February 19th 2020

By Bill Berkowitz

In a period dominated by Donald Trump’s baloney-strewn State of the Union address, the impeachment trial and his acquittal by the sycophantic Republican-controlled Senate, Attorney General William Barr’s turning of the Justice Department into a den of Trumpian iniquity, and the rising death toll from the Coronavirus, one story that appears to have slipped by relatively unnoticed is particularly chilling: For the first time, the U.S. Navy has deployed a submarine armed with a low-yield Trident nuclear warhead. The mercurial Trump, who has expressed great regard for nuclear weapons -- and whose 2021 budget included a large uptick in spending on nuclear weapons -- is steering the ship of state.

“The first ballistic missile submarine scheduled to deploy with the new warhead was the USS Tennessee (SSBN-734), which deployed from Kings Bay Submarine Base in Georgia during the final weeks of 2019 for a deterrent patrol in the Atlantic Ocean,” longtime journalist William Arkin and Hans M. Kristensen, wrote in an article for Federation of American Scientists, titled “US Deploys New Low-Yield Nuclear Submarine Warhead”. 

First mentioned in February 2018 in a Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) announcement, Arkin and Kristensen pointed out that “it was described as a capability to ‘help counter any mistaken perception of an exploitable ‘gap’ in U.S. regional deterrence capabilities,’ a reference to Russia. The justification voiced by the administration was that the United States did not have a ‘prompt’ and useable nuclear capability that could counter – and thus deter – Russian use of its own tactical nuclear capabilities.”

According to the FAS story, “The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has further explained that the ‘W76-2 will allow for tailored deterrence in the face of evolving threats’ and gives the US ‘an assured ability to respond in kind to a low-yield nuclear attack.’”

Pacifica’s Democracy Now led an interview with Arkin by stating: “The W76-2 warhead, which is facing criticism at home and abroad, is estimated to have about a third of the explosive power of the atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima.” 

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) called the news “an alarming development that heightens the risk of nuclear war.” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith said, “This destabilizing deployment further increases the potential for miscalculation during a crisis.” 

The Russians too are concerned Sergei Ryabkov, the country’s Deputy Foreign Minister, said: “This reflects the fact that the United States is actually lowering the nuclear threshold and that they are conceding the possibility of them waging a limited nuclear war and winning this war. This is extremely alarming.”

“What surprised me in my reporting … was a story that was just as important, if not more important, than what was going on in the political world,” Arkin said.

In a mid-January Newsweek story titled “With a New Weapon in Donald Trump's Hands, The Iran Crisis Risks Going Nuclear” Arkin wrote about the threat of a U.S. nuclear strike on Iran. “Though the United States has never made any public or explicit nuclear threat against Iran, in the past year, it has deployed a new nuclear weapon [the W76-2] which increases the prospects for nuclear war. … [It] is a ‘low yield’ missile warhead intended for exactly the type of Iran scenario that played out in the last days of the Obama administration.”

While four senior military officers doubted the new weapon would be used on Iran, according to Arkin, “the deployment of the new Trident II missile warhead [is] explicitly intended to make the threat of such an attack more credible, and [they] point[ed] it out as a little understood or noticed change that increases the very danger. They argue that the new capability should give Tehran pause before it contemplates any major attack on the United States or its forces. But all four also add, very reluctantly, that there is a ‘Donald Trump’ factor involved: that there is something about this president and the new weapons that makes contemplating crossing the nuclear threshold a unique danger.”

Both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations had contingency plans in place for the use of nuclear weapons in case of “a massive conventional attack or to stop enemy use of chemical or biological weapons,” Arkin pointed out in Newsweek.  

According to The New York Times, Trump’s 2021 budget “revealed for the first time that it intended to create a new submarine-launched nuclear warhead, named the W93. Its development is part of a proposed 19 percent increase this year, to $19.8 billion, for the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Energy Department agency that maintains the nuclear stockpile and develops new nuclear warheads. More tellingly, that is a jump of more than 50 percent since 2017, President Trump’s first year in office.”

Arkin told Democracy Now that he had “heard from many people, … that they were concerned that Donald Trump, in his own way, might be more prone to accept the use of nuclear weapons as one of options when he was presented with a long list of options.”

One senior officer told Arkin: “In 35 years of my being in the military, I’ve never thought before that I had to think of the personality of the president in presenting military options.”