Donald Trump loves to communicate with the nation and the world through Twitter. Capacious, short statements in this microblog, about which they often joke that it is very convenient to "send" someone in it, than to explain something to him, have become one of the characteristic features of the government of this bright, original, but greatly overrated politician (so far he did not fulfill any of his promises). He also devoted more than one tweet to the topic of US nuclear power.
Among the immortal statements of Mr. Trump on this topic, one can note, for example, one from August 9 last year, on Twitter, of course.
My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before …
This means: "My first order as president was to renew and modernize our nuclear arsenal, and now it is much stronger and more powerful than ever." Experts, analysts and just people who are able to understand this issue even in the first approximation, then they laughed great at these statements of Trump. He then wrote that he hoped that "the United States will never have to use this power," and assured that his country "will always be the most powerful country in the world." He managed, of course, without any evidence of the correctness of his words, and rightly so: why, a gentleman can lie?
It turns out, how can he if he is Anglo-Saxon, and can doubly if he is a populist politician like Trump. And he can do it repeatedly and on the same topic, all the same, as they like to say in the domestic show business, "people go for it." And Trump ate a dog in show business, after all, he organized beauty contests and conducted a reality show, and he knows perfectly well that the American "People" is even more unassuming than the target audience of some "House-2" or something just as "high-quality and high-quality". Moreover, in military and political issues, where the man in the street was hammered into the brain with four-inch nails from childhood that America is above all and is stronger than everyone else.
So the other day, more than half a year later, Donald burst into another speech on the topic of the steady growth of the nuclear power of the US Armed Forces and their ascending road to the bright day after tomorrow. He said that the United States had "the most powerful nuclear forces in the world," and again expressed the hope that they would never use them.
We provide $ 654.6 billion for defense. No one will say that our military will be forgotten, which they talked about for a long time. We spend a lot of money on nuclear systems to upgrade and in some cases build completely new ones, for example, nuclear submarines. So we will have the most powerful nuclear forces on earth, which will be in absolutely perfect shape, and we hope we never have to use them.
Trump then signed the US budget for 2018, on this occasion he proclaimed it. So what did the great statesman and patriot of America do to increase nuclear power? And he did almost nothing in reality.
Recently, another list of documents from the US Department of Energy was declassified, where, along with such "burning" information such as the power of the explosion during the 1957 tests covered with sand history. or 1958, or the power of a very long-time disposed of thermonuclear bomb B53 (9Mt, the most powerful of those in the US arsenal), there was also information on the number of nuclear weapons disposed of in recent years and on their total number in arsenals.
Such information is published there regularly, in contrast to the Russian Federation, where the total number of arsenals of strategic nuclear forces (SNF) (taking into account the charges unplaced on carriers and exchange and repair funds) is not disclosed, as well as tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) - because there is no agreements between superpowers prescribing to do so. What is written in the agreements is published by the parties on a regular basis, for example, data on the START-3 exchange in the form of credited warheads on carriers, the number of deployed and unplaced carriers, and so on. Moreover, by mutual agreement, the Americans do not publish the layout of our SNF carriers - how many and what systems, only summary information. Although, of course, they do. And if such secrecy makes sense in terms of TNW, and in terms of the total number of SNF charges, then in terms of carriers and placed charges, it is clearly not. For reference, there are no exact data on our arsenals, but estimates only for tactical nuclear weapons begin, with serious specialists, from 4 thousand charges and above (6-8). In terms of strategic nuclear forces, they are, at least, not less, but rather more than the American ones. In terms of placed charges on SNF carriers, we recently outstripped the United States by almost half a thousand charges, but by the beginning of 2018. urgently completed the dismantling of a number of charges and fit into the limit of the START-3 Treaty - 1550 credited charges placed. In reality, this is somewhat more, because a bomber considered as a carrier of 1 charge actually carries 6, 8, 10, 12, or even 16-20 CR.
But let's return to our sheep, or rather, not to ours, but to American ones. So, according to this document, for 2017. (not for the whole, the information is given at the end of September, that is, by the beginning of the new financial year in the United States, by October 1), the American nuclear arsenals weakened by 354 nuclear weapons, and amounted to 3822 units of strategic and tactical charges, instead of 4018 a year earlier. There are about 500 tactical bombs among them, and these are only tactical bombs B-61 of adjustable power, which in a number of modifications is up to 170, and in others up to 340 kt - there is no other TNW in the United States for a long time, so, the last W80-0 naval warheads for sea-based CD (SLCM) TLAM-N ("Tomahawk") were disposed of before August 31, 2011. The remaining strategic bombs B83, with a capacity of up to 1.2Mt, can be conventionally considered tactical, but they are being actively disposed of, and according to plans, in a couple of years they will finally be "finished" (and by the way, this, along with the B-61, is the only nuclear weapon of the "toothless" flying wing, heavy bomber B-2A).
