Inside a $100 Billion Project to Modernize America's Outdated Nuclear Missile ArsenalA Time correspondent visited one of the American missile warning bases and was surprised: the light suddenly turns off in rooms with ballistic missiles, and when something breaks, Air Force repair crews take parts from military museums.
Biden wants to modernize the arsenal, but not everyone in the United States agrees that it is advisable.
If something breaks inside Captain Kaz Moffett's underground command post based on the Alpha-01 missile alert, this part or piece of equipment will be marked with a paper tag with the inscription "warning" or "danger". Several of these tags are already hanging in this cramped capsule, buried about 20 meters underground under the high plains of eastern Wyoming. One is attached to a shut-off valve that regulates water flow in case of an emergency. Another one hangs on the ventilation hatch. The command capsule itself is now mounted on steel piles, because the shock absorber system installed back in 1963 to protect against the shock wave of a thermonuclear explosion is not working now. So there's a huge tag for Air Force repair crews to fix that, too.
There are also such malfunctions that are not marked in any way. On Moffett's computer monitor, which allows him to monitor a fleet of ten intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with nuclear warheads, a glitch flashes at the bottom of the screen. His classified telephone line is so weak that he can barely hear his fellow Air Force officers who command more than a hundred other nuclear missiles scattered over twenty thousand square kilometers. "You can hear them quite clearly if you stand at the right angle, on one leg and jump up and down," smiles Moffett. — It's all part of our job. We spend a lot of time asking ourselves, "Hey, what are we going to do today?"
Entering the Moffett capsule on Alpha 01 is like entering the past. Rows of turquoise racks for electronics, industrial cables and analog controls have been here since the US military installed this equipment decades ago. Take a closer look at the equipment and you will find the names of manufacturers such as Radio Corp. of America, which ceased to exist in 1987, and Hughes Aircraft Co., which ceased to exist in 1997. Some systems have been updated over the years, but these achievements have remained invisible to anyone who survived the revolution of personal computers, not to mention the Internet era. The entire fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles here uses less computing power than what is now inside the smartphone in your pocket. When something breaks down, Air Force repair crews take parts out of storage shelves, pay a contractor to make them specifically according to their ancient specifications, or even sometimes take them from military museums.
If the 29-year-old Moffett had ever received an order to launch missiles under his control, then such a directive, which only the US president can give, would have come in the form of a so-called "emergency action message" (EAM). The order will appear on Moffett's buggy tricolor monitor via a computer program that still uses floppy disks, initiating a series of steps to launch missiles. The countdown sequence of the terminal begins after the machine translates the digital signal from the command center into its analog form, which is the only one that the 50-year-old receiver inside the missile silo can recognize. "I had never seen such old equipment in my life until I came down here," says 32—year-old Lieutenant Jessica Phileas, another Air Force rocket man and Moffett's partner on round-the-clock duty. "This is something unimaginable."
For a generation, the U.S. "triad" of bombers, submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons has been slowly becoming obsolete as the country has focused on other pressing security threats such as terrorism and cyberattacks. Today, the service life of this Cold War-era weapon has exceeded all standards for many years, which leads to grueling work on its repair and an acute shortage of spare parts.
This puts the US in front of a very difficult choice. We can maintain our current fleet of missiles, but with increasing costs: the cost of servicing intercontinental ballistic missiles alone has increased by 17% over the past half century and amounts to almost $482 million per year. We can withdraw some of our nuclear forces from combat duty, potentially disrupting the global strategic balance, which is designed to ensure that if any country starts a nuclear war, everyone in it will be destroyed. What the Pentagon wants to do now is spend about $1 trillion or more in the coming decades to replace all three parts of our nuclear triad.
