Nuclear expert Jon Wolfsthal on the costs of US nuclear weapons programs spiraling out of control

Just as the US House of Representatives passed its so-called “big, beautiful bill” last week, offering large tax cuts to the wealthy and kicking millions off their health insurance, President Trump announced that his administration would invest $175 billion over three years in a “Golden Dome” missile defense project that would, purportedly, protect the United States against any missile attack, small or large. This new defense program adds to an already long list of programs for the modernization and replacement of all US strategic nuclear delivery and associated systems.

Currently estimated at about $1 trillion over the next 10 years, the nuclear modernization program has faced technical and management challenges, leading to repeated cost and schedule overruns. These overruns are so large that they triggered a breach of the Nunn-McCurdy Act, which requires Congress to be notified when defense programs exceed certain cost thresholds. There have been two such notifications recently: First in January 2024 for the new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and a second time in April for the radar modernization program of the latest configuration of the B-52 bomber. And the new Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine could trigger another breach: According to a September 2024 Government Accountability Office report, difficulties with the construction of the lead submarine may result in cost overruns that are nearly five times the Navy’s initial estimates.

To help make sense of the cost problem affecting all three legs of the US nuclear arsenal’s modernization, I spoke with Jon Wolfsthal, a nuclear expert and director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists. Wolfsthal, who is a member of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board, has studied this issue for over a decade. Earlier this month, he wrote an article for the Federation of American Scientists in which he says the costs “continue to spiral out of control.”

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

François Diaz-Maurin: I want to start by asking: Why did you write about the cost issue of the US nuclear weapons programs now?

Jon Wolfsthal: I don’t know why in this environment, in this economic situation, with the broader trends in US politics, the nuclear budget doesn’t get more attention. As I’ve mentioned a few times, whether you think we absolutely need to have a large nuclear arsenal with many different types, or whether you think we should live in a world without nuclear weapons, it is in no one’s interest to have large programs with massive cost overruns, delayed schedules, and without any clear indication that they are going to be running more smoothly in the future.

If we looked at the last decade, not only could we see the costs for these programs rising, but we could see that the demands of the budget would slowly eat up other parts of the defense budget and would lead to reduced nuclear capabilities. This happens not by any strategic decision, but by mismanagement and default. And most people I know, not everybody though, think that’s not the way to achieve nuclear reductions or improve nuclear stability. Rather, that’s a recipe for more risk. And so, with this FAS article, I wanted to try to refresh people’s memories that the cost issue isn’t new. It’s one that we’ve been aware of, but it continues to get worse and will keep getting worse until some higher-level political attention and solutions are brought to bear.

Diaz-Maurin: I guess most of our readers already know that nuclear weapons are costly. But that’s not exactly what your piece is about. It’s rather that the costs are, as you say, spiraling out of control. What do you mean by that? Could you break down a bit what’s happening with those costs?

Wolfsthal: When I first looked at this issue back in 2009, after I entered the Obama administration, it was clear that the Bush administration had not been investing money to maintain a safe arsenal; they had diverted money away from stockpile surveillance, which are basic, non-controversial steps to maintain a safe arsenal. So President Obama and Vice President Biden immediately took steps to make sure we were keeping our weapons safe by investing more money in a program that wasn’t necessarily part of the Prague agenda. It was just common sense: You don’t want weapons to be neglected. You don’t want them to risk going off, and you don’t want to have to risk having to return to nuclear testing.

But in 2010, President Obama made a series of commitments in order to convince the Senate to approve the New START treaty. And at that time, he committed to spending $88 billion over 10 years to modernize the arsenal. When I left government in 2012, it was already clear that the full scope of that modernization was going to be much bigger, but nobody had ever looked at exactly what that scope was going to be. And so, Jeff Lewis and I, along with our research assistant at [the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in] Monterey did that first analysis in 2014. And we came up with the number, based on the government’s own estimates, that it would cost $1 trillion over 30 years to modernize the [US nuclear] arsenal and maintain what we had.

