Another week, another Trump tweet… another flurry of activity.
Hardly a day goes by that President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t use Twitter to send the nation into a rhetorical tornado by making a broad proclamation regarding the future of defense policy.
In the past few weeks, he’s attacked the forthcoming Air Force One replacement as well as the F-35 Lightning II development program for being too costly, sending shares of major player companies into a tailspin.
This week he decided to double down on a sector of the defense industry that few people consider lacking: the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Coming just hours after a statement made by Vladimir Putin indicating that Russia would continue to strengthen and widen its already substantial nuclear capability, Trump summed up his own plans for the U.S.’s ICBM fleet in 140 characters or less by posting this:
Nuclear weapons occupy a small but very peculiar corner of our defense program.
Requiring less manpower and visible infrastructure to maintain, the niche sector of the ICBM arsenal — consisting of ground and sea-based missiles with intercontinental strike capability — nevertheless accounts for a huge chunk of overall defense spending.
Obama’s plan to modernize the arsenal, which was laid out in a 64-page-long report in 2010, carried an estimated cost of about $1 trillion.
Considering that the nation’s current inventory consists of about 4,500 warheads and 1,900 delivery vehicles, that cost breaks down to about $222 million per warhead, or $526 million per delivery vehicle.
Not a cheap program, to say the least, but this relatively small collection of weapons is hundreds of times greater than the destructive potential than the rest of the U.S. Armed Forces put together.
Who Has the Bigger Stick?
Total mega-tonnage represented by these 4,500 warheads is said to be around 550 — meaning the total explosive yield of these weapons is equal to about 550 million tons of TNT.
That’s enough to destroy every major city on Earth, along with surrounding suburbs, at least twice over — making it overkill as is.
The problem is that Russia’s arsenal’s of total destructive potential eclipses ours, with as much as 800 total megatons, carried by missiles with equal range and accuracy capabilities to ours.
Raw power isn’t the only factor to consider, however. Modern intercontinental ballistic missiles on both sides are designed to carry multiple highly maneuverable warheads, along with decoy re-entry vehicles designed to fool anti-ballistic missile defense systems as they rain in from space.
The Russians have spent years and billions of dollars in recent years updating their nuclear arsenal with new, highly advanced systems such as the RS-28 Sarmat — a rocket capable of lifting 10 tons of payload into low-Earth orbit, before dropping the dozen or so warheads anywhere on the planet with enough destructive force to completely wipe out a region the size of France.
To make matters worse, a large component of Russia’s ground-based ICBM arsenal is mobile, carried on launchers like the one pictured below.
Roaming vast tracks of the Siberian tundra, ICBMs mounted on vehicles like this cannot be tracked or permanently targeted the same way that our own silo-based missiles can.
This may be viewed as a shortcoming, as the bulk of the U.S. nuclear inventory consists of stationary Minuteman Missiles, which have similar range as the Russian weapon but only three warheads.
Both nations keep hundreds of sea-based warheads at the ready inside the hulls of their Ballistic Missile Submarines, whose sole job consists of sitting silently on the ocean floor for up to six months at a time, awaiting orders.
Duck and Cover… And Get Vaporized All the Same
Trump’s answer is to meet brute force with brute force, which might seem silly but actually falls in line with the decades-old doctrine of MAD (mutually assured destruction) — the idea that immediate and total oblivion in response to a first strike would preclude an attack by any enemy, no matter how powerful.
His glib tweet, of course, hides the fact that hand in hand with increased focus on offensive strike capability would come continued spending on defense measures, such as ground-, sea-, and space-based anti-ballistic missile systems.
One of the beneficiaries of Trump’s prospective policy is Orbital ATK (NYSE: OA) — parent company of Thiokol, the Utah-based producer of the rocket engines for ICBMs like the Minuteman.
Another would be Raytheon (NYSE: RTN), the producer of the anti-ballistic missile “kill vehicle,” designed to intercept incoming warheads in space.
Any way you look at it, a renewed nuclear weapons race would guarantee hundreds of billions of dollars pumped into defense contractor coffers on both sides, with ongoing costs of maintenance increasing every year.
Export potential is, of course, negligible at best.
Until next time,
John Peterson
Pro Trader Today