Joe Biden took the presidency in an effort to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in American politics. He even considered the possibility of completely excluding intercontinental ballistic missiles from the triad. But last year, this option was abandoned when intelligence agencies found that China was expanding its nuclear arsenals faster and more aggressively than previously thought. "When you watch China grow rapidly militarily, seeking to triple the number of nuclear weapons it has, it seems inappropriate for the United States to unilaterally reduce its nuclear missile capability at the moment," one senior administration official told TIME. This opinion was strengthened after the start of the Russian special operation in Ukraine, during which President Vladimir Putin threatened to use nuclear weapons against the United States and European allies.
Skeptics still wonder whether the US military needs to replace every bomber, submarine and missile in order to modernize the arsenal originally conceived to win the Cold War. And if so, has our country seriously considered the strategic and financial costs associated with attracting another generation to this? "Americans have forgotten about the danger inherent in nuclear weapons by definition," says Lindy Kirkbride, 73, a Wyoming activist who led demonstrations in the 1980s against the military's latest attempt to replace intercontinental ballistic missiles. "Young people don't seem to realize that these weapons pose the same existential threat to the world as global warming."
If the US really decides that it needs to keep its land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, then it should finance the creation of fundamentally new weapons, and not continue to invest billions in the existing missile arsenal, says Chuck Hagel, a former defense secretary and Republican senator from Nebraska. "America must either replace these ancient systems, or completely abandon them," Hagel argues.
The final decision on replacing America's aging nuclear forces rests with Congress. He must decide not only whether to replace them, but also how to do it. Now that Biden is in power, the Pentagon is betting that it will receive funding for its entire $1 trillion project to replace all three parts of the nuclear triad, including $100 billion to replace all land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. In April, the responsible representatives of the Air Force held the first of a series of meetings with the municipalities that this project will affect to inform them about what could happen to them. The dizzying, multi-year enterprise, now in its early stages, promises to become one of the most complex and expensive in American military history. It includes the removal and removal of 450 missiles and 45 command centers in Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Montana and North Dakota; the payment of huge compensation to 9,800 landowners of 50,000 hectares of land for the right to do so; the subsequent construction of mines and the installation of new missiles in the same places. The military plans not only to replace all missiles, silos and launchers, but also intend to eliminate and replace the extensive underground network of cables connecting these structures.
At the moment, the current intercontinental ballistic missiles, called Minuteman III, are buried inside fortified mines at intervals of several miles throughout the Great Plains. Behind fences 2.5 meters high, entwined with barbed wire, in wheat fields, cattle pastures and even near country roads, there are 400 missiles in a state of full combat readiness — ready to launch — at any time.
Maintenance crews at Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne often take over their shifts before dawn. The objects they visit can be 150 kilometers or more from the base, and special trailers take some time to get there in the snow or in the rain, especially if the cargo includes a hydrogen bomb. One Tuesday morning in July, the task of such a shift was to repair a Minuteman III in a missile silo in Pine Bluffs, Wyoming. Drivers crank their necks as a string of military vehicles sweeps past them.
An hour later, the convoy stops on a gravel road at Wyoming Highway 215. If you didn't know what you were looking for, you would most likely have walked past the A-05 launch complex without paying any attention to it. This is a fenced area with several antennas, a concrete slab sunk into the ground on rails and some other inconspicuous things. But under the slab is the most advanced ground-based nuclear missile in the US arsenal.
The Air Force maintenance crew sneaks through the gate in the padlocked fence, drives up to the hatch on one side of the plate and lifts the 500-kilogram lid with a hand-held screw jack. Then it is shifted on steel rails, and one of the members dials the combined codes on the two inner covers to gain access inside the shaft. One by one, the technicians penetrate the stairs into an underground shaft with a diameter of about a meter. These are two floors down to the technical floor, where halogen lamps are lit along the rounded walls above buzzing machines. Minuteman III rests in the middle of all this in a launch tube, aimed at the sky, and is capable of delivering a nuclear strike anywhere on the planet in about 30 minutes. More than one and a half meters in diameter and 20 meters in height, the intercontinental ballistic missile is equipped with a thermonuclear warhead located inside the black nose cone, the destructive power of which is at least 20 times greater than the power of the atomic bomb that killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima.