I must say that 354 charges per year is, of course, not a record in recent years, and not a record since 1990. when 7 thousand a year were sometimes disposed of - but then in the USA the production capacities were not closed, and they were also all right in terms of disposal and reloading. But, of course, it surpasses the "achievements" of the United States in "strengthening" the nuclear arsenal for most of the presidency of "destroyer and weakling" (according to Trump) Obama - only in 2009-2010, in the first years of his rule, 352-356 charges were destroyed, that is, as much as in the first year of the "strong statesman" Trump, who "makes America great again" and in general, they say, raised nuclear power to previously unattainable heights in a year. On Twitter. And in all other years of "obamstvo" they cut fewer "sources of light and heat", about 100-300 per year. At this rate, if the Americans continue to "build up their nuclear power" in this way, there will be nothing to build up in 10 years. But hope for this, nevertheless, is not worth it, and at the state level, and even more so, one should not "pawn" on such gifts from the enemy.
So, congratulations, Mr. Trump - you are lying. Although, perhaps, as a prominent "effective manager", he had something completely different in mind, because their terminology has enough convenient euphemisms that can cover up failures. For example, "negative growth", or, say, "positive negative profit".
But, some will say, is it really bad to cut old charges? No, not bad, especially if there is no way to re-equip them in time, then this must be done. Nuclear weapons, if not serviced and reloaded on time, not only become useless, they also become dangerous. This is usually not known by the authors of tabloid tales and forum rumors from various underdeveloped countries and territories, who like to tell something like "but we have 3-4 nuclear warheads stolen from the warehouses of the Soviet Army, hidden in secret basements and caches, and if anything, then tremble, Russians. " If you do not take into account also the fact that nuclear warheads to steal even from the warehouses of the USSR Armed Forces, even the Russian Federation, even the United States, and even the DPRK is absolutely impossible, and the charge itself is useless.
The Americans have more than once, having eliminated their production of nuclear weapons (officially the capacity is partially mothballed, but in reality there is a lot to be recreated) and having greatly reduced the capacity for reloading and servicing nuclear weapons, they were faced with the fact that they had to put ammunition on disposal, the need for which did not disappear, but very much even necessary, but it was not possible to re-equip them in time, because there were much more needed charges on the lines, such as the LEP programs (Life Extension Program, we use the abbreviation of the PSE) SBS BB W76 and W88 for SLBM D5 "Trident-2" and their minimal modernization, we are talking about W76-1.
Trump is very fond of saying that he supposedly does a lot for nuclear missile power, but, in fact, he is doing more for military officials, corporate figures and congressmen and senators who feed on it, allocating additional money for new programs. Moreover, if we compare again with the "peacemaker" Obama, military spending under him was again higher (especially taking into account the rise in prices in the US military-industrial complex and general inflation).
No, something is being done. Thus, preliminary work has begun on the program of a new GBSD ICBM, the price of which is growing by leaps and bounds - in 2015. the total cost of the program from 400 deployed single-warhead ICBMs and 242 to the reserve and for testing, amounted to 61 billion. dollars, at the beginning of 2017. - at 140, and now she has grown up. But at the same time, realizing that the program may not lead to success, options are being worked out how to keep the Minuteman-3 ICBM in service even after 2030-2040. Exactly the same story with the B-21 Raider bomber, which is, in fact, an attempt to resell the US Air Force B-2A in a new package. The price tag of the program is already growing steadily, and there are fears that it will fail for this reason, therefore, at the same time, "straw is underlining at the place of the fall." We are talking about working out options, how to force at least part of the 36 currently used for the main purpose (there are a few more of them, but the rest are used for testing or serve as a source of spare parts) of old B-52N hard workers, the youngest of whom is older than the Caribbean Crisis, fly to 2075. A new Columbia-class SSBN is under development, which will enter service in the 2030s, and missiles that will someday replace it, of course, the very successful D5 (they will not replace it right away). But even with her, not everything is smooth so far.
A new Nuclear Posture Review, one of the key documents in the nuclear weapons field in the United States, was adopted. Previous NPRs were adopted in 2010, 2002, 1994. But this document raises serious doubts about the competence of its compilers, both in terms of considering the development of the nuclear forces of potential adversaries (the Russian Federation, China, or, say, the DPRK), and in terms of the plans of the United States itself.
