HR4685-119

2. Findings Congress finds the following: According to the Congressional Budget Office, the projected cost to sustain and modernize the United States nuclear arsenal, as of 2025, is $946 billion over the 2025–2034 period, or an average of about $95 billion a year, and nuclear forces account for 8.4 percent of the total 10-year cost of the plans for national defense outlined in the President’s 2025 budget submission. In September 2020, the Air Force awarded a sole-source contract to Northrop Grumman for the ground-based strategic deterrent program (now called Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program), raising concerns that the absence of competition for the award would result in higher than projected costs to United States taxpayers. The program is intended to replace 400 deployed Minuteman III missiles with more than 600 new missiles, to allow for test flights and spares. The Sentinel program has encountered significant cost growth and schedule delays in recent years, and the full extent of both remains uncertain as the Department of Defense is currently restructuring the program. In January 2024, increases in the total costs of the Sentinel program triggered a review under chapter 325 of title 10, United States Code (commonly known as the Nunn-McCurdy Act), which is intended to determine whether a program that has experienced large cost overruns should continue, and what, if any, changes should be made to control costs. In July 2024, the Department of Defense completed that review and released a new estimate of total costs for the program of $141,000,000,000 in constant 2020 dollars, which is 81 percent (or $63,000,000,000) larger than the program’s baseline 2020 estimate of $78,000,000,000. The total estimated life cycle cost of the Sentinel program (not including warheads) was estimated by the Department of Defense to be $260,000,000,000 in 2020 and is undoubtedly higher today. In May 2025, the Air Force announced the Sentinel program will likely predominantly require digging fresh missile silos, a significant change from previous plans to reuse existing silos and a move that would likely cause further significant cost increases and schedule delays. According to public reports, officials of the Department of Defense expect the restructuring effort to delay the Sentinel program by several years. The Department of Defense’s 2025 budget plans called for initial operating capability to be achieved in May 2029, a date that, as of the date of the enactment of this Act, looks unachievable. The Air Force is considering contingency plans that would extend the life of Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles by 11 more years to 2050 if delays continue to plague the Sentinel missiles intended to replace them. The National Nuclear Security Administration is developing a replacement intercontinental ballistic missile warhead, the W87–1, for the Sentinel and expanding plutonium pit production to build new warhead cores, costing at least $14,000,000,000 and $18,000,000,000, respectively. Even in the absence of an intercontinental ballistic missile leg of the triad, the United States would have an assured retaliatory capability in the form of multiple ballistic missile submarines, which are virtually undetectable, and there are no known, near-term credible threats to the survivability of the ballistic missile submarine force. The survivability of the submarine force will be enhanced as the Department of Defense moves to replace the Ohio class ballistic submarine fleet with the new Columbia class ballistic missile fleet. While intercontinental ballistic missiles have historically been the most responsive leg of the United States nuclear triad, advances in ballistic missile submarine communications to allow for the dissemination of emergency action messages in wartime have negated that advantage. Intercontinental ballistic missiles based in silos are vulnerable and, once launched, cannot be recalled, leaving decisionmakers with mere minutes to decide whether to launch the missiles before they are destroyed, known as a posture of launch on warning or launch under attack in the face of a perceived nuclear attack, greatly increasing the risk of a national leader initiating a nuclear war by mistake. Under current policy, the President has the authority— to launch United States nuclear weapons first and is not limited to retaliation; to launch nuclear weapons under warning of attack, rather than waiting for evidence of attack; and to launch nuclear weapons on the President's sole order. False alarms have happened multiple times and can happen again. For example, in 1980, a false alarm was reported to the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and was almost reported up to President Jimmy Carter as a real attack but was luckily identified in time. Recent Pentagon reports have found that, as a result of cyberattacks, the President could be faced with false warnings of attack or lose the ability to control nuclear weapons. In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a former lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defense Forces correctly identified a false warning in an early warning system that showed several United States incoming nuclear missiles, preventing Soviet leaders from launching a retaliatory response, earning Colonel Petrov the nickname the man who saved the world. Former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry wrote that the ground-based leg of the nuclear triad is destabilizing because it invites an attack and intercontinental ballistic missiles are some of the most dangerous weapons in the world and could even trigger an accidental nuclear war. General James Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Commander of the United States Strategic Command, wrote, with Secretary Perry, [T]he greatest danger is not a Russian bolt but a US blunder—that we might accidentally stumble into nuclear war. As we make decisions about which weapons to buy, we should use this simple rule: If a nuclear weapon increases the risk of accidental war and is not needed to deter an intentional attack, we should not build it. … Certain nuclear weapons, such as … the [intercontinental ballistic missile], carry higher risks of accidental war that, fortunately, we no longer need to bear. We are safer without these expensive weapons, and it would be foolish to replace them.. General George Lee Butler, the former Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Air Command and subsequently Commander-in-Chief of the United States Strategic Command, said, I would have removed land-based missiles from our arsenal a long time ago. I’d be happy to put that mission on the submarines. So, with a significant fraction of bombers having a nuclear weapons capability that can be restored to alert very quickly, and with even a small component of Trident submarines—with all those missiles and all those warheads on patrol—it’s hard to imagine we couldn’t get by.. While a sudden bolt from the blue first strike from a near-peer nuclear adversary is a highly unlikely scenario, extending the Minuteman III would maintain the purported role of the intercontinental ballistic missile leg of the triad to absorb such an attack.