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Gen.: Nuke arsenal can be cut, not eliminated

The officer who oversees America’s nuclear arsenal said he supports a reduction in the warhead inventory but that a strong nuclear deterrent will be needed for many decades to come.

“I believe we’re going to need a nuclear deterrent in this country for the remainder of this century, the 21st century,” said Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, in a meeting Tuesday with defense reporters in Washington.

But as U.S. officials look to the future, Chilton said, “What we need is a modernized nuclear weapon to go with our modernized delivery platforms that we’ve worked on and are working on, and a responsive infrastructure, one that can produce weapons.

“If we do that right ... you have an opportunity to lower what is referred to commonly as the hedge inventory, the backup inventory,” said Chilton.

In December, Congress turned down the Defense Department’s request to fund the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, which Congress mandated in 2004, instead directing that defense officials develop a “comprehensive nuclear weapons strategy for the 21st century.”

Maintaining an arsenal will be necessary as long as other nations have similar capabilities, Chilton said.

“I am not in favor of unilateral disarmament,” he said. “So long as we possess nuclear weapons, it is our responsibility to treat them appropriately, safely and securely — and to make sure we are ready to use them, because that is the deterrent force that we provide.”

That does not mean that in a more peaceful world, he wouldn’t prefer getting rid of all nuclear weapons.

“These are absolutely powerful and terrible weapons,” Chilton said. “I’m a father, too, of children, and I would love to have ’em grow up in a nuclear-free world. Absolutely. And I don’t want to equivocate on that at all.

“But I’m not for unilateral disarmament,” he repeated. “I also want them to grow up free. And as long as we have other nations out there with nuclear capabilities ... that threaten our freedom, then I think we need to have a nuclear deterrent force that can do the mission of preserving our freedom.”

Modernizing the arsenal, Chilton said, “will allow us to get rid of a lot of the nuclear weapons that we have in our inventory — not deployed today, necessarily, but in our inventories — which are too big, in my view. Or bigger than they need to be, actually.”

Due to changes in requirements and reductions mandated by treaties with Russia, the U.S. nuclear stockpile by 2012 will have shrunk by 25 percent from the height of the Cold War, Chilton said.

“And that’s not trivial,” he said.

The nation’s deterrence strategy also has shifted from its Cold War roots, Chilton said.

“Think about it in a much different way than you did with the Soviets,” Chilton said. “Deterrence in the 21st century ... is going to require whole-of-government approaches, not just a military approach. ... It’s not one-size-fits-all for deterrence.”

That’s because of the different danger posed by, say, the leader of a new, yet rogue, nuclear power.

“What motivates that individual?” Chilton said. “What do they value? What do they fear? What is unacceptable risk to them, in what areas? It may not be a military solution at all. It may be an economic solution, or diplomatic solution.

“How can we work with the interagency, with the whole of government, to address the specific different types of actors on the world scene that we’d be interested in deterring or dissuading from doing things counter to U.S. interests?” Chilton said.

Then there is the entirely different challenge of a stateless terrorist acquiring a nuclear weapon.

“How do you address the al-Qaidas of the world who would love to get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction and employ it against the United States?” Chilton said. “How do you deter that entity? These are really hard questions that we believe we have to address and think about.”

And in a military sense, Chilton said he’d like to have additional non-nuclear — and even non-kinetic — options. The nation would have more “arrows in the quiver” if it added a long-range conventional strike capability as well as a cyber-strike capability, Chilton said.

U.S. Strategic Command is also responsible for global command, control, communications, computers and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; global strike missions; and global missile defense, among other responsibilities.