The United States is on track to spend the equivalent of more than two Manhattan projects per year in one of the most expensive nuclear arms races in history.
The US has not done a recorded air breathing nuclear detonation since 1992 (the last US test, Julin-Divider, was on September 23, 1992). Almost 50 years and over 1000 tests in the USA alone and its nuclear warhead inventory and the energetics needed to loft them via rocket-borne means for the submarine and ground-launched missile programs is ancient and sclerotic. Although nuclear explosions have not been conducted in the USA since 1992, the physics of the process is quite well understood, and can be simulated on a computer. There is a considerable amount of physics testing at the National Ignition Facility for making and setting off miniature hydrogen bombs and is active today.
Some of the Minuteman II silos are still using 8″ floppy disk media (although one can make the case it makes them less vulnerable to tampering) although that was supposed to have been changed around 2020. The system, once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), relied on IBM Series/1 computers installed by the Air Force at Minuteman II missile sites in the 1960s and 1970s. Although a USB controller takes way more processing power than a Series 1 has. More likely it’s a system that translates floppy commands to something that reads virtual sectors from a solid state disk, possibly with data at rest encryption that is dynamically decrypted on read.
The GAO talked about this in 2016.
For the ignition systems you can test the bomb mechanism with a lump of some other metal instead of the fissile nuclear fuel to make sure the timing sequence is correct. You can do this 100 times to make sure it’s reliable. You just replace the ones in the warheads every five years to make sure they haven’t gone stale. The theory work behind the nuclear detonation sequence is mostly done in computer models these days, there’s little need to actually set off a thermonuclear blast anymore. We’ve already verified the models decades ago.
The US can test the missiles themselves without a payload. Although the latest tests with the UK have been disastrous. The last successful test was 2012 for the UK.
Don’t think for a moment these will will come in on time and on budget.
Over the past decade, the United States has launched one of the most expensive nuclear arms races in history. As it stands now, this new nuclear modernization comes with a price tag of approximately $1.7 trillion over 30 years.1 To put this in perspective, adjusted for inflation to 2023 dollars, the four years of the Manhattan Project cost approximately $30 billion.2
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the United States is set to spend some $756 billion on nuclear weapons modernization programs between fiscal 2023-2032,3 which averages out to $75 billion a year on nuclear weapons. That is more than two Manhattan projects every year for the next eight years.
Put in other terms, it is nearly all the money the United States spent on nuclear weapons and delivery systems for World War II, spent every year, for the next eight years. When combined with the Department of Defense’s conventional weapons portfolio over the same period, nuclear modernization will drive annual peacetime Pentagon budgets to unprecedented levels.
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The United States already maintains the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal, a high-tech array of weapons systems that currently consists of a deployed force of some 1670 strategic nuclear warheads.7 These weapons can already destroy all human civilization. The overwhelming majority of these warheads are much more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, which measured 15 and 21 kilotons respectively.8 The most powerful weapon currently in the arsenal is the B83 gravity bomb, clocking in at 1.2 megatons, or 80 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.9 Even the smallest – the bomber launched ALCM cruise missile – is able to “dial its yield” up or down between 5-150kt.10 On top of this, the U.S. maintains a hedge of 1938 strategic warheads of all types in reserve, ready to be uploaded onto launchers in the event of a crisis.11 Finally, we maintain some 100 weapons, variously termed as tactical, battlefield, or non-strategic, forward deployed at six NATO air bases that are meant to be carried by conventional fighter craft in the event of a full-scale war in Europe.12
Matching a chaos avalanche of incompetency that the West is experiencing now, the recipe for disaster with these updates is assured. The US needs to make a sober assessment of just how much of this expense is necessary. One possibility is reducing the number of total missiles and weapons from thousands to hundreds. Another is the possibility is the retirement of the two airborne legs of the nuclear triad and using the nuclear submarine force as the primary means of nuclear deterrence.
In Part II, I will provide a critique and overview of the new Sentinel system being considered to replace the silo-borne Minuteman III arsenal.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
