If the New START nuclear arms-limitation treaty expires in February, and the U.S. decides to boost its deployed nuclear weapons, there could be billions of dollars in one-time and recurring costs on the Department of Energy side of the equation, the Congressional Budget Office reported Tuesday.
Although the study, “The Potential Costs of Expanding U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces If the New START Treaty Expires,” purports not to estimate the cost to the Department of Energy for producing, sustaining, and storing new warheads, there are some rough estimates within.
Those best guesses are low-fidelity, the non-partisan office warns, because most nuclear stockpile details are classified. Also, it is not clear to the Congressional Budget Office whether the unclassified costs of refurbishing nuclear weapons — in what DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) usually calls life extension programs or alterations — maps exactly to the potential cost of manufacturing, from scratch, a new copy of an existing warhead design.
That said, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would cost between $9 million and $12 million to make one brand new copy of any existing warhead in the arsenal — or, if the warhead needs a new plutonium pit, between $15 million and $20 million for one copy.
At that rate, it would cost DOE between $45 billion and $65 billion to make 3,000 new warheads, all with new pits, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The latest report looks at the cost of expanding deployed U.S. warheads to the levels permitted under previous bilateral arms control agreements, up to the 6,000 allowed under the START I treaty signed between then-President George H.W. Bush and then-Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991.
The Congressional Budget Office prepared the recent report at the request of a pair of Democratic lawmakers: House Armed Services Chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
New START limits the U.S. and Russia to 1,550 strategic nuclear weapons on a mixture of intercontinental ballistic missiles, heavy bomber aircraft, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Then President Barack Obama and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the treaty in 2010. It went into effect in the U.S. in 2011, and both sides reached the prescribed limits in February 2018.
New START can be extended for up to five years if the U.S. and Russian presidents agree. Russia has said it would extend the treaty, but not if the U.S. insists that, before doing so, Moscow commit to pursuing a trilateral nuclear arms-control treaty that also includes China. The Donald Trump administration has said it wants to force such a treaty, but China has said it will not participate in nuclear arms-control talks.