If you’re one of the millions of Americans who live within range of its 450 intercontinental ballistic missile silos, the Pentagon has written you off as an acceptable casualty. The silos are scattered across North Dakota, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska in a zone of sacrifice—what lawmakers and military planners have long called the “nuclear sponge.”
Despite real concerns over cost overruns, human lives, and the general uselessness of ICBMs, the Pentagon is barreling forward with a plan to modernize those silos and their missiles. Right now the Department of Defense thinks it’ll cost $141 billion. Independent research puts the number at closer to $315 billion.
All of that is money the Pentagon plans to use to build a doomsday machine—a weapon that, were it ever used, would mean the end of human civilization. Such a weapon, most experts agree, is pointless.
ICBMs are a relic of the Cold War. The conventional thinking is that a nuclear power needs three options for deploying nuclear weapons—air-based strategic bombers, sea-based stealth submarines, and land-based missiles. That’s the nuclear triad. Should one leg of the triad fail, one of the other two will prevail.
First deployed throughout the 1960s, America’s ICBMs are old. According to the US Air Force, the Minuteman III missiles need to be decommissioned and replaced with a new missile called the Sentinel. Northrop Grumman has a plan to do it. The Air Force wants to buy 634 Sentinel missiles and modernize 400 silos and 600 other additional facilities.
This would cost probably hundreds of billions of dollars. The prices have spiraled so out of control—up 81 percent from 2020 projections—that it triggered a little-known congressional rule aimed at curtailing costs. If a weapons program’s costs bloat beyond 25 percent of their original projection, the DOD has to justify the need for the program and the rising costs. On July 8, the Pentagon released the results of the review. Unsurprisingly, it said it needs the weapons. A congressional hearing is scheduled for July 24.
There’s been a lot of congressional back and forth about the program. Representative Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat and ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, has been public in his opposition to the program. Senator Deb Fischer, a Nebraska Republican, has said that people calling for cuts to the nuclear program are living in a dream world.
“Land-based ICBMs, by virtue of their location in our heartland, are also unlikely to be targeted by enemy attack,” Fischer said in a recent Newsweek op-ed.
“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 a major justification for the program is that it would do exactly that, it would force the adversary to target these warheads … they’re counting on the adversary thinking about it.”
At one point in his career, Cirincione was a congressional staffer who worked on military reform for almost a decade. “When I was on the Armed Services Committee staff in the ’80s and ’90s, I heard about the sponge,” he says. “It’s one of the two chief justifications for the ICBM.”