Something else swims beneath the commercial and recreational vessels, as well as the island-bound ferries, that cross Puget Sound on any given day, armed with a payload large enough to forever transform a continent.
Naval Base Kitsap in Bangor, on the Kitsap Peninsula, is home to eight enormous Ohio-class nuclear attack submarines, each roughly as long as two football fields and armed with a variety of nuclear missiles. Seven of them are loaded with nuclear bombs and quietly travelling the Pacific Ocean at any given time, while one refuels in Bangor.
With these warheads, Washington state now has the world’s third-largest deployed nuclear weapons arsenal – 1,120 — behind only Russia and the United States as a whole, whose stocks still number in the thousands after decades of deterrence.
On those submarines, one weapon in particular has reached the pinnacle of its usefulness in its brief existence: The W76-2, a nuclear bomb with a decreased payload designed to confront Russia. It was rushed into production by the Trump administration and approved by Congress in anticipation of a situation similar to this one — a Russian invasion of a friendly country, in which President Vladimir Putin’s “escalate to de-escalate” doctrine could push the world’s nuclear superpowers closer and closer to war.
U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, a Democrat from Bellevue and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is concerned that the warhead’s lower yield will lure a president to use it.
Even if the competing nations do not exchange nuclear strikes, Smith is fully aware that every twitch from a nuclear superpower sends shockwaves throughout the nuclear-armed world, perhaps igniting a new arms race. “It’s an important moment for the entire country and the entire world, including Washington state,” said Smith in an interview last week after being briefed by the Pentagon on the situation in Ukraine. “It’s a more dangerous and potentially conflicted world, and we’re all going to have to reckon with it cautiously.”
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