Trump's Vast Nuclear Arsenal

On Thursday Aug 10, 2017 President Trump implied that his administration had improved and increased the US nuclear arsenal. It was a lie. The US nuclear arsenal is at its lowest level ever since the US began building up its nuclear weapons after World War II. While at times the US has possessed upwards of 30,000 nuclear warheads, today the country has deployed less than 1780 weapons. And when you look at the way those weapons are deployed, the numbers that are available on a no-notice basis are much less. Here's how they breakdown.

The US maintains a strategic triad, composed of land-based ICBMs, submarine launched missiles, and land-based bombers. The land-based ICBMs are Minuteman III missiles, and there are only 400 of the original 1,000 remaining. While half are capable of carrying 3 warheads, they currently only carry 1 W78 350 kt warhead. The other 200 carry ex-Peacekeeper W87 300 kt warheads. So the ICBM force fields 400 warheads.

The SLBM force consists of 12 deployable subs carrying a total of 248 Trident missiles. These missiles can carry from 1 to 8 W76 100 kt or W88 455 kt warheads, for a total of 1,984 warheads, but only 890 of those are deployed on missiles loaded in submarines. Therefore, the sea-based leg of the triad deploys at most 890 warheads.

The land-based bomber force is composed of 44 B-52H and 16 B-2A bombers tasked with the nuclear mission. The bomber force has the capability to carry up to 1,038 W80 150 kt warheads on Air Launched Cruise Missiles or B61 or B83 gravity bombs. However, only 300 are deployed at the bomber bases; the remaining are in long-term storage. Therefore, the bomber force can only deploy 300 warheads.

The B-1B bombers that the administration sent to overfly the Korean peninsula this week are not nuclear capable.

So, the total number of nuclear warheads that the US can project in a no-notice nuclear war are about 1590. That is a far cry larger than the estimated 60 warheads that North Korea may have accumulated. And the use of a single nuclear warhead would be a catastrophe. We are not fighting an existential war like WW II, facing the potential casualty count that an invasion of the Japanese mainland might have resulted in. But the Korean War still exists, technically. The Korean "Police Action" of the 1950's ended in an armistice. The war was never concluded. And it produced thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of enemy casualties. A modern war on the Korean peninsula would surely produce millions, and would produce the potential for a nuclear release that could involve North Korea, the US and China.

Is it any wonder that we should require our President to understand the true state of the US nuclear arsenal before he starts lying about its vast capabilities?