America needs to replace a rotting arsenal of nuclear weapons and counteract an increasingly boisterous Russia, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said Tuesday. For these reasons, it must consider the long-taboo prospect of building new nukes. “Can we have a national conversation about building new nuclear weapons?” Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said in remarks at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C. “That’s something we haven’t been able to even have a conversation about for a while, but I think we’re going to have to.”

Just last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his plans to boost the former Soviet power’s nuclear arsenal with 40 new missiles. The plan follows a string of provocative comments from top Russian officials who consider a nuclear weapon the most effective method of countering what they consider NATO’s provocative actions in Eastern Europe.

“Russia obviously retains the right if needed to deploy its nuclear weapons anywhere on its national territory, including on the Crimean Peninsula,” Mikhail Ulyanov, head of the Russian Department for Non-Proliferation and Arms Control, said in early June.

Thornberry said Tuesday this is more than enough justification for considering a new supply of offensive nukes.

His comments join a chorus of nuclear experts who have become increasingly concerned about the role the weapon that defined the Cold War will play in the coming years. Much of the nuclear material in the U.S. arsenal will expire roughly between 2020 and 2030, without a clear plan for their replacement. Meanwhile, post-Cold War disinterest in defense-related nuclear jobs, and inattention from the departments of Defense and Energy have led to a gradual aging of the nuclear workforce, further endangering America’s chances of keeping up with potential foes.

“Our nuclear deterrent has been so safe, so reliable that we have come to take it for granted, and the people who make it possible,” Thornberry said. “We have lost people, engineers in the nuclear complex, to go to work in the energy industry, partially because they had to shoo rats off their lunch in some of the facilities in which they were working.”

“I still worry that we are asking labs to do the impossible, which is to keep complex machines running at peak condition forever,” Thornberry added. “And I’m just not sure that can happen.”

Thornberry considers nuclear deterrence “the foundation upon which all our other defense-based activities are based.” Yet the priority for nuclear maintenance and funding has slipped under recent presidents, including Obama. In 2009, the newly elected president called nuclear weaponry “the most dangerous legacies of the Cold War” and said the U.S. would reduce its stockpile over the following four years. He believed he would be able to complete a new arms reduction treaty with Russia by the end of that year.

Obama has since reportedly shifted his position slightly, prioritizing funding in 2014 for nuclear weapons maintenance over nonproliferation efforts worldwide, and followed through this year on a plan to rebuild much of America’s nuclear arsenal.

But the glamour and intrigue of working on nuclear weapons during the Cold War has become tarnished since the collapse of the Soviet empire. A 2008 Department of Defense study found trends through the 1990s indicated a steady increase of the average age of an employee working on nuclear programs, due largely to a shrinking force, employees who were willing to work beyond retirement age and lack of recruitment. Those who joined in 1985 at age 35, for example, would be close to retirement age at the time of the report.

“The continued aging of this large cohort of the nuclear workforce poses strategic challenges for maintaining and transferring critical nuclear deterrence skills to a new generation,” the report stated.

Overhauling the program became a principal effort of then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, mere weeks before he resigned in late November, and following a string of cheating and abuse scandals within the nuclear weapons branches of the military. A perception that the nuclear arms of the military were obsolete – particularly land-based silos, but also nuclear missile-equipped submarines and bombers – contributed at least in part to these shortcomings.

As a result of “troubling lapses and poor morale in our nation’s nuclear forces,” Hagel ordered reviews into these units, and promised new funds for incentives to improve morale and for higher ranking officers to oversee the force.

Hagel had historically prioritized improvements to the nuclear force going back to his tenure in the U.S. Senate. His home state of Nebraska, like Thornberry’s Texas, hosts multiple nuclear research facilities with reactors.

The Defense Department is not, however, the only collection of organizations to advocate for a sharper edge to America’s nuclear arsenal. A group of think tanks led by the Center for Strategic and International Studies have cited U.S. nuclear shortcomings, and advocated for newer weapons that could better counter an attack from, say, Russia.

Were Russia to deploy one of the smaller, more accurate weapons it claims it is developing, the U.S. might feel forced to “self-deter” and not fire back with the larger weapons to which it is limited, for fear of causing disproportionate collateral damage.

“The United States is not well postured for this type of nuclear employment scenario,” according to a CSIS report. “Its Cold War-era nuclear weapons were designed for a global conflict involving thousands of high-yield weapons in a massive exchange. The United States needs to develop and deploy more employable nuclear weapons, ones that enable the United States to respond directly and proportionately to an adversary’s employment of a nuclear weapon.”

A solution within the U.S., however, will be difficult, particularly at a time of budget constraints, the looming threat of across-the-board cuts known as sequestration, a demands for upgrades from across the military services’ aging fleets.

“Technologically, financially, expertise-wise, it’s not going to be easy,” said Thornberry. The focus, he added, must be on educating both the public and Congress about the potential threat, and giving a “head start” to the next president.



