The United States currently deploys hundreds of nuclear missiles across Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Each missile carries a nuclear payload many times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people. The Pentagon is now planning to build a new, deadlier generation of these missiles, which are housed in underground silos.
But these intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, are not meant to be launched, ever. Not even in a nuclear war. Their primary mission is to be destroyed in the ground, along with all the people that live anywhere near them. Their main purpose is to “absorb” a nuclear attack from Russia, acting as a giant “nuclear sponge.” Such is the twisted logic of atomic warfare.
But it never made sense to draw a nuclear attack toward the United States, rather than away from it. Even during the Cold War, analysts challenged this plan, claiming it was “madness to use United States real estate as ‘a great sponge to absorb’ Soviet nuclear weapons.”
Yet the nuclear sponge is still with us. Not only that, the Trump administration is planning to spend $100 billion to do it all over again.
