WASHINGTON (AP) – As defense secretary to a president who famously envisioned “a world without nuclear weapons,” Ash Carter has said remarkably little about them.
He has been quiet on a range of nuclear issues, including the Pentagon’s $8 billion effort to correct an array of morale, training, discipline and resource problems in the Air Force nuclear missile corps, revealed by The Associated Press in the last three years. Nor has he publicly explained in detail the utility of nuclear weapons in an age of attacks by non-state actors like the Islamic State to build support for spending hundreds of billions on a new generation of them.
When asked, he has left no doubt that he sees nuclear weapons as the “bedrock” of U.S. security. But he rarely reveals the underpinnings of his thinking.
This is all the more notable because Carter, a physicist by training and policy wonk by reputation, cut his professional teeth on nuclear weapons during the Cold War. He probably knows more about them than any defense secretary since William Perry, a longtime nuclear expert, led the Pentagon a generation ago.
This quiet approach is expected to end when Carter visits Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota on Monday. There he plans to deliver a speech on nuclear deterrence, the notion that a robust and ready U.S. nuclear force will make clear that the cost of hitting the U.S. would outweigh any benefit. It will mark his first visit to a nuclear weapons base since becoming defense chief in February 2015.