The team members don't think about it. On this day, two missiles of the unit are undergoing maintenance. They need to get them back in line. Rocket scientists have spent hundreds of hours working in similar underground bunkers, removing and replacing parts with whole trucks to guarantee the launch of the 52-year-old weapon, if ever ordered to do so. The work involves moving specialists across the entire surface of the ICBM in a special lift, similar to a construction cradle. Each task is standardized. The rocket men have thick instructions and instructions in their hands, similar to telephone directories.
The A-05 site was built in October 1963, simultaneously with nine other missile silos and a launch control center, in which Phileas and Moffett are on duty. As in the capsule of this point, most of the equipment remained the same. Ventilation keeps the temperature inside the mine at 21 degrees Celsius, which gives a respite from the summer heat outside. Humidity is also regulated here so that all equipment works properly.
Suddenly, darkness reigns in the mine. Standing underground next to one of the world's most powerful nuclear missiles during an unexpected power outage requires good nerves, but the Air Force repair team remains unwavering. This is what they always expect from working with this equipment. They are waiting for electricity to pass through a switchboard that was manufactured decades before they were born. In the dark, they argue about which will turn on first: the civil power grid or a local generator. "The electricity will turn on again, just give it a second to think," says Fiscella, a technician. — Many of the things here are very outdated. They just break down."
Right. Once, in a high hangar where Air Force servicemen work with thermonuclear warheads W78 and W87, the roof leaked. Last winter, crews had to cut off the rusty locks of the heavy hatch above the loaded Minuteman III rocket and lower two repairmen into the mine to repair it using belts and a crane. Teams are fighting corrosion, water penetration, collapsed pipelines, displaced doors and bulging walls. There are hundreds of thousands of parts in Minuteman III, and something always breaks among them.
On average, repair crews in Wyoming replace five important parts in rockets every day. Sometimes, when a part fails, it can be found in an army warehouse. In other cases, an electrical adapter or connector fails, and decades have passed since anyone has seen them anywhere at all. The Air Force can't just take something off the shelves at Home Depot and put it on a nuclear missile, so whole teams are looking for spare parts. If something cannot be found, the military will conclude a contract with private companies to manufacture some part according to the original specifications. But it can be expensive. The cost of maintaining and maintaining constant combat readiness of American ICBMs has increased to an average of $ 55,000 per hour. This is taking into account the huge costs of their permanent storage in temperature-controlled mines deep underground.
According to the military, the proposed new intercontinental ballistic missile, previously known as a "Ground-based strategic Deterrent" until the Air Force officially named it Sentinel in April this year, will include more advanced rocket boosters, composite materials and new guidance systems. It will also have an electronic design with an open architecture, which will allow software updates and other modifications without requiring major modernization. The US Air Force Command says that this is an easier and less costly way to maintain the planned 50-year life cycle of a rocket than to disassemble it manually every time or painstakingly repair it from nose to tail.
Members of the Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers have already begun to disperse across Wyoming to draw up environmental impact maps, entry rights and other plans related to the construction of new mines. Initial work will begin on the Wyoming rocket fields in 2024. But the main construction of mines and control centers will begin in 2026, as all plans will be brought together and more workers will arrive at the construction sites. The crews will then open a new mine every week for nine consecutive years. Meanwhile, the Sentinel rocket is preparing for its first test flight next year from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
But let's go back to mine A-05. It takes about 90 seconds before the lights come on and the cars come back to life. "All right, let's get back to work," Brigadier Fiscella tells the brigade. — Otherwise we will fall behind the schedule."
From his ranch, Mato Wynune can see the Air Force team working on the A-05 launch pad, but does not know what they are doing there. She lives half a mile down the road in a one-story white farmhouse hidden behind bushes and evergreen trees. "I don't ask any questions, but it seems important to me," says 81—year-old Wynune, her white hair is braided in two braids in accordance with her Lakota traditions.
