If you’re one of the millions of Americans who live within range of the Pentagon’s 450 intercontinental ballistic missile silos, scattered across North Dakota, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska, you’re considered an acceptable victim — a sacrifice zone that lawmakers and military planners have long called the “nuclear sponge.”
Despite concerns about cost overruns, human lives, and the general uselessness of ICBMs, the Pentagon is forging ahead with plans to modernize these silos and missiles. Currently, the Pentagon estimates the cost will be $141 billion; independent studies have put the figure closer to $315 billion.
All of this is money the Pentagon plans to spend on building doomsday weapons — weapons that, if used, would mean the end of human civilization. Most experts agree that such weapons would be pointless.
ICBMs are a relic from the Cold War. Conventional wisdom holds that nuclear powers need three options for deploying their nuclear weapons: airborne strategic bombers, sea-based stealth submarines, and land-launched missiles. This is the nuclear triad. If one of the triads fails, one of the other two will win.
America’s intercontinental ballistic missiles are aging, having been first deployed in the 1960s. According to the Air Force, the Minuteman III missiles need to be retired and replaced with a new missile called Sentinel. Northrop Grumman plans to do just that. The Air Force wants to buy 634 Sentinel missiles and modernize 400 silos and 600 other additional facilities.
This will likely cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Prices have soared out of control, up 81 percent from 2020 projections, triggering a little-known congressional rule aimed at cutting costs. If the cost of a weapons program balloons beyond 25 percent of original projections, the Defense Department must justify the program’s necessity and the increased costs. On July 8, the Defense Department released the results of its review, saying, as expected, that the weapons are needed. A congressional hearing is scheduled for July 24.
The plan has been the subject of much debate in Congress. Representative Adam Smith, Democrat from Washington and ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, has publicly opposed the plan. Senator Deb Fischer, Republican from Nebraska, has said those calling for cuts to the nuclear program are living in a dream world.
“Land-based ICBMs are also less likely to be targeted by enemy attack because they are located in our nation’s central core,” Fischer wrote in a recent Newsweek editorial.
“Military planners would be surprised to hear that,” said Joseph Cirincione, former president of the Ploughshares Fund and former director of nuclear nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The main rationale for this plan is that it will do just that, it will force an adversary to target these warheads… They expect the adversary to think about it.”
Cirincione, who at one point in his career worked on military reform as a congressional staffer for nearly a decade, said, “I heard about sponges when I was on the Armed Services Committee staff in the ’80s and ’90s,” and that they were one of the two main justifications for ICBMs.