With regard to nuclear charges, the following can be noted in it. So, in our media and the blogosphere, they intensely relished the news from this very NPR-2018 about "the beginning of the development of a new SBS for a new sea-based CD" (talking about the NGLAW program to replace the Tomahawk, which, however, by itself will last until about 2040.). By the way, talk of replacing the Tomahawk in US naval circles intensified immediately after, to put it mildly, the ambiguous results of the strike on Shayrat. And also - about the ultra-low power BB for "Trident-2", which is planned to be developed, according to NPR. Why Americans need such a BB is another question, but the point is that the plans of the Department of Energy, also recently published, do not have either one or the other block. There are generally no new charges in the plans for the coming decade. Just because they cannot be produced, the production of a number of important components has been lost - the Americans are only planning to restore the production of nuclear weapons.
This is reflected in the same document from the Department of Energy (DoE_ and the National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA). It only lists all types of nuclear weapons that are in the US now. These are ICBMs and SLBMs W78, W87, W76 (options 0 and 1), W88, B61 bombs (options 3, 4, 7, 11, 10) and B83, a special warhead W80-1 for the nuclear version of the air-based airborne missile system AGM-86 on B-52H bombers. country (well, what is left of it - there is no production, there is only the possibility of reassembling, reloading, partial modernization, for example, electronics, fuses and the charges themselves).
With regard to ammunition, these are: the completion of the conversion of W76-0 into W76-1 by next year, the conversion of the first working model of the corrected bomb B61-12 (400 bombs of the remaining modifications will be converted into it, the rest will be disposed of, its power is limited to 50 kt), a number of works with the W88, creation of the first working sample of the W-80-4 SBCH for the new LRSO missile system (by alteration from the W-80-1). There are no new SBS for the sea-based CD, and there are no new BBs for the Trident-2 SLBM either. And the pilots will simply not give a single W80-4 warhead to the sailors - they probably will not fit the new naval KR. And they themselves do not have enough of them, because the AGM-86B nuclear missile launchers are not enough even for a full salvo of the existing B-52H grouping, used for their main purpose, including because there are not enough charges. Well, it is worth remembering the traditionally "warm" relations between the services of the US Armed Forces, especially the Air Force and the Navy. What, in general, happens in any armed forces, the question is only in the forms of this rivalry and the degree of its radicalism. Remembering General Curtiss LeMay, who said "The Soviet Union is our adversary. Our enemy is the Navy" ("The USSR is only our rival, and our real enemy is the Navy"). So sailors will not see the W80-4.
Why then was it necessary to inscribe obviously unrealizable elements into the nuclear doctrine? But there are also enough other oddities, for example, like completely fragmentary knowledge about the nuclear programs of the RF Armed Forces (much of what Vladimir Putin said in his sensational Address was not there, as well as what he had "forgotten" about tell), and not only that. Maybe, of course, everything is different in the closed part of the document, but it's hard to believe in it.
On the other hand, there are a number of measures that will probably be able to return America's ability to create nuclear weapons from scratch, based on accumulated nuclear materials, but not earlier than the early 2030s, but most likely later. The fact is that there were similar plans in previous NPRs, but they were not implemented. In particular, to ensure the possibility of stuffing "plutonium cores" after 2030. about 50-80 pcs. in year. These are elements of plutonium "fuses" of thermonuclear charges. And even the numbers were similar. Whether it is being implemented now - time will tell.
If not, then the planned reduction of the nuclear weapons system to the "3 + 2" scheme may not take place, or the planned reduction of the nuclear weapons system may be postponed. That is, to two types of tactical charges - bombs B61-12 and SBSh W80-4 and three types of strategic BB (suitable for SLBMs and ICBMs) - IW1, IW2 and IW3, which are planned to be produced from about the mid-2030s, and some from 2040s. So far, nothing irreparable has happened for America - well, they have lost a number of types of charges that they did not want to lose, their arsenals have been greatly reduced, but there are still charges for strategic nuclear forces, this is the main thing to be disposed of. With TNW, everything is much worse and there is no chance of solving this problem in the foreseeable future. It is another matter if the "negative growth" continues at such a pace, problems will appear.
But what will happen next will be seen. The likelihood that the current plans for restoring nuclear warhead production will also "move to the right" along the timeline is quite high. In the meantime, Mr. Trump will continue to tell us fables about America's steadily growing nuclear power. Growing down a couple of Britain's nuclear capabilities a year. Or, if you like, on the potential of France (well, it falls short of the Chinese one a little). And then his successors will tell.
