The political and military vulnerability of America’s land-based nuclear missiles

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Jon Wolfsthal

The current plan for US nuclear modernization would replace the nation’s aging Minuteman III missiles with next-generation missiles known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, at a cost of $100 billion or more. As part of the agreement that resulted in the Senate’s approval of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty nuclear agreement with the Russian Federation, the Obama administration agreed to a nuclear modernization plan that includes retaining and upgrading the nation’s intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). But from a military standpoint, these missiles are the most vulnerable and least essential components of the US nuclear arsenal. As part of its comprehensive nuclear posture review, the Trump administration should take the time to determine whether ICBMs fit into America’s nuclear deterrent strategy, and to consider options such as reducing or even eliminating them – which could be done with little risk to the overall security of the United States or its allies. 

“The nuclear stockpile must be tended to, and fundamental questions must be asked and answered,” retired Marine Corps General James N. Mattis advised the US Senate Armed Services Committee in January 2015. “Is it time to reduce the triad to a dyad, removing the land-based missiles?” he asked. “This would reduce the false alarm danger” (Mattis 2015Mattis, J. N. 2015. “Statement of James N. Mattis before the Armed Services Committee.” January 27.https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Mattis_01-27-15.pdf. [Google Scholar]).

Two years later, as Secretary of Defense, Mattis presides over a department that is forging ahead with the nuclear modernization program laid out by the Obama administration – a plan that includes modernizing land-based missiles. It calls for replacing the nation’s aging Minuteman III missiles, stationed in underground silos scattered across five states, with a next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent.

The Minuteman III missiles were first deployed in 1970, but have been upgraded over the years to extend their life to 2030. The Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent is scheduled to begin deployment in the late 2020s, and will enable the United States to maintain its land-based missile capability through 2075 (Air Force 2016Air Force. 2016. “AF Reaches First Milestone in Acquisition of New ICBM.” AFNWC Public Affairs Office, Kirtland Air Force Base, September 1.http://www.kirtland.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/933565/af-reaches-first-milestone-in-acquisition-of-new-icbm. [Google Scholar]). The Air Force plans to buy 666 new missiles, of which 400 will be deployed at any one time under current and projected force structures.

During the Cold War, strategists often depicted the US nuclear arsenal as a three-legged stool, with each leg bolstering the nuclear deterrent and providing flexibility. But Mattis is not the only official to suggest that the land-based leg of the stool could be safely removed without jeopardizing US nuclear security. The “fundamental question” he raised in 2015 about land-based missiles still has not been answered. The Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent has parochial defenders in Congress, but considering its limited military value and high cost, the Trump administration should take time to reconsider how ICBMs fit into its emerging nuclear strategy and, with scarce resources, whether they should be a priority.

America’s nuclear legs

The United States has a large and diverse nuclear arsenal consisting of land-, sea-, and air-launched nuclear weapons. However, the so-called nuclear “triad” is a misnomer. The United States actually has what would be more accurately described as a nuclear “pentad,” with five distinct ways of delivering nuclear weapons: intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, strategic bomber aircraft with cruise missiles, strategic bombers with gravity bombs, and tactical fighter bombers with gravity bombs. Even with the reductions pursued under President Barack Obama, the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff has concluded (Smith 2013Smith, R. J. 2013. “Obama Administration Embraces Major New Nuclear Weapons Cut.” The Center for Public Integrity, February 8.https://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/02/08/12156/obama-administration-embraces-major-new-nuclear-weapons-cut. [Google Scholar]) that America still has more nuclear weapons than it needs to deter its adversaries and reassure its friends, and to carry out nuclear missions should deterrence fail.

