The Hill News

The supercommittee’s failure to reach agreement on a deficit reduction plan may trigger deep, automatic reductions in future U.S. defense spending. At the same time, some in Congress are finally beginning to examine how much the United States plans to spend on nuclear weapons in the years ahead.

The automatic reductions, known as “sequestration,” would double the amount of money the Pentagon must cut from its projected budget growth, from about $450 billion to roughly $1 trillion, over the next decade.  

No matter how deeply the defense budget will be cut or how many hundreds of billions of dollars the federal government plans to spend on nuclear weapons, one thing is clear: Republicans and Democrats need to work together to reduce Cold War-era nuclear weapon systems that do not address likely security threats.  

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