At the time, we were criticized as being alarmist, anti-nuclear, padding the budget, and trying to attack the sustainment program. And there were also comments, and this is in the piece, that people said: “This is affordable. It’s a small fraction of the defense budget, and it’s historically very low.” They looked at what modernization had cost during the Reagan administration, and it was about 6 percent of the defense budget at the time. So, for them, this was going to be less than that.

Now, fast forward to the [April] report by the Congressional Budget Office, not only is $1 trillion low for a 30-year estimate, but we’re going to spend a trillion dollars in 10 years, because all of these programs turned out to be vastly more complicated and vastly more expensive. This is partly because of political decisions made by the first Trump administration to award these contracts before they were mature, to single-source contractors, and to bite off more than the defense industrial complex could chew. First, we have the [Sentinel] ICBM program, with an initial estimate of about $60 to $70 billion now running above $140 billion. Then, the B-21 bomber program is classified.^[1] It was classified at the request of the late Senator John McCain. Therefore, we don’t even know what those budget costs are. And, quite frankly, I think the Congressional Budget Office probably underestimates what those costs are, because the Air Force has always wanted to exclude research and development costs.

Then, the [Columbia-class] submarine has been delayed for a number of reasons. I think that has probably less to do with programmatic mismanagement than with just real shortfalls in our defense industrial complex. And I don’t have the numbers right in front of me in terms of the sub growth, but there’s no doubt that the ICBM has been the poster child for cost overruns.

And then there was just a report in April that the B-52, the current nuclear bomber, has actually breached the Nunn-McCurdy guidelines, because it has exceeded the allowed cost overruns and is now considered an at-risk program. So the cost issue is not unique to any one program. The problem is that the Defense Department is trying to modernize every leg of the US nuclear deterrent at the same time, while also trying to build next-generation fighters and attack submarines, and to deal with repairs that are to the defense industrial base on the conventional side. But it just can’t do it all, and things are going to get more and more expensive.

Diaz-Maurin: You mentioned the B-52 bomber breaching the Nunn-McCurdy Act, which requires that the military services notify Congress when a program exceeds its appropriated cost or schedule. Last year, the Sentinel ICBM program also breached the Nunn-McCurdy Act with an unprecedented 37 percent growth in budget compared to previous estimates and at least a two-year schedule delay. But as far as I can know, nothing happened, and the program is likely to proceed. Does it mean that Congress has no say ultimately over such breaches?

Wolfsthal: Well, these are always questions of political will. Congress passed a law and under the Biden administration, the Nunn-McCurdy Act was followed. [After a breach], it requires the Defense Department to recertify that there are no alternatives for the program and that the necessary steps are being taken to move money from one part of the defense budget to meet the shortfall and to put the program on sound footing. In this case, it was the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisitions and Sustainment [William LaPlante] who certified the program under [Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin and determined that there was no alternative, which I don’t believe to be true. Now we know that the Minuteman III can be extended. So that’s the alternative.^[2]

Any assurances that the program was being put on sound footing are now completely blown away by the fact that they’re not even sure what silos they’re going to have: Do they need all new silos? Can they repurpose old silos like they’re going back to the drawing board on silos? Congress should take that certification and analyze it. Part of the problem is that the Nunn-McCurdy justification is classified and has not been released. In fact, the Federation of American Scientists has submitted a FOIA request for the Nunn-McCurdy certification, because we’d like to know what analysis went into trying to comply with the law. But as we’ve seen in this environment, the law is what judges say it is, and Congress would have to stand up for its political and legal rights, because they’re not going to just be handed them by the Trump administration.

Diaz-Maurin: What’s the alternative to the Sentinel ICBM program, exactly? And, generally speaking, are all nuclear modernization programs equally necessary for national security?

Wolfsthal: Those are exactly the right questions. And what we appear to be doing is saying, “we made a decision 10 years ago, and it’s impossible to revisit those decisions, and we have to keep doing this no matter what.” But that’s not the way nuclear strategy should be run, and the fact that they haven’t revisited basic concepts suggests to me that they’re just not interested in or capable of doing the hard work of managing this arsenal.

