In 2018, President Donald Trump goaded North Korea’s Kim Jong Un by posting an infamous tweet. Un had recently stated that his nuclear launch button sat on his desk. Trump retorted by insisting his “button” was “much bigger & more powerful… and my Button works!” Two years later, as the country faced the first and perhaps most alarming wave of COVID-19, Trump’s administration discussed the possibility of resuming underground nuclear testing, which the Senate Armed Services Committee proposed to fund.

Already that year, Trump had amped up his nuclear weapons spending by 20 percent, including plans for a new warhead called the W93 — the first new warhead design since the 1980s. Until then, U.S. leaders had intended to update the nation’s nuclear arsenal, not add to it. 

If there was a clash, it was between these two apparently different outlooks, between whether the nation would or should undergo a nuclear weapons modernization or, instead, a buildup.

“‘Modernization’ sounds like a good thing, like putting a new roof on your house,” arms control advocates David Cortright and William D. Hartung recently wrote. “Buying new weapons to boost the Pentagon’s ability to destroy the world is decidedly not a good thing.”

In their view, modernization had actually become a euphemism designed to “obfuscate the reality of a massive expansion of nuclear weapons capacity.” Others maintain there is still a difference.

The origins of nuclear modernization

This clash didn’t start with Trump — it began during the era of President Barack Obama. After winning a Nobel Peace Prize for what the Nobel committee called a “vision of a world free from nuclear arms,” Obama moved to renegotiate the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russian Federation. New START, as it’s called, lowered the number of deployed strategic warheads by 30 percent and the number of deployed nuclear-capable delivery systems — such as intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), submarine-launched missiles and air-launched cruise missiles — to 700 over the next decade. 

New START would “advance our relationship with Russia,” Obama stated at the time, “which is essential to making progress on a host of challenges, from enforcing strong sanctions on Iran to preventing nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists.”

But the treaty came with a price. In order for a certain cadre of Republican senators to support ratification, Obama agreed to give new life to America’s aging nuclear weapons complex, a modernization that would ultimately set in motion, among other things, plans to revive the production of plutonium pits — the essential core of every nuclear warhead — at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and, eventually, the Savannah River Site (SRS), in Aiken, South Carolina. 

Obama launched this modernization in 2016 — it’s now known as the “program of record” — and almost immediately the Department of Defense (DOD) felt compelled to refute claims that it signaled “a nuclear arms buildup or a renewed arms race.” To the DOD, America’s arsenal would “age into obsolescence” before a world free of nuclear weapons could ever be realized, hence the need for modernization. Regardless of the label, spending has soared. At the time, the DOD estimated that such an update would cost between $350 and $450 billion over the course of 20 years. Today, the estimate is $1.7 trillion over 30 years.

Since 2023, Searchlight New Mexico has frequently covered the local implications of producing plutonium pits to meet the nation’s congressionally mandated quota — 30 pits per year at LANL and 50 pits per year at SRS by 2030. Both sites are several years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, Searchlight found. 

Whenever they are made, the first 800 pits are slated for another new warhead — the W87-1 — that will be mounted onto a new ICBM called the Sentinel. During the Cold War, the Minuteman III — the ICBM the Sentinel is set to replace — carried three warheads, each with its own potential target. Under New START, that number was reduced to one warhead per Minuteman. Now, the first ten years of pit production, or 800 pits, is intended to “preserve the option of uploading Sentinel ICBMs with up to three warheads should the New START limits not be extended beyond the expiration of the treaty in February 2026,” Frank N. von Hippel, co-founder of Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security, told Searchlight.

But will the Sentinel ever be realized? As one of the most complex programs in the history of the U.S. Air Force, it’s now over budget by a staggering 80 percent. Many critics have decried the costs, while others have condemned ICBMs altogether as an unacceptable relic of the Cold War. In 2021, 700 scientists and engineers petitioned President Joe Biden to cancel the Sentinel program entirely.

In addition to the hefty price tag, the U.S. and Russia maintain these missiles on a launch-on-alert status, meaning that if one country attacked the other, the country on the receiving end could quickly retaliate before being hit by incoming warheads. One of the most frightening realities is that a president would have only a few minutes to decide if the threat were real.

Around this time last year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its famous “Doomsday Clock” at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest, except for the previous year, that this symbol of mankind’s risk of global nuclear catastrophe had been placed. Why? The Bulletin’s editor, John Mecklin, wrote that the huge sums of money the U.S., China and Russia are spending “to expand or modernize their nuclear arsenals” add “to the ever-present danger of nuclear war through mistake or miscalculation.” If one nation ramps up, the logic goes, another might feel compelled to keep pace, a dynamic of one-upmanship born out by the Cold War. 

The 2023  Congressional Strategic Posture Commission published a report making the opposite claim and suggesting that modernization wasn’t enough. “At this point, U.S. nuclear modernization programs underway are critical and necessary,” the report said, “but no longer adequate to deter the increased challenges from Beijing, Moscow, and the possibility of engaging both simultaneously.”

“Readiness to test nuclear weapons”

There are many unanswered questions as we enter a new year, a second term for Trump, and an increasingly fractious political environment. One of the most contested is the issue of resuming underground nuclear testing, which ended in 1992. The Heritage Foundation — a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. — published Project 2025, a flashpoint in last year’s heated election season, recommending, among a huge list of policy proposals, restoring “readiness to test nuclear weapons at the Nevada National Security Site.”

Searchlight approached six nuclear policy experts from across the ideological spectrum to talk about a range of issues, chief on the list, nuclear testing. Several, including von Hippel, maintained that underground testing is no longer scientifically necessary to ensure that the arsenal works, a question studied and answered by the lab’s well-known Stockpile Stewardship Program. Robert Peters — a former DOD staffer and current fellow at the Heritage Foundation — told Searchlight scientific necessity was irrelevant. 

While not speaking on behalf of the Heritage Foundation, Peters argued that testing is a form of “nuclear signaling,” a way of telling the world that the U.S. will not back down if provoked by an adversary. Peters was clear on another point, too: If there are other activities “inhibiting” LANL’s ability to make plutonium pits, those activities should be shut down. He didn’t name the activities, but LANL dedicates some of its budget — an increasingly shrinking share — to non-weapons science, such as wildfire modeling and climate change. 

Almost all the experts Searchlight consulted weighed in on perhaps the most relevant question for residents of New Mexico: How does the state fit into what’s been recently dubbed “one of the most expensive arms races in history”?

Click on individual names to reach the interviews: