The Bunker: Nuclear Daze

The Bunker, delivered to our subscribers Wednesdays at 7 a.m., is a newsletter from the desk of National Security Analyst Mark Thompson. Sign up here to receive it first thing, or check back Wednesday afternoon for the online version.

This week in The Bunker: President Trump muddies the waters when it comes to resuming U.S. nuclear-weapons tests; the Pentagon’s biggest contractor hypes readiness that’s MIA; contractors are still waiting on Golden Dome’s design; and more. Oh, and a heartfelt helmet tip to vets ahead of their special day next Tuesday, November 11.

SMITHEREENS!

President Trump says it’s time to resume nuclear tests

The happiest day The Bunker ever spent inside the Pentagon was September 27, 1991. That’s the Friday the first President Bush unilaterally declared, with help (PDF) from his just-departed defense secretary, Dick Cheney, that he would eliminate most short-range nuclear weapons. They also took Air Force atomic bombers off their 24-hour runway alerts. The dying Soviet Union would do the same shortly thereafter. The Bunker will never forget walking on air down those Pentagon corridors nearly 35 years ago, elated that the superpowers were finally backing away from the nuclear abyss.

The saddest day, assuming he were still on the beat, would have to have been October 29. That’s when President Trump declared that “because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.” The U.S. hasn’t tested a nuclear weapon since September 23, 1992. Of course, if The Bunker were still on the beat, he couldn’t be walking down Pentagon corridors — on air, or anywhere else. That’s because he would have refused to sign the diktat (PDF) imposed by Defense Secretary Pete “Hands-Off” Hegseth. The current defense chief disdains any reporting on the U.S. military that he doesn’t dictate and has barred reporters who disagree from the Pentagon.

Of course, taking Trump’s Truth Social post at face value is always a risky proposition, especially when it’s filled with errors (no possessive apostrophe after “countries,” for example, for the punctuationistas among us). Not only is there no Department of War — no matter how many times he refers to the Department of Defense that way — the Pentagon doesn’t test nuclear weapons. That job belongs to the Department of Energy, which recently furloughed 1,400 of the 1,800 workers responsible for that mission due to the government shutdown. And there are no “countries” testing atomic warheads these days except for North Korea. Trump repeated his insistence that U.S. nuclear-weapons testing will resume in a November 2 interview on “60 Minutes.” For good measure, he added that both China and Pakistan are secretly conducting such tests, claims that Beijing and Islamabad quickly denied. Incredibly, he’s clashing with Chris Wright, his energy secretary, over the issue.

Such messy nuclear messaging is an unforced error in an increasingly edgy world. Global nuclear arsenals and atomic-weapons tests are polarizing issues, for obvious reasons. Supporters embrace testing because it proves the continuing potency of such weapons, and the deterrence they supposedly provide. Those opposed to it believe it simply is another step closer to nuclear war. Given that split, it’s fitting that the final nuclear-weapons test carried out by the U.S. 33 years ago was code-named “Divider.”

The “fog of war” is a metaphor that stands for the sheer confusion that envelopes combatants on an ever-changing battlefield. It’s not supposed to be coming from the commander-in-chief, who has plenty of time to double-check what he’s saying. Nuclear weapons remain a threat to civilization. Whenever a U.S. president talks about them, he or she should do so with calmness, clarity, and coherence.

SPOOF-IN-ADVERTISING

These days, anyone can say anything

If you live in the nation’s capital, you might awaken each morning to WTOP, Washington’s all-news radio station. Beyond traffic and weather, its airwaves are filled with ads for government contractors eager to peddle their wares to the Defense Department and other federal agencies. Recently, there’s been a series of spots from Lockheed, the Pentagon’s biggest contractor, ending with the line: “Ahead of ready.”

Ahead of ready?

This is the company building the F-35 fighter for the Air Force, the Marines, and the Navy. Here’s what objective observers have been saying about the readiness of Lockheed’s pre-eminent program:

• “The Lockheed Martin-made F-35A — the cornerstone of the service’s fighter fleet and one of the most expensive military programs in history — has been plagued with reliability and availability issues. In 2021, the fighter was available nearly 69% of the time, according to the Air Force. But the F-35A’s mission capable rates have since plunged, and the jet was ready 51.5% of the time in 2024. The Joint Strike Fighter’s lagging availability has become such a problem that its program executive officer, Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt, in 2023 announced a ‘war on readiness’ that seeks to improve how often the F-35 can fly,” Defense News reported in March.
  
• “The F-35 program has failed to meet a key readiness metric for six straight years, despite a steady increase in spending to operate and maintain the aircraft, according to a new report from a government watchdog agency,” Defense One reported in 2024.

• “The F-35 fleet mission capable rate — the percentage of time the aircraft can perform one of its tasked missions — was about 55% in March 2023, far below program goals,” the Government Accountability Office reported in 2023.

Where’s the Federal Trade Commission when you need it, at least when it comes to the F-35? The agency’s truth-in-advertising mission is “to stop scams; prevent fraudsters from perpetrating scams in the future; freeze their assets; and get compensation for victims.”

Sounds about right.

DOME, SWEET DOME

Mission Impossible (cont.)

Well, it’s been nearly six months since President Trump announced his plan to build a “Golden Dome” shield to protect the nation from all incoming aerial threats — and to do it for $175 billion before his term ends in 2029. Well, the clock’s a-tickin’, and the folks charged with building the thing still don’t know what it is they’re supposed to be making.

“Golden Dome hype meets information vacuum as industry awaits Pentagon direction,” read the October 30 headline over Sandra Erwin’s story in Space News. “The holistic architecture” — its basic blueprint — hasn’t been shared with anyone in industry at this point,” Tom Barton, co-founder of Antaris, a Pentagon missile-defense contractor, told an industry confab. Rob Mitrevski, president of defense contractor L3Harris’ Golden Dome Strategy and Integration (yep, that’s his title) added that “the question still remains, what is Golden Dome?” Well, it’s basically a pie-in-the-sky fantasy designed to make defense hawks feel warm and comfy while impoverishing taxpayers with a false sense of security.

“A House of Dynamite,” a new Netflix thriller, focuses on the shortcomings of the current U.S. national missile shield. The flick, according to Bloomberg News’ Tony Capaccio, is giving the Pentagon the vapors. But disinterested experts think it’s pretty accurate.

The biggest challenge when it comes to outfitting the nation’s armed forces is to get the biggest bang for the buck. A national missile-defense system won’t make sense until it’s good enough to work and cheap enough to buy. Right now, neither of those is true. And, based on all available evidence, it’s going to stay that way for light-years into the future.

So that’s the paradox this week in Pentagon procurement. With or without testing, you know nuclear weapons are going to work, most of the time. And you know that Trump’s shield of dreams won’t. Both are pitiful wastes of money from a world apparently unable to grapple with the challenge of life on this planet.

WHAT WE’RE READING

Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently

→ Seeing the light…

The value of lasers on the battlefield has been hyped for decades, and they are not the “strategic game-changers” their boosters claim, Jules J. S. Gaspard argues in the fall issue of Military Strategy Magazine.

→ Disinformation deluge

The West “is losing the information war” to China, Iran, and Russia, and their “global web of news sites, podcasters, media platforms, and influencers,” Artur Kalandarov wrote October 31 on West Point’s Modern War Institute’s website.

→ Outhoused

Senior civilian members of the Trump administration have been moving into housing on military bases traditionally occupied by the nation’s top military officers, Michael Scherer, Missy Ryan, and Ashley Parker reported in The Atlantic October 30.

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