Like many of her neighbors, Wynune doesn't expect Minuteman III to ever break out of the wheat field surrounding her over a pillar of rocket fire. But in principle, the rocket's flight can be traced along a fiery arc to about 100 kilometers above the ground, when it will drop three different stages within three minutes. In outer space, far from the field of view of the Wynune, a cone-shaped combat module with a thermonuclear warhead inside will maneuver to its target at a speed of about 20,000 kilometers per hour. Navigation is based on an inertial guidance system with rotating gyroscopes, and not on satellite signals. If the error is even 0.05%, it may mean a deviation from the course of 30 kilometers or even more.
After entering the dense layers of the atmosphere, the missile's warhead will rotate clockwise and fall at a speed several times faster than the speed of a rifle bullet. In less than a minute, the hydrogen bomb will explode several hundred meters above the epicenter, creating a fireball with a diameter of several kilometers with a temperature reaching millions of degrees. This fiery whirlwind will incinerate all living things and burn all buildings within a kilometer radius. The shock wave flattens buildings to the ground for many kilometers around. Residual precipitation will fall for several days, polluting the environment, water and food, causing health problems for survivors. Human losses will amount to millions.
This is something that no one would want to see firsthand. And yet America needs these intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Pentagon and US military leaders say, to keep Russia, China, North Korea or any other country from thinking about launching a preemptive strike against the US. In the eerie logic of planning a nuclear war, these countries are believed to refrain from doing so out of fear that the Minutemen III will unleash their own wave of nuclear Apocalypse. That is why the United States should replace outdated missiles, concludes Biden and the leadership of the Ministry of Defense, and not continue the struggle to maintain the existing system.
Critics of this concept say that such thinking is an outdated dogma of the Cold War. According to them, thermonuclear missiles mounted on submarines and long-range bombers are more than enough to deter hostile countries from using their own nuclear weapons. Moreover, they fear that intercontinental ballistic missiles could provoke an unintended nuclear catastrophe due to the enemy's erroneous conclusion about the attack, his miscalculation regarding the intentions of the United States or some other mistake. During the Cold War, there were several borderline situations when the destruction of most of humanity was prevented only thanks to luck or the common sense of lower-level officers. In February, the Pentagon postponed a long-planned test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile to avoid escalating tensions with Russia amid a special operation in Ukraine. Anti-nuclear groups call such unreliable circumstances proof that, perhaps, atomic weapons should be scrapped altogether.
Another aspect of our missile silos that is not widely discussed in America itself is that they are a kind of strategic bait for nuclear strikes by other countries. The nuclear "counter-force strategy" focuses on the preemptive destruction of the enemy's nuclear weapons before they can be launched. The US military seized on this idea as a justification for the creation of new intercontinental ballistic missiles. It is assumed that if the United States did not have land-based missiles, Russia or China could simply launch a massive strike on only six strategic US facilities: the administration's residence in Washington, three nuclear bomber bases (in North Dakota, Missouri and Louisiana), as well as two nuclear submarine ports (in Washington states and Georgia). "With the presence of many hundreds of ICBM launch bases, this set of targets expands from six main targets to more than 400," says Air Force General Anthony Cotton, who commands the nuclear forces of this type of troops and is Biden's candidate for the post of head of the US Strategic Command. "This gives the president, as commander—in—chief, numerous solutions. And removing one of the components of the nuclear triad deprives him of many of these options."
This is the opinion of strategists who wake up every day and prepare for a nuclear war. But activists of the movement against nuclear weapons look at this more skeptically: if the stated goal of American intercontinental ballistic missiles is to attract enemy missiles to themselves so that the rest of the Americans would not be their targets, then those states in which these ICBMs are deployed are deliberately sacrificed? "We shouldn't be trying to 'lure' a nuclear attack onto U.S. soil," says Tom Collina, policy director of the Plowshares Fund, a San Francisco—based nonprofit that supports nuclear nonproliferation. — ICBMs are useless, it's a waste of money, and without them we would be safer. It would be better to take this $100 billion and burn it in a barrel."
