KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A sprawling new plant here in a former soybean field makes the mechanical guts of America’s Atomic Warheads. Bigger than the Pentagon, full of futuristic gear and thousands of workers, the plant, dedicated last month, modernizes the aging weapons that the United States can fire from missiles, bombers and submarines.
It is part of a nationwide wave of atomic revitalization that includes plans for a new generation of weapon carriers. A recent federal study put the collective price tag, over the next three decades, at up to a trillion dollars.
This expansion comes under a president who campaigned for “a nuclear-free world” and made disarmament a main goal of American defense policy. The original idea was that modest rebuilding of the nation’s crumbling nuclear complex would speed arms refurbishment, raising confidence in the arsenal’s reliability and paving the way for new treaties that would significantly cut the number of warheads.
Instead, because of political deals and geopolitical crises, the Obama adminis-tration is engaging in extensive atomic rebuilding while getting only modest arms reductions in return.
Modernizing a Nuclear Arsenal
The government is upgrading major nuclear weapon plants and laboratories, which employ more than 40,000 people.
Nevada National Security Site
EMPLOYEES: 2,500
UPGRADES:
1 proposed
The National Criticality Experiments Research Center was built for $150 million.
Los Alamos National Laboratory
EMPLOYEES: 7,430
UPGRADES:
7 approved, 6 proposed
A plutonium processing site was recently renovated.
Kansas City Plant
EMPLOYEES: 2,730
The National Security Campus, recently completed for $700 million.
Y-12 National Security Complex
EMPLOYEES: 4,720
UPGRADES:
5 approved, 4 proposed
The complex’s Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility was built for $550 million.
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N.M.
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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
EMPLOYEES: 5,250
UPGRADES:
2 approved, 6 more proposed
Sandia National Laboratories
EMPLOYEES: 9,880
UPGRADES:
3 approved,
9 proposed
A complex for testing weapons was recently rebuilt for $100 million.
Pantex Plant
EMPLOYEES: 3,180
UPGRADES:
3 approved, 10 proposed
The plant’s high-explosives pressing facility is being built for $145 million.
Savannah River Site
EMPLOYEES: 5,670
UPGRADES:
1 approved
The new Tritium Engineering Building was recently completed.
Supporters of Arms Control, as well as some of President Obama’s closest advisers, say their hopes for the President’s vision have turned to baffled disappointment as the modernization of nuclear capabilities has become an end unto itself.
“A lot of it is hard to explain,” said Sam Nunn, the former Senator whose writings on nuclear disarmament deeply influenced Mr. Obama. “The President’s vision was a significant change in direction. But the process has preserved the status quo.”
With Russia on the warpath, China pressing its own territorial claims and Pakistan expanding its arsenal, the overall chances for Mr. Obama’s legacy of disarmament look increasingly dim, analysts say. Congress has expressed less interest in atomic reductions than looking tough in Washington’s escalating confrontation with Moscow.
“The most fundamental game changer is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” said Gary Samore, Mr. Obama’s top nuclear adviser in his first term and now a scholar at Harvard. “That has made any measure to reduce the stockpile unilaterally politically impossible.”
That suits hawks just fine. They see the investments as putting the United States in a stronger position if a new Arms Race breaks out. In fact, the renovated plants that Mr. Obama has approved for a smaller force of more precise, reliable weapons could, under a different president, let the arsenal expand rapidly.
Arms controllers say the White House has made some progress toward Mr. Obama’s broader agenda. Mr. Nunn credits the President with improving nuclear security around the globe, persuading other leaders to sweep up loose nuclear materials that terrorists could seize.
In the end, however, budget realities may do more than nuclear philosophies to curb the atomic upgrades. “There isn’t enough money,” said Jeffrey Lewis, of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, an expert on the modernization effort. “You’re going to get a train wreck.”
While the Kansas City plant is considered a success — it opened ahead of schedule and under budget — other planned renovations are mired in delays and cost overruns. Even so, Congress can fight hard for projects that represent big-ticket items in important districts.
Skeptics say that the arsenal is already dependable and that the costly overhauls are aimed less at Arms Control than at seeking votes and attracting top talent, people who might otherwise gravitate to other fields.
But the Obama administration insists that the improvements to the nuclear arsenal are vital to making it smaller, more flexible and better able to fulfill Mr. Obama’s original vision.
Daniel B. Poneman, the departing Deputy Secretary of Energy, whose department runs the complex, said, “The whole design of the modernization enables us to make reductions.”
A Farewell to Arms
In the fall of 2008, as Barack Obama campaigned for the Presidency, a coalition of peace groups sued to halt work on a replacement bomb plant in Kansas City. They cited the prospect of a new administration that might, as one litigant put it, kill the project in “a few months.”
The Kansas City plant, an initiative of the Bush years, seemed like a good target, since Mr. Obama had declared his support for nuclear disarmament.
The $700 million weapons plant survived. But in April 2009, the new president and his Russian counterpart, Dmitri A. Medvedev, vowed to rapidly complete an arms treaty called New Start, and committed their nations “to achieving a nuclear-free world.”
Five days later, Mr. Obama spoke in Prague to a cheering throng, saying the United States had a moral responsibility to seek the “security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
“I’m not naïve,” he added. “This goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence.”
That October, the Nobel committee, citing his disarmament efforts, announced it would award Mr. Obama the Peace Prize.
The accord with Moscow was hammered out quickly. The countries agreed to cut strategic arms by roughly 30 percent — from 2,200 to 1,550 deployed weapons apiece — over seven years. It was a modest step. The Russian arsenal was already declining, and today has dropped below the agreed number, military experts say.
Even so, to win Senate approval of the treaty, Mr. Obama struck a deal with Republicans in 2010 that would set the country’s nuclear agenda for decades to come.
Republicans objected to the treaty unless the President agreed to an aggressive rehabilitation of American nuclear forces and manufacturing sites. Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, led the opposition. He likened the bomb complex to a rundown garage — a description some in the administration considered accurate.
Under fire, the administration promised to add $14 billion over a decade for atomic renovations. Then Senator Kyl refused to conclude a deal.
Facing the possible defeat of his first major treaty, Mr. Obama and the floor manager for the effort, Senator John Kerry, now the secretary of state, set up a war room and made deals to widen Republican support. In late December, the five-week campaign paid off, although the 71-to-26 vote represented the smallest margin ever for the ratification of a nuclear pact between Washington and Moscow.
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