Recommendations for nuclear weapons policy and forces include:
1. Leaders should declare “unequivocally and frequently” that nukes are still needed.
2. Establish a Red Team to look for nuclear enemies.
3. Establish a Deterrence Team to figure out how to better deter current and future adversaries.
4. The missile defense under construction is inadequate to deal with countermeasures and needs to be upgraded.
5. Accelerate development of “a credible Nuclear Leg of the Strike Triad.”
6. Figure out what to do with nuclear forces beyond the SORT treaty, but hedge (it is now called “remain reversible”) against negative developments in Russian and China.
7. Modernize the command and control system.
8. The Nuclear Weapons Council should establish a policy that no single warhead type makes up more than 20 percent of the deployed stockpile (i.e., the stockpile should consist of at least five different warhead types).
9. RRW-1, as the first Reliable Replacement Warhead prototype is called, should be a full weapons program.Recommendations for the nuclear weapons production complex include:
1. Produce “a predetermined number of RRW-class warheads” per year by 2012.
2. Create a National Nuclear Weapons Agency to support Complex 2030.
3. Retain all three nuclear weapons labs.
4. The Secretary of Defense should figure out which is easier: sustain the current quantities and diversity of nuclear weapons or build new ones.
5. Create an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategic Weapons with a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Weapons.
6. Get congressional approval to appoint the Deputy Secretary of Defense as the Nuclear Weapons Council and make the commander of STRATCOM a member of the Nuclear Weapons Council.
To those liberals who think I’ve slipped a cog on my wheel by suggesting that we modernize our nuclear weapons, I am not necessarily suggesting that we make more weapons. I am suggesting that we institute a program to construct Reliable Replacement Warheads (RRW’s). We have treaties with the Russians on absolute number of warheads allowable and I think we’re fine with that amount. Many of them are smaller warheads (theater nuclear weapons) used for nuclear demolitions (the so-called suitcase/backpack weapons), nuclear artillery rounds and so forth. Hydrogen bombs have a shelf life. The tritium in the weapons needs to be refreshed and serviced on a periodic (classified) basis. We can extend the life of existing nuclear weapons through a program of modernization.
