Why did the NNSA propose so many changes? I believe the weapons laboratories were trying to see how much "modernization" they could get away with before someone screamed about building "new" nuclear weapons. When George W. Bush's administration planned a series of so-called "reliable replacement warheads" (RRW) to replace the existing designs in the stockpile, many people sensibly wondered why the country was building new nuclear warheads. Congress ultimately defunded the RRW, and President Barack Obama decided against continuing with it, saying he was opposed to building "new" nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, "new" has no technical meaning, so the B61 Mod 12 became a test case for how far the nuclear weapons complex could go in terms of redesigning nuclear weapons while staying within the president's broad political guidance.
In a very narrow sense, the nuclear weapons complex succeeded in pushing the envelope: The B61 Mod 12 is a completely redesigned weapon with fewer and more modern components, new capabilities, and different safety features. It is "new" in every important sense of the word, without running afoul of the prohibition against "new" nuclear weapons as defined in Obama's 2010 Nuclear Posture Review. In particular, the national laboratories are pushing the rationale of "enhancing safety" to expand modernization efforts past weapons' non-nuclear guidance and arming systems and into the nuclear heart of the bomb. Because Obama does not inspire the same suspicions with regard to nuclear weapons as Bush did, the labs have been able to run riot.
But pushing the boundaries of acceptable modernization has made the B61 life-extension program so expensive that Congress may now kill it off altogether. Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) has already argued that the problems suggest "NNSA is simply incapable of performing its basic mission." Turner and other proponents of spending more on nuclear weapons are preparing to use the failure of the B61 life-extension program to attack the Obama administration for failing to make good on the commitments to nuclear modernization it made as part of the deal to secure Senate passage of the New START arms control treaty with Russia. The B61 Mod 12 does not have many friends at the moment.
All this brings us back to the question of whether the B61 is worth it.
Right now, the United States forward-deploys 180 B61s at air bases in five NATO countries. They are "tactical" nuclear weapons, deployed to help stop a Soviet thrust into Western Europe. (That there is no Soviet Union anymore is a mere detail.) If the life-extension program slips, there may be a gap during which the United States does not have B61s in Europe. Do we really need them? Senior military and civilian officials have repeatedly stated, in private and public, that the B61 has no military utility. One senior official with European Command told a task force created by the defense secretary, "We pay a king's ransom for these things and … they have no military value." There is no military mission for these weapons; they exist largely to fulfill political needs.
That is not nearly as disreputable as it sounds, though I happen to dislike spending on symbolic capabilities. But the theory has been that nuclear weapons in NATO allow for burden-sharing. The idea is that one solution to the "free-rider" problem in NATO's defense is to insist that NATO allies bear some of the financial and political burden of keeping NATO as a "nuclear alliance" by housing forward-deployed U.S. nuclear weapons.
The problem with this argument is that the NATO nuclear weapons are Exhibit A for the failure of the alliance to share the burden. In general, European politicians run in the other direction at any mention of U.S. bombs on their soil. We've seen a lot more burden-shirking than burden-sharing.
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