The Department of Defense is using Russian warhead production capacity as part of its justification for maintaining a large stockpile of nondeployed warheads in the United States even as it reduces
its deployed arsenal under the StrategicOffensive Reductions Treaty. Appearing before the Senate in February, Undersec-retary of Defense Douglas Feith explained the U.S. rationale for storing, rather than destroying, warheads removed from service:
Russia has a large [nuclear weapons] infrastructure. They have a warm production base capable of producing large numbers of new nuclear weapons annually. The United States has not produced a new nuclear weapon in a decade, and it will take nearly a decade and a large investment of money before we would be in a position to produce a new nuclear warhead. So the issue of…whether we choose to build up a large infrastructure that would put us in a position to create new nuclear weapons if circumstances in the world changed and warranted it, versus taking weapons and rendering them unavailable for use in the near term by putting them in storage is an issue that…needs to be examined….