Of these multiple delivery platforms, none is as militarily or politically vulnerable as the intercontinental ballistic missile and the multibillion-dollar program to replace it, now in its initial stages. Given the reduced importance of ICBMs for carrying out nuclear missions such as holding an enemy’s fixed nuclear targets (silo-based missiles, for example) at risk to reduce the damage an enemy could inflict on the United States, it remains unclear how these weapons fit into American strategy. Furthermore, the current modernization plan – with three design and procurement programs, each in the tens of billions of dollars, and with ambitious timelines – is fraught with risks of delays and cost overruns. Having some certainty over whether the new missile program goes forward, and what its future size and mission will be, would go a long way in determining the stability of the US-Russian and US-Chinese nuclear relationships.

Each leg of the nuclear pentad has costs and benefits for deterrence and stability. Submarine-based missiles are widely seen as the most survivable leg of the US strategic deterrent, with good reason: They are hard to find and track and provide the bulk of America’s retaliatory deterrent. Strategic bombers can be sent into combat and then recalled, and are important for signaling to the United States’ friends and allies alike when its interests are at risk. ICBMs, however, are easy to target because they are stationary; cannot be recalled once launched; and serve little role in deterrence other than as what warfighters call a “sponge” – absorbing a nuclear attack by drawing enemy missiles to widely dispersed targets in the United States.

Nuclear pawns

With more than 400 aim points spread across a wide geographic area, the United States’ land-based missiles do greatly complicate Russian and Chinese war planning. It would take a lot of Russian or Chinese nuclear weapons to hit them all. It is unlikely that either adversary would have any confidence that it could eliminate all of these targets in a bolt-out-of-the-blue scenario and survive, especially since America’s submarines would remain at sea and capable of striking back. These subs – barring a quantum improvement in Russia or China’s ability to find and sink them – undermine the suggestion that a country could conduct a successful nuclear sneak attack. Submarine-launched missiles are also highly accurate, giving them a capability to not only deter but also to carry out some of the missions previously assigned to land-based missiles – such as degrading enemy forces in a conflict should deterrence fail.

During the Cold War, when experts worried regularly about sudden strikes, there might have been some internal logic that justified having hundreds of ICBMs ready to launch. Historians can, and do, argue whether this was prudence or paranoia. But even with growing US-Russian tensions today, there is no credible evidence to suggest that either Russia or China is tempted to initiate a full-scale nuclear conflict by conducting a sudden strike to eliminate America’s nuclear forces. While the risk is not zero, in a world of limited resources where priorities must be assigned and costs and benefits weighed, retaining and modernizing land-based missiles looks like a questionable proposition at best, and easily the least valuable of the nuclear upgrades planned or underway.

The chance that Russia or China would consider such a strike is so low, in fact, that President Obama, with the full support of the Joint Chiefs and US Strategic Command, ordered in 2013 that the United States no longer rely on launch-on-warning to ensure that the nation’s military could carry out its nuclear missions of deterrence, reassurance, and, ultimately, damage limitation should deterrence fail. By openly stating that the United States could, and would, sacrifice its ICBMs in a conflict and still fulfill its missions, the country signaled the reliability and strength of its retaliatory forces. The 2013 move also made clear the success of the government’s work to enhance continuity of operations and of government in the wake of a catastrophic event such as nuclear war.

While command and control systems remain a high priority, as noted recently by military leadership (Pellerin 2017Pellerin, C. 2017. “Selva: Nuclear Deterrent Is the Joint Force Modernization Priority.” DoD News, March 8. U.S. Department of Defense.https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1107141/selva-nuclear-deterrent-is-the-joint-force-modernization-priority. [Google Scholar]), efforts to test and exercise the continuity of US democratic institutions so that there is a national command structure in the wake of a catastrophic event have greatly improved over the past decade. Meanwhile, Pentagon strategists have yet to fully internalize that, in a scenario in which US ICBMs are targeted by Russian forces (the only country that could conceivably hit all the United States’ ICBMs at once), these at-risk ICBMs would mainly be aimed at silos suddenly emptied by the weapons that had just been launched at the United States. Ironically, the most likely scenario in which Russia launches these weapons is when it fears for their survival because of the ability of US ICBMs to be launched quickly and destroy them.