If Biden was ever ready to accept this train of thought, he has now closed the door on him as president. When Biden took office in January 2021, his team embarked on a thorough reassessment of nuclear policy, the kind of comprehensive study that every new administration conducts, and it quickly discovered China's plans to expand its nuclear arsenal. The data showed that Beijing planned to triple the number of warheads to 1,000 by 2030, while simultaneously building hundreds of new mines capable of launching long-range ballistic missiles, potentially targeting the United States and its remote nuclear forces. Then, three days after the start of the special operation in Ukraine, Putin announced that he was putting his nuclear forces on "high alert" in response to what he called "aggressive statements" by the United States and its European allies.
Although even the Biden administration's unclassified nuclear review has not been fully made public, a senior administration official says that after these events, Biden's team decided to completely rebuild the nuclear triad. Despite the fact that during the 2020 election campaign, Biden admitted the possibility of abandoning intercontinental ballistic missiles, the White House approved the controversial and complex Air Force plan to replace Minutemen III missiles with Sentinel missiles. And where Biden once supported the policy of not using nuclear weapons first, his administration has now retained the opportunity to do so.
None of these arguments likely reached Wynune on her porch a short walk from the A-05 launch complex. The local farmers don't seem to be fixated on the mine either. They just plow around her. 394 people who visited five local municipalities to meet with representatives of the Air Force were not interested in the president's plans or the question of why their hometowns are considered promising "sponges" for attracting enemy hydrogen bombs. Instead, the participants' questions mainly concerned the military's acquisition of land for construction, the processes of filing claims for possible damage and damage to roads, schools and other utilities.
Where some see an existential nightmare, many locals see opportunities for themselves. The Wyoming Business Council called this project the largest investment in economic development in the history of the state. The Cheyenne City Chamber of Commerce has created a website for state-owned enterprises so they can become approved suppliers for Northrop Grumman Corp., the giant defense corporation that won a $13.3 billion contract in 2020 to lead the program after its sole competitor, Boeing Co., refused to participate in the tender. It is planned that Wyoming will become the first state to receive Sentinel missiles after the completion of the construction of new mines.
Jim Young from Kimball, Nebraska, visited his city office at the time to meet with the military. He is not concerned about the plans for the construction of launchers or the new missiles themselves. Many residents of the region are even proud to host intercontinental ballistic missiles, which many consider an act of patriotism. What worries 73-year-old Young is that the Air Force is blocking a long-planned project to build a wind farm in the city, which would bring income to local government and provide new jobs. The military claims that they need a zone with a radius of about four kilometers around each mine in case helicopters need to land near them in an emergency. "How is it: a medical helicopter can land on the roof of a hospital, but here the military needs a radius of four kilometers? "They probably think we're just a bunch of backwoods farmers crazy about wind farms." But this is our land."
Young was in high school when the Air Force first planted intercontinental ballistic missiles into the ground in the southwest corner of Nebraska. At that time, most families could trace the history of their land holdings back to the days of settlement almost a century ago. They signed contracts with the federal government to sell one or two acres of their land at market value for what was called "national defense." Then the new construction attracted workers from all over the country, reviving the quiet town. Young's graduating class doubled to about 90 students, and new shops, restaurants and bars began to appear along Highway 30 in downtown Kimball. "A lot of people here think that with these new rockets, we're going to have a similar boom here," says Young.
But the activity of those old days is far in the past. Some workers of that time settled in the city with their families, but most did not. But rockets have become part of the daily life of the city and the surrounding area. You hung around them when you were going to the movies with your girlfriend, or heading to the grocery store, or taking your child to visit a friend. When we drive with Young in his Dodge pickup truck past fields sown with sunflower, sugar beet, corn and millet, we see fenced-off mines with rockets on the horizon. Young recalls how, many years ago, trenches stretched for miles through his family's wheat fields. At that time, the town of Kimball was proud of its role as the "front line" in the Cold War. Residents even started calling it the US Missile Center.
Now this name is not heard in the district. But with the expansion of a new global arms race, its return to these parts is more than possible.
By William Hennigan