If the President determines—which is his right—that we need to maintain 400 warheads on ICBMs, there are lots of ways we can do that. During the Obama administration in 2016, we suggested that you could take the 200 most reliable Minuteman IIIs and simply put two warheads on each of them. You would cut the reliability risk of the ICBM program significantly, because you could take the most reliable, most modern of the Minuteman IIIs and maintain two warheads on each. This wouldn’t risk inviting an attack because Russia or China would still have to strike at 200 fixed land targets. So, you still would have the sponge and a very visible deterrent.^[3] But that was rejected by the Air Force as unworkable, even though it turns out the Sentinel program is also unworkable.

Still, there are alternatives. For instance, could the United States go back to the drawing board and develop mobile ICBMs? Could the United States build a new ICBM, but fewer of them? Could the United States simply upload warheads to submarines and have fewer ICBMs? Back in 2018, there was an analysis done by Global Zero called “Alternative Nuclear Posture Review,” which talked about going to a [nuclear] dyad, with submarines and bombers only. So, there are lots of ways by which the United States could maintain a very robust nuclear deterrent and fighting force without having to spend $140 billion plus on a new ICBM, which likely will not be deployed for more than a decade, which I think is even a very optimistic timeline.

Diaz-Maurin: Going back to your piece, you seem to describe a systemic inability by the Defense Department to meet budget and schedule for its nuclear programs. What can be done to improve oversight of those programs?

Wolfsthal: These are hard things to do. It’s not as if I am sitting in a nice non-governmental office without government responsibility and saying that this is easy. These programs are difficult. But this is why we suggested in 2014 that these things are so hard; we shouldn’t be doing them all at the same time. Stagger them. Invest. Do the submarine first, because the submarine is necessary. They’re stabilizing. The defense capacity is there. Then, if you’re going to do the bomber, you know there are explanations for why you might want to do the conventional bomber first. Maybe you want to delay that program somewhat. But when it comes to the ICBM, this program could easily have been pushed out another decade.

I still think that there are lots of good reasons to say, especially if you’re going to have to extend the life of the Minuteman IIIs anyway: Stop the Sentinel program. Go back to the drawing board. Reevaluate how many warheads you need, which we’re going to have to do anyway as New START goes away. And then, figure out what’s the best, most reliable way to maintain those capabilities. Maybe that is a new ICBM, maybe that’s mobile, maybe it’s fixed. But buy yourself the five years necessary to figure out how to do this program, and in the meantime, get some of these other programs on a sound footing, because the same people that are managing the finances, the defense industrial base, the contracting, the long-lead-term procurement items, the defense contractors are doing all these programs. But there’s just only so much time in the day, and we’re facing now a trillion-dollar defense budget annually that is still not capable of doing the basic things that most people would say are necessary: maintaining a well-equipped, motivated military force, taking care of their health, buying modern communication, command, and control equipment, building resiliency, preparing for the future of warfare (whether it’s AI, cyber, non-kinetic), all those different things.

Very few people think that nuclear weapons are the most important thing that the Defense Department is doing. These weapons are, in many people’s views, necessary, but not the most important. And so, how do we right-size this investment? Maybe you stop some of the programs, and maybe you slow some of them down. But right now, there is no strategic prioritization taking place within the Defense Department. I don’t think that [Defense] Secretary Hegseth has a knowledge base on these issues, nor do I think that the people that he’s brought in under him have any experience with managing these nuclear systems. And the White House is not exercising control in that area. Therefore, the only option is for Congress to step up, and for the expert community, the civil society community, the Congressional Budget Offices of the world, to draw attention to this issue, to try to create momentum for some sound analysis and changes to put these programs on a better footing.

Diaz-Maurin: Let me play a little devil’s advocate here. Whenever there is a congressional hearing about threat assessment, you get experts and military officials testifying that the United States urgently needs to upgrade all three legs of its nuclear arsenal at the same time to respond to China’s growing nuclear ambitions and the likely end of strategic arms control with Russia. In their view, the full nuclear modernization program is a necessary insurance policy for national security. What would you tell them?

Wolfsthal: I would say that right now we have five legs of a nuclear arsenal, not three. We have submarines, ICBMs, and bombers, but we also have long-range cruise missiles and tactical (non-strategic) nuclear weapons. So, the United States already has more than a triad. What’s at risk is not whether we can maintain a nuclear deterrent, but whether we can maintain an effective nuclear deterrent by trying to buy new systems that will not be delivered on time, will not have the operational capability that they were originally designed to have, and that we will end up in disarmament or reductions either by default or by mismanagement. Therefore, the choice before us is not to maintain a great arsenal or to develop a super great arsenal. It is whether we can define a pathway to maintain a reasonable arsenal that can deter our adversaries and protect our allies, or whether we are going to drop off a cliff because we cannot effectively manage these programs. And that’s not me arguing that we can live with fewer nuclear weapons. It’s simply that we need a strategy. We then need to put capabilities and resources to work to achieve that strategy, be mindful about it, and be effective at it.

In 2009, I drafted part of the Prague speech for President Obama, and people tend to look only at one part of that speech or the other, but they rarely read the whole thing. What Obama said is that we should recommit ourselves to a world without nuclear weapons. But so long as nuclear weapons exist, they need to be safe, secure, and effective. Those two things go hand in hand, and right now, we’re on a pathway to neither pursue a world without nuclear weapons nor maintain a safe and effective nuclear arsenal. And as a result, we risk not getting either, and that is a recipe for real danger.

Diaz-Maurin: When we go back to the reliability issue across the legs, it all comes down to the reliability of the plutonium pits, the explosive core of nuclear weapons. As part of the US nuclear modernization, the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration has launched an ambitious program to produce new plutonium pits at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. But this program, too, is facing cost overruns and production challenges. What’s your view about this program?

Wolfsthal: First, I still rely on the 2006 study that was done by the JASON [advisory group], which concluded that our pits are likely to be reliable for at least 100 years. What this comes down to, however, is not the internal perceived reliability of an individual pit, or even of an individual missile or submarine. It is whether an adversary believes that the United States is capable and willing to launch nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack or strategic threat to the United States or its allies? Because if they do, then it doesn’t matter if our weapons are 98 percent or 94 percent reliable. It simply matters that we have influenced our adversaries and our allies so they know that the US commitment is credible.

Our biggest challenge right now is not the technical reliability of our programs. The biggest problem is that nobody believes that President Trump would ever risk the security of the United States to protect its allies, and adversaries doubt seriously whether Trump would even launch US nuclear weapons in response to an attack by Russia or China because he’s trying to cut economic deals with as much as he is trying to deter them. So our problems are not going to be fixed financially. They need to be fixed politically.

Now, to the extent that we will need nuclear weapons to be credible until we can achieve some more stable outcome, we need to make sure we are not wasting money and spending these funds and scarce resources on programs that aren’t going to build what they are designed to build. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much what we are doing right now. We are not only trying to build an aircraft while we are flying it. We’re trying to build an aircraft while it’s doing a nosedive into the ground, and the trajectory is already set. The first rule of hole digging when you’re in one is to stop digging. And any reasonable analyst would look at the Sentinel ICBM program and say, “This has to go back to the drawing board.”

Diaz-Maurin: One final question before I wrap up this interview. President Trump just announced his plan to build a so-called Golden Dome missile defense project in three years at a cost of no more than $175 billion. Past the feasibility of building such a complex system in so little time, what do you make of its cost estimate?

Wolfsthal: Everything we have learned about missile defense over the last 50 years is being ignored by the Trump administration. Their estimates are easily off by an order of magnitude, and any protection they provide will be so limited as to be almost insignificant. Moreover, pursuing a Golden Dome missile defense will drive our adversaries to build more missiles, more maneuverable missiles, and rely on decoys, enabling them to render any national defense ineffective. These funds would be much better spent on other defense and non-defense priorities. The idea that we will build any kind of effective defense in the next three years is simply a fantasy.

Notes

[1] The B-21 bomber is expected to enter service by 2027 to gradually replace the B-1B and B-2 bombers through the 2030s. In total, the Air Force is expected to procure at least 100 B-21 bombers.

[2] Some current Minuteman III ICBMs will likely have to be life-extended to make up for the delay in the new Sentinel ICBM program.

[3] The “nuclear sponge” is a concept that illustrates how silos would absorb hundreds of Russian (or Chinese) missiles and warheads to destroy the United States’ ICBM silos before these adversaries can launch an attack on other targets.