Obama’s New Nuclear Cruise Missile: Another Nuclear Weapon Intended To be Usable

The Obama Administration’s nuclear modernization plans fly in the face of Obama’s claim that he is reducing the role of nuclear weapons in national security strategy. It’s clear that the Pentagon, through these programs, particularly the B61-12 bomb and the Long Range Standoff (LRSO) cruise missile, is seeking nuclear weapons that are more tactically useful. Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists has been persistent in pointing this out. In a March 25 blog posting, Kristensen highlighted the questions that Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked in a recent hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee, during which administration officials tried but failed to convince her of the need for the LRSO.

NATO commander Gen. Philip Breedlove, Kristensen reports, argued in a separate hearing that the new B-21 bomber and its new cruise missile are needed to break anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) measures. This is so that the bombers can break through air defenses in order to get close enough to destroy their primary targets. Those A2/AD targets would include Russian S-400 air-defense, Russian Bastion-P coastal defense, and Chinese DF-10A land-attack missile launchers.

Frank Klotz, the director of the national Nuclear Security Administration, made a bumbling effort to convince Feinstein of this argument but failed miserably. “No you didn’t convince me,” she said.

Kristensen concludes by showing that the argument that the LRSO is needed to “bust” A2-AD defenses means that this is not a weapon of last resort, as nuclear weapons ought to be, but a weapon which brings nuclear use to the forefront of a conflict. This argument, Kristensen writes, “sounds eerily similar to the outrageous threats that Russian officials have made over the past several years to use nuclear weapons against NATO missile defense systems,” but instead, the US calls it “deterrence and reassurance.” Worse, still, the targets that they say the LRSO is to be used against, are reachable with conventional weapons that are currently in service. One flaw in Kristensen’s argument is that he takes at face value Obama’s promise, made in his speech in Prague in 2009, to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Kristensen thinks that the problem is that the nuclear warfighters in the Pentagon are out of control and need to be reined in, when in reality it’s Obama that is creating the conditions for nuclear confrontation with not only Russia, but China as well.