If you are one of the millions of Americans living within range of its 450 intercontinental ballistic missile silos, the Pentagon has ruled you out as an acceptable victim. The silos are spread across North Dakota, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska in a sacrifice zone — what lawmakers and military planners have long called the “nuclear sponge.”
Despite real concerns about cost overruns, human lives and the general uselessness of ICBMs, the Pentagon is moving ahead with a plan to modernize those silos and their missiles. Right now, the Defense Department believes it will cost $141 billion. Independent research puts the figure at around $141 billion. up to 315 billion dollars.
All of this money is money that the Pentagon plans to use to build a doomsday machine, a weapon that, if ever used, would mean the end of human civilization. Most experts agree that such a weapon is pointless.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles are a relic of the Cold War. The conventional wisdom is that a nuclear power needs three options to deploy nuclear weapons: air-based strategic bombers, sea-based stealth submarines, and land-based missiles. That’s the nuclear triad. If one leg of the triad fails, one of the other two will prevail.
The U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles, which were first deployed in the 1960s, are old. According to the U.S. Air Force, the Minuteman III missiles must be decommissioned and replaced by a new missile called Sentinel. Northrop Grumman has a plan to do so. The Air Force wants to buy 634 Sentinel missiles and modernize 400 silos and 600 additional installations.
This would likely cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Prices have soared so much—up 81 percent from 2020 projections—that they have triggered a little-known congressional rule aimed at driving down costs. If a weapons program’s costs exceed 25 percent of its original projection, the Defense Department has to justify the need for the program and the rising costs. On July 8, the Pentagon released the review resultsUnsurprisingly, he said he needed the weapons. A congressional hearing was scheduled for July 24.
There has been much back and forth in Congress over the program. Rep. Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat and ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, has been public in his Opposition to the programSen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., has said that people calling for cuts to the nuclear program are living in a dream world.
“Land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, by virtue of their location in our heartland, are also unlikely to be targeted by an enemy attack,” Fischer said in a recent Newsweek Opinion Article.
“Military planners would be surprised to hear that,” says Joseph Cirincione, retired president of the Ploughshares fund and former director of nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Because one of the main justifications for the program is that it would do exactly that, it would force the adversary to target those warheads… they’re counting on the adversary to think that way.”
At one point in his career, Cirincione was a congressional staffer and worked on military reform for nearly a decade. “When I was on the staff of the Armed Services Committee in the 1980s and 1990s, I heard about the sponge,” he says. “It’s one of the two main justifications for the ICBM.”
