Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Searchlight: What are the top three issues for you as the Trump presidency begins? 

Geoff Wilson: The current modernization — the program of record — is actually Modernization 2.0. We’re not just talking anymore about doing the Obama big three: the Sentinel [ICBM], the Columbia [ballistic missile submarine], and the B-21 [strategic bomber]. If you listen to Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer or any of the Republicans who now make up the majority on the Senate Armed Services Committee, they say that everything we’re doing already — the $1.7 trillion budget for modernization — is somehow “essential, but not sufficient to meet the threats.” That just blows my mind. And then you look at the Congressional Strategic Posture report — they’re basically just calling for a blank check. To think about producing new risk and inflaming a global arms race without concern for cost is a pretty wild political agenda to me. I find that particularly disconcerting.

I think issue number two is the creation of new tactical nuclear weapons. There have been calls made by former Trump officials and Republicans in Congress to build a whole new generation of “theater-based” tactical nuclear weapons to be used alongside conventional U.S. forces. Many of these would likely be based on U.S. cruise missile platforms, which are already deployed around the world on U.S. military ships and aircraft, and it likely wouldn’t be too difficult to convert them to carry nuclear warheads.

Searchlight: What exactly does that mean?

It would obviously be a hugely destabilizing step. For instance, the Army just announced that it would deploy ground-launched cruise missile platforms to Europe in 2026. While these missiles will be deployed with conventional munitions, this is a move that would have been forbidden by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that the first Trump administration withdrew from in 2019, due to the risk that such “dual use” weapons could be quickly converted to nuclear ones in a crisis. 

We may also see the deployment of new tactical nuclear weapons like the sea-launched nuclear cruise missile on conventionally armed U.S. Navy ships. The Navy has been clear in the past that they don’t really want this weapon and fear that it will confuse and complicate the vital mission of conventional ships around the world. The risk posed by weapons such as these is that they are seen as being “more” usable, and that they share the same silhouette on a radar screen as a conventional U.S. cruise missile, one of the most commonly used weapons in the U.S. arsenal. And that is a dangerous prospect, as there would be no way for an enemy to know if they are under nuclear or conventional attack any time the United States launches a cruise missile at them. 

If we’re caught in a dangerous crisis or standoff with a nuclear rival like Russia or China, that could lead to escalation or even a nuclear war. That is why former presidents like George H.W. Bush unilaterally pulled dangerous and destabilizing weapons like these out of the U.S. arsenal, and why Reagan built the INF treaty in the first place. But now we’re talking about reviving some of these terrible ideas from the Cold War, all while knowing from our own history that they will do little to improve our deterrent. 

If we learned any lesson from the Cold War, it should have been that merely having more nuclear weapons didn’t make us any safer. 

Searchlight: What’s the third major issue? 

The idea of restarting nuclear testing is completely incendiary. To do something so potentially damaging to strategic stability — let alone to the health and safety of American citizens — just to have a chest-thumping moment on the world stage, is an act of bravado that isn’t necessary for a nation that already spends more than the next nine countries combined on its military. 

Searchlight: Trump has tapped Elon Musk to run his proposed Department of Government Efficiency. The Sentinel program might be a good candidate for some belt-tightening. What do you think? 

Wilson: Absolutely. For the longest time, I believed that cutting the Sentinel was not going to happen. Even initiatives to study whether or not it was necessary, or study whether the Minuteman III could be modernized, have failed in Congress every year, and they failed by widening margins every year. That is, up until a series of reports came out last year that detail just how extremely behind schedule and over-budget that program is after it triggered the Nunn-McCurdy breach, which happens when a defense program goes over its budget by 50 percent and must report to Congress. Typically, a breach this significant would lead to the program’s cancellation.

In this case, the Sentinel is more than 80 percent over its initial cost estimate and the DOD is still supporting it, even though the U.S. government has yet to buy two-thirds of the land and easements necessary to lay new fiber-optic cables that will link missile silos to the command centers. As I understand it, changing from copper cabling to fiber-optic cabling has proven to be one of the most expensive parts of the modernization program to date. Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman, the Sentinel’s primary contractor, has admitted that it wildly underestimated how much work still needs to be done.

So, absolutely, that’s one hundred percent a place that the administration could look to do some belt-tightening and save a significant amount of money. 

Searchlight: The amount of money DOE spent in New Mexico in 2023 — $9.4 billion — eclipsed the state’s entire budget for the same year by almost $1 billion. What do you foresee for residents here when it comes to weapons production?

Wilson: The writing is really on the wall. I think LANL and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — the third weapons lab in the U.S., besides LANL and Sandia — are where the rubber meets the road on these issues, and to a certain extent, the Savannah River Site, too. It’s interesting. If you look at the NNSA budget, people say, “Oh, the NNSA is trimming fat, cutting significant money.” But I think the nuclear weapons budget went up by $132 million between 2024 and 2025.

So we are not taking our foot off the gas on new weapons development. We’re talking about the first new warhead that the United States has built since the 1980s that’s based on new designs. We’re talking about a congressional mandate for 80 new pits per year, and these new pits are apparently also based on new designs. And this, by the way, has been supported, overwhelmingly, by bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate.

If you go far enough down that road, it doesn’t really matter who’s in the White House. The new administration may decide that it wants to resume underground testing for political motives, but new designs for pits and warheads may also force the issue of testing within the next decade. That’s really disconcerting, and something that people haven’t really come to terms with yet.