By John LaForge

The Pentagon is preparing to replace all of today’s 400 long-range, land-based nuclear-armed missiles with a new missile dubbed “Sentinel.” In the face of widespread expert criticism of the plan, the new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are being built by Northrup Grumman to replace the Minuteman III missiles now in underground launch silos
spread across 40,000 square miles of Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, and North Dakota.* Popular Mechanics has reported that the program “will involve a total overhaul of the entire ICBM system, including new missiles, new launch control buildings, and the logistical and communications infrastructure.” The Air Force admits that thousands of miles of new fiber-optic cabling, connecting launch centers to the missiles, is also planned.

This spring, the program’s projected cost-per-missile grew to $214,000,000, or 81% over the 2020 projection. The skyrocketing costs triggered the federal Nunn-McCurdy Act, which terminates a program unless the Pentagon determines it is “essential” to national security. On July 8, the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, previously with the weapons giant Raytheon, issued the certification. Taxpayers for Common Sense lambasted the Pentagon’s review, saying it was based on “antiquated” Cold War hokum about a supposed “need” for three types of nuclear attack systems — land, air, and sea-based.

The fantastically expensive program, with an estimated long-term cost of $264 billion, has been called unnecessary, dangerous, and redundant by hundreds of military and civilian authorities. In dozens of news articles, position papers, declarations, editorials, commentaries, and sign-on letters, scientists, Ivy League authors, think tanks, military officials, U.S. senators, and even former cabinet secretaries have called for the cancellation of Sentinel and the permanent elimination of ICBMs.

Written appeals for the permanent elimination of land-based missiles, issued over the last 15 years, have come from no less than former Secretaries of Defense William Perry and James Mattis, former head of the Strategic Command Gen. George L. Butler, former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former commander of U.S. nuclear forces Gen. James Cartwright, Senator and later Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel; and former Secretary of the Navy and personal advisor to President Ronald Reagan, Paul Nitze.

In a July 8, 2024, letter to President Biden, some 716 scientists, including ten Nobel laureates and 23 members of the National Academies called for the program to be cancelled. The scientists recommended eliminating the land-based missiles entirely, calling them “expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary.” It was the second time in three years that a large group of scientists urged the White House to eliminate ICBMs. On Dec. 17, 2021, more than 700 scientists and engineers urged Biden to “cancel the program to replace existing ICBMs,” adding “We also urge you to consider eliminating silo-based ICBMs.”

One such scientist, Robert Goldston, Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University, put the enormous cost in perspective. Writing in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2020, Prof. Goldston wrote, “ICBMs would be too expensive even if they were free.… They have overwhelmingly negative value and therefore should be eliminated.” Sébastien Philippe, Sharon K. Weine, and Frank N. von Hippel, all with Princeton’s Program on Science & Global Security, wrote for Defense One online last June that termination of Sentinel “would make the country much safer while saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.”

On December 1, 2023, Scientific American declared in an editorial, “Plans to modernize nuclear weapons are dangerous and unnecessary: The U.S. should back away from updating its obsolescent nuclear weapons, in particular silo-launched missiles that needlessly risk catastrophe.” The editors even asked: “Who today benefits from disinterring the arms race?” answering, “Only defense-industry shareholders and military contractors near silos in North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska.”

The point amplifies one made in 2021 by the Federation of American Scientists in “Siloed Thinking: A closer look at the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent,” a report that argued the Sentinel program “is being driven by intense industry lobbying and politicians from states that will benefit most from it economically, rather than a clear assessment of the purpose of the new ICBM.” In March this year, Northrop Grumman claimed, “more than 10,000 people are employed on Sentinel across the country,” according to The Hill.

According to Responsible Statecraft online for July 31, 2024, “Northrop Grumman and its subsidiaries contributed $1.2 million to members of the Senate ICBM Coalition between 2012 and 2020 and over $15 million to members of the Senate and House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittees, and to the Senate and House Appropriations subcommittees on defense.”

