Biden goes ‘full steam ahead’ on Trump’s nuclear expansion despite campaign rhetoric

President Joe Biden ran on a platform opposing new nuclear weapons, but his first defense budget backs two controversial new projects put in motion by former President Donald Trump and also doubles down on the wholesale upgrade of all three legs of the arsenal.

The decision to retain a low-yield warhead that was outfitted on submarine-launched ballistic missiles in 2019, and to initiate research into a new sea-launched cruise missile, has sparked an outcry from arms control advocates and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which is vowing a fight to reverse the momentum.

"We must instead spend money on threats that Americans are actually facing like pandemics and climate change, instead of on new destabilizing weapons when we can extend the lifespan of the ones we already have for much cheaper,” progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said in a statement.

Khanna and other Democrats are spoiling for a fight over nuclear funding in the coming months, including slashing money for a new fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles and the new sea-launched missiles.

“The signal this budget is sending is full steam ahead: ‘We like what Trump was doing and we want to do more of it,’’ said Tom Collina, director of policy at the Ploughshares Fund, a leading disarmament group. “It is not the message Biden was sending as a candidate. What we have here is Biden essentially buying into the Trump nuclear plan, in some cases going beyond that.”

Emma Claire Foley, a researcher at Global Zero, a disarmament group, said the latest budget "essentially preserves the priorities of the Trump administration," despite the new administration's rhetoric about pursuing a more responsible nuclear posture.

During the 2020 campaign, Biden told the Council for a Livable World, an arms control group, that the current arsenal is “sufficient” and the United States does not need new nuclear weapons. In July 2019, Biden also called Trump’s move to introduce new capabilities a “bad idea.”

The Democratic Party platform in 2020 also bluntly stated that "the Trump Administration’s proposal to build new nuclear weapons is unnecessary, wasteful, and indefensible.”

The former vice president, who has a long history of pushing for less reliance on nuclear weapons, cautioned against investing in a nuclear expansion just days before he left office in 2017.

“If future budgets reverse the choices we’ve made, and pour additional money into a nuclear buildup, it harkens back to the Cold War and will do nothing to increase the day-to-day security of the United States or our allies,” Biden told the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But his budget plan now reflects different priorities. In total, Biden is requesting $43.2 billion for nuclear weapons, a slight decrease from the $44.2 billion appropriated in fiscal 2021.

That includes modernizing all three legs of the nuclear triad: the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, which is the replacement for the fleet of Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles; the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines; and the new B-21 stealth bomber.

The budget also proposes $609 million for the Long Range Standoff Missile, which is designed to be outfitted on bomber planes. That’s $250 million more than what was projected by the Trump administration for fiscal 2022.

Most controversially, the Pentagon’s request maintains the W76-2 low-yield warhead that is now outfitted on submarines and sets aside $5.2 million for a new sea-launched cruise missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. Another $10 million is being requested for the warhead in the budget for the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the Energy Department.

The low-yield warhead, which has less explosive power than other atomic bombs, was recommended by the Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, which concluded that Russia’s growing reliance on such weapons in war planning required the United States to develop more “flexible” options to deter their use.

“Expanding flexible U.S. nuclear options now, to include low-yield options, is important for the preservation of credible deterrence against regional aggression,” the review stated.

The weapon is a new version of an existing warhead. “The modification had already been purchased and fielding began in FY 2020 and may already be completed,” said Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association.

The Trump nuclear review also made the case for building a new version of a sea-launched cruise missile that could carry a lower yield warhead, a class of weapon that was taken offline at the end of the Cold War. Biden’s research and development budget has a provision to “design, develop, produce and deploy a Nuclear-Armed Sea-Launched Cruise Missile.”

The arms control and disarmament community is making clear its disappointment. “President Biden ran on a campaign to reverse the budget and outrageous policies put forward by the Trump administration,” the Council for a Livable World said in a statement Wednesday. “However, this budget expands nearly every nuclear program put forward by that administration. This is not acceptable.”

As “a long-time supporter of arms control and nuclear threat reduction,” the group said, Biden “can — and should — do better.”

Collina also noted the contradiction in Biden’s previous statements and the budget request. “Now Biden wants to fully fund all of Trump's nukes,” he said. “Which is the real Biden?”

A White House spokesperson deferred to DoD. A Pentagon spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The decision to keep the low-yield weapon is seen as particularly worrisome because it would have been relatively easy to jettison compared to some of the other major programs.

“I would say that the preservation of the low-yield weapon project is pretty disheartening,” said Foley of Global Zero, which published its own alternative Nuclear Posture Review in 2018.

“There is a number of systems, like the low-yield warhead for the submarines and the nuclear cruise missiles, that Trump began under his watch that are completely unnecessary and would have been quite easy for the Biden administration to pick off,” Collina added. “They were the low-hanging fruit.”

He also cited proposed funding increases for projects such as the Long Range Standoff Missile. “They have added to the momentum,” Collina said. “The more billions you pump into these things the harder it is to kill.”

Foley sees the budget as evidence that the new administration is embracing the view that the United States needs to match every weapon that Russia or China develop.

“We don’t need this mentality of capability matching, which is driving this low-yield weapon and is driving the ICBM conversation,” she said. “If we are thinking in terms of deterrence we need to meet the threats that are out there, which we can do with a smaller force of bombers and submarines. We don’t need to have everything everybody else has. That’s not a strategically valid thought.”

Progressive Democrats who have sought to cut a number of the programs, including the GBSD, the LRSO, the low-yield warhead and the new cruise missile, also see the current approach as “misguided.”

Khanna and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), another vocal progressive, are objecting to Biden's nuclear budget request and contend the money could be better spent on domestic programs and efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

The lawmakers are pushing legislation to bar funding for the GBSD program or the new W87-1 warhead intended for the missiles and to shift $1 billion from research efforts on the new land-based missile to coronavirus vaccine.

"Spending trillions on the Pentagon budget didn’t stop this devastating pandemic, and I’ll continue fighting for cuts to this perennially-bloated line item,” Markey said.

Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, told POLITICO he also “strongly” believes “the United States needs to alter its modernization strategy from one that’s predicated on dominance to one that is based on deterrence.”

Other senior Democrats want to block funding the new nuclear cruise missile, a version of which was removed from Navy ships in the early 1990s and formally retired in 2013.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.), who chairs the House Armed Services’ Seapower panel, have sponsored legislation to nix all funding for it.

Van Hollen slammed the program as "not only reckless, but costly and unnecessary" and chided the Biden administration for advancing the Trump-era effort.

“I’ll be working to prevent additional funds from going to this endeavor and to ensure Navy funding goes where it's needed most,” Van Hollen said.

Some supporters of the current nuclear portfolio suggested that the Biden budget may simply be a “placeholder” until the administration completes its own Nuclear Posture Review.

Tim Morrison, who oversaw the nuclear portfolio on the Trump National Security Council and is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said he believes that any major proposals to slash weapons programs will first require building a consensus across the executive branch before trying to convince Congress.

“The most dangerous place I think they can be is to cut or scale back programs before they could do these reviews,” Morrison said. “It would show such decisions were based on ideology. If they are going to kill the triad they need buy-in. The last thing they want is any of those military leaders saying they weren’t consulted on any decisions.

“This is a holding action while they run their reviews,” he added. “We’ll see next year.”

Collina sees it differently. “To me if you were going into a placeholder you would freeze or pause,” he said. “This makes me worried that the NPR is not going to be an open review but that what we are seeing is kind of the administration tipping their hand, that they are not going to spend any political time on it. They are letting themselves stay boxed in."