Experts explained why Joe Biden abandoned the SLCM-N missiles
US President Joe Biden canceled the program to create a sea-based nuclear cruise missile, which was adopted by Donald Trump in 2018. It was supposed to be the "American response" to the tactical nuclear complexes of Russia and China. "Newspaper.Ru" figured out why the American leader did it.
In the US military budget for 2023, funding for the SLCM-N (Sea-Launched Cruise Missile - Nuclear) program has been curtailed. This is an upgraded version of the famous Tomahawk missile with a nuclear warhead for submarines and surface ships. Officially, the Pentagon attributed this to "the reduction of the role of nuclear weapons in the US defense strategy."
Doctor of Military Sciences Konstantin Sivkov in an interview with "Gazeta.Ru" said that the real reason, in his opinion, is Washington's inability to produce new nuclear warheads, without which the SLCM-N program loses its meaning.
"The reason for the cancellation is that the United States has big problems with the production of nuclear weapons. This was a consequence of the fact that there is no opportunity to enrich uranium in the United States. Here North Korea can enrich uranium, Iran can enrich uranium, and the United States does not have a uranium enrichment industry and does not have a scientific school for uranium enrichment," Sivkov explained.
According to him, the US enrichment industry was liquidated due to the conclusion in 1993 of the HEU-LEU (highly enriched uranium - low enriched uranium) Agreement, which is also called the Gore-Chernomyrdin agreement, which provides for the supply to the United States of Soviet weapons-grade uranium formed after the start of disarmament, "diluted" from 90% of isotope 235 to 4-5%.
"As a result, after 30 years, the United States completely lost its own uranium enrichment technologies - not even a trace remained. Personnel and scientific and technical schools have been completely destroyed. Even if they buy all this somewhere, it will take a lot of time to deploy production. And in these conditions, of course, they have no opportunity to deploy new warheads," Sivkov stressed.
In 2015, the American company Centrus Energy Corp unsuccessfully tried to master the technology of uranium enrichment for the needs of nuclear power and the military-industrial complex using gas centrifuges and build a plant in Ohio, but a year later the project was closed and the equipment was dismantled.
Dmitry Stefanovich, a researcher at the IMEMO Center for International Security of the Russian Academy of Sciences, recalled that plutonium cores are required for the production of nuclear weapons(plutonium is obtained from an isotope of uranium. - "Newspaper.Ru") [/i], which the USA was supposed to start producing in the amount of 80 pieces per year, but still have not been able to establish production.
"There was a target to reach 80 cores per year in relatively close years, but so far nothing is coming out of it - for technical reasons, maybe for budgetary reasons. This is a matter of finance and the construction of production facilities," Stefanovich said.
At the same time, he believes that the true reason for the cancellation of the SLCM-N program lies in the "unwillingness of the US Navy to get involved with nuclear weapons."
"The American Navy does not need nuclear cruise missiles at all. The operation of nuclear weapons is a complicated thing that requires some preparation. In addition, it is forbidden to enter many ports of the world with nuclear weapons on board, which significantly narrows the capabilities of the fleet. To put several nuclear missiles in universal launchers, you need to remove the same number of more popular conventional ones from there - for example, anti-submarine ones. In addition, the Navy has already been loaded with anti-missile defense tasks that are not peculiar to it. If we add nuclear deterrence to this, it will require an increase in the number of warships on duty," Stefanovich explained.
He noted that a certain role in the decision to close the SLCM-N program could also be played by the opinion of the American expert community that the deployment of nuclear Tomahawks would lead to an escalation of relations with Russia and China, since they would have to consider all Tomahawks nuclear.
- the expert explained.
At the same time, he pointed out that the United States should not show weakness in front of Russia and China, because if the countries of the Asia-Pacific region doubt the ability of the US Navy to fend off threats from China, they may try to acquire their own nuclear weapons.
Denis Telmanov