The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 12.5 kilotons.
Think for a minute: Now and for the next 10 years the United States is planning to keep deployed as many as 1,500 such warheads or bombs, many even more powerful than 100 kilotons and almost all ready to be launched or dropped anywhere in the world inside of one hour.
Today’s troubles in Japan should reawaken memories of the Chernobyl nuclear accident 25 years ago and the evacuation of about 600,000 people. And, of course, almost 66 years ago, there were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where atomic bombings resulted in more than 200,000 deaths.
Nevertheless, last week, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.), described himself as “a little nervous about how we’re going to be able to really provide all of our [strategic nuclear warhead] needs” if the United States reduces the number of launching tubes on a new generation of Ohio-class strategic nuclear submarines from 20 to 16 “to save money.”
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus appeared before McKeon and the Senate Armed Services Committee last week to defend his fiscal 2012 budget. He defended reducing the future number of strategic submarines from today’s 14 to 12, as well as the number of tubes on each sub from 20 to 16.
One reason the number of submarines was cut is that each would be powered by a nuclear reactor that will enable it to stay on patrol for its entire lifetime without refueling, Mabus said.
The Navy is trying to develop “the best design that we can and to get the cost into a manageable range,” he said. “We’ve taken $1 billion per boat out within the last year, and we are looking for another half-billion per boat.” That would still put the cost at about $4.5 billion.
Those 16 tubes on the planned 12 new Trident submarines would also give the United States the ability to keep four or more of those boats at sea. Those four alone would be able to launch 64 D-5 intercontinental ballistic missiles, each carrying a minimum of five nuclear warheads. The real question is where — save for perhaps Russia and China, which are today not enemies — could we find 320 targets that needed to be hit with a 50-or-more-kiloton nuclear warhead.
At a meeting of the House Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces a week earlier, Rep. Michael Turner
(R-Ohio) raised the same question as McKeon, but in a different way. He asked Air Force Gen. C. Robert Kehler, the new head of the Strategic Command, if a year ago the command said it needed 20 tubes on the new Ohio class subs, “does 16 meet the requirements and how was it determined that 20 to 16 meets the requirements?”
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