 would come from the removal of two warheads from each of 500 Minuteman III ICBMs, in a move set under terms of the 1993 START II treaty.
Crouch said that many of the warheads removed would be kept as a "responsive force," able to be reinstalled on missiles within weeks or months. He called it "prudent that we have some responsive capability" that would allow some of the warheads to be returned to the active inventory.
Crouch said no decision had been made on which weapons or how many would be kept for the responsive force.
Noting that previous arms control agreements did not specifically call for destruction of weapons, Crouch said, "I believe the Russians are doing a very similar thing."
Critics of the Bush decision to retain weapons have noted that the Clinton administration also stored warheads it reduced, which will soon create a situation where the United States has more nuclear warheads stored than on operational alert.
On the controversial issue of whether the administration is considering any new nuclear weapons designs to attack deeply buried bunkers or caves, Crouch gave an ambiguous answer. "At this point, there are no recommendations in the report about developing new nuclear weapons," he said. Then he added, "We are trying to look at a number of initiatives," one of which "would be to modify an existing weapon to give it greater capability against deep or hard targets."
Crouch also said there was no current plan for resumption of underground nuclear testing and attributed the decision to reduce from the current two years the time necessary to prepare for such a test to a study done during the previous administration.
At the White House, however, press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters that Bush has not ruled out conducting nuclear testing "to make sure the stockpile, particularly as it is reduced, is reliable and safe. So he has not ruled out testing in the future, but there are no plans to do so."
Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information and a specialist in nuclear weapons, said yesterday that although he does not agree with the broad approach taken by the new NPR, its reduction of warheads on alert intercontinental ballistic missiles "is a major improvement."
