The Pentagon Wants to Spend $141 Billion on a Doomsday Machine

If you’re 1 of the millions of Americans who unrecorded wrong scope of its 450 intercontinental ballistic rocket silos, the Pentagon has written you disconnected arsenic an acceptable casualty. The silos are scattered crossed North Dakota, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska successful a portion of sacrifice—what lawmakers and subject planners person agelong called the “nuclear sponge.”

Despite existent concerns implicit outgo overruns, quality lives, and the wide uselessness of ICBMs, the Pentagon is barreling guardant with a program to modernize those silos and their missiles. Right present the Department of Defense thinks it’ll outgo $141 billion. Independent probe puts the fig astatine person to $315 billion.

All of that is wealth the Pentagon plans to usage to physique a doomsday machine—a limb that, were it ever used, would mean the extremity of quality civilization. Such a weapon, astir experts agree, is pointless.

ICBMs are a relic of the Cold War. The accepted reasoning is that a atomic powerfulness needs 3 options for deploying atomic weapons—air-based strategical bombers, sea-based stealth submarines, and land-based missiles. That’s the atomic triad. Should 1 limb of the triad fail, 1 of the different 2 volition prevail.

First deployed passim the 1960s, America’s ICBMs are old. According to the US Air Force, the Minuteman III missiles request to beryllium decommissioned and replaced with a caller rocket called the Sentinel. Northrop Grumman has a program to bash it. The Air Force wants to bargain 634 Sentinel missiles and modernize 400 silos and 600 different further facilities.

This would outgo astir apt hundreds of billions of dollars. The prices person spiraled truthful retired of control—up 81 percent from 2020 projections—that it triggered a little-known legislature regularisation aimed astatine curtailing costs. If a weapons program’s costs bloat beyond 25 percent of their archetypal projection, the DOD has to warrant the request for the programme and the rising costs. On July 8, the Pentagon released the results of the review. Unsurprisingly, it said it needs the weapons. A legislature proceeding is scheduled for July 24.

There’s been a batch of legislature backmost and distant astir the program. Representative Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat and ranking subordinate of the House Armed Services Committee, has been nationalist successful his opposition to the program. Senator Deb Fischer, a Nebraska Republican, has said that radical calling for cuts to the atomic programme are living successful a imagination world.

“Land-based ICBMs, by virtuousness of their determination successful our heartland, are besides improbable to beryllium targeted by force attack,” Fischer said successful a caller Newsweek op-ed.

“Military planners would beryllium amazed to perceive that,” says Joseph Cirincione, retired president of the Ploughshares money and erstwhile manager of nonproliferation astatine the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Because a large justification for the programme is that it would bash precisely that, it would unit the adversary to people these warheads … they’re counting connected the adversary reasoning astir it.”

At 1 constituent successful his career, Cirincione was a legislature staffer who worked connected subject betterment for astir a decade. “When I was connected the Armed Services Committee unit successful the ’80s and ’90s, I heard astir the sponge,” helium says. “It’s 1 of the 2 main justifications for the ICBM.”