Missile Force Personnel Scandals Ignored

Among the scores of critiques of the Sentinel and calls for its cancellation, Nukewatch hasn’t seen a single reference to the scandals that have rocked the ICBM system — embarrassments that we chronicled in our Revised Edition of Nuclear Heartland (2015). High-profile fraud and corruption among personnel of the missile system have resulted in hundreds of demotions, firings, courts martial, and forced retirements. Scores of Air Force missileers and several command officers from among the 9,600-strong Minuteman missile system have been punished or relieved of duty for distributing illegal drugs, ignoring safety and security rules, failing proficiency exercises, sleeping at the controls, and cheating on exams, as well as for “burnout,” sexual assaults, and spousal abuse. Some of the more well-reported crimes or misdemeanors include the following:

• In 2006, top-secret fuses made for Minuteman III missile warheads were mistakenly shipped to Taiwan from Hill Air Force Base in Utah.

• In 2008, three of four on-duty launch control officers at Minot AFB were discharged from the service after falling asleep at the controls that contained launch codes for ten missiles.

• In 2010, a computer glitch knocked fifty Minuteman III missiles off line at F.E. Warren AFB “for longer than an hour.” Five different Launch Control Centers lost all contact with the ten missiles they each control.

• An Air Force study obtained by the Associated Press in 2013 found that court-martial rates in the Minuteman missile fields in 2011 and 2012 were more than twice as high as in the overall Air Force. By June 2015, there were four active courts-martial underway at Minot AFB for drug use, rape, assault, sexual assault on an unconscious person, and larceny.

• In 2013, seventeen missile launch crew members were fired from Minot AFB along with Lt. Col. Randy Olson, after the finding of a long list of potential safety security code violations and protection errors.

• In 2013, Col. David Lynch, commander of Malmstrom AFB, was forced into retirement following a failed safety and security inspection of the 341st missile wing.

• In 2013, Brig. Gen. Michael Carey was demoted from Maj. Gen. and removed from his position as head of the 20th Air Force for drunken carousing, solicitation, and sexual harassment while on a presidential junket in Moscow.

• Missileers based in Minot, North Dakota and Malmstrom, Montana, were given possible career-ending reprimands in 2013 for leaving launch control center blast doors open, in violation of strict protocols.

• In 2014, two Malmstrom AFB missile launch crew administrators were accused of running a narcotics distribution system involving missile launch crews across six air bases. Messages they sent to 11 others concerned ecstasy and amphetamines.

• In 2014, nearly the entire chain of command, nine Colonels and Lt. Colonels, were relieved of duty at Malmstrom AFB over their failure to detect widespread cheating on proficiency exams by launch control officers. Earlier, 92 Malmstrom missileers were suspended, decertified, and barred from launch control duty for cheating on the tests.

• In 2018, the AP obtained transcripts of seven courts martial proceedings showing that service members entrusted with guarding the ICBMs bought, distributed, and used the hallucinogen LSD and other mind-altering illegal drugs. Fourteen airmen were disciplined, and six were convicted of LSD use, distribution or both.

Missile field duty, like launch center staffing and guard duty, involves numbing tedium, plagued with long hours of isolation and boredom and haunted by high-level discussions about eliminating the missiles. The work is understood by those assigned to it as a career cul-de-sac, always overshadowed for promotions and commendations by colleagues in war zones in the Middle East, Ukraine, and the South China Sea. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists put it this way in 2015: “Given the significant number of ‘expert’ studies that have appeared over the past five years suggesting that the ICBM leg of the nuclear triad should be deactivated, it is no wonder that morale has been a persistent challenge in the missile force….”

* Nukewatch has published (in 1988 and 2015) two editions of Nuclear Heartland, a guide to the history, locations, intended use, and recurring scandals of the archaic ICBMs. The Revised Edition is available discounted for $10 plus postage.