The politics of modernization

The military and strategic vulnerability of ICBMs has been an open secret for years. It was this vulnerability that led Senators from states that host ICBMs, or are involved in their testing and development, to claim (wrongly) that “ICBMs are the most stabilizing part of the triad” (Senate ICBM Coalition 2009Senate ICBM Coalition. 2009. “The Long Pole of the Nuclear Umbrella: A White Paper on the Criticality of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile to United States Security.” November4.http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/policy/us-nuclear-policy/icbm_coalition_white_paper.pdf. [Google Scholar], 5). This logic, and their active lobbying to persuade the Obama administration that any reductions in ICBMs should be evenly spread among the states with ICBM bases, made clear that these officials were concerned mainly with the economic impacts that ICBM reductions, or even base closing, would have on their states – and not with the strategic or military implications of reductions required under the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which entered into force in 2011. While it is not a surprise that senators are protective of their states’ economic interests, nuclear strategy should not be sacrificed at such an altar.

New START limits both Washington and Moscow to a maximum of 1550 offensive nuclear weapons on 800 launchers, of which no more than 700 can be deployed at any time. None of the senators in the ICBM Coalition wanted their states to bear the brunt of cuts to the number of launchers the United States would keep under the treaty. It was in this context that the Obama administration agreed, after the treaty’s adoption, that the implementation of New START would be spread evenly across the nuclear forces.

Throughout the remainder of his term, President Obama kept his commitments to the Senate to fully fund the nuclear modernization – and to sustain ICBMs along with submarine-launched ballistic missiles and strategic bombers for the life of New START. That political commitment expired when Obama left office, however. The future commitment, direction, and scope of US nuclear modernization remain a question mark, as with so many other aspects of security and defense planning. It is likely that President Donald Trump will seek to move full steam ahead on all the modernization programs begun by Obama, but it is not clear what will happen when trade-offs between defense programs must be made in an environment that will be budget-constrained (regardless of whether the White House request for a $54 billion increase in military spending is approved).

Assuming the modernization goes forward as planned, over the next 20 years, the United States will purchase and deploy the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent to replace the aging Minuteman III missiles deployed in three groups: one at Malstrom Air Force Base in Montana; another at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota; and a third at F. E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska. Each missile wing has three squadrons, and each squadron has 50 missile silos. Of these 450 silos, 400 have missiles and the other 50 are kept ready to be loaded with missiles.

Requests for proposals went out from the Air Force in 2016, and the Pentagon should begin reviewing submissions toward the end of this fiscal year. Costs for designing and building the new missiles are now expected to exceed $100 billion when all is said and done. That is much higher than the $61 billion estimate given just last year by the Defense Department’s top acquisition official (Reif 2017Reif, K. 2017. “New ICBM Replacement Cost Revealed.” Arms Control Today, March. Arms Control Association.https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2017-03/news/new-icbm-replacement-cost-revealed. [Google Scholar]). While maintenance costs for the new missiles are likely to be much lower than keeping the older Minuteman III missiles up and running, the silos will not be replaced – and thus the savings for the operations and management of the new systems may be smaller than some expect.

With a current defense budget of about $600 billion per year, these costs would appear manageable, especially when spread out over more than a decade. But given the overall budget pressures, a dollar spent on new missiles is a dollar not spent on F-35 aircraft, troop recruitment and retention, navy acquisition, and other programs. This is not “guns versus butter,” but rather guns versus guns. There are other options.

Alternatives to missile replacement

At one extreme, the United States could simply decide to get out of the ICBM business – something former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and others have recommended (Perry 2016Perry, W. J. 2016. “Why It’s Safe to Scrap America’s ICBMs.” New York Times, September 30.https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/opinion/why-its-safe-to-scrap-americas-icbms.html. [Google Scholar]). Doing so would eliminate the military rationale for Russia to maintain a large ICBM force of its own, possibly opening the door to new reductions in both arsenals and increased strategic stability. Such a development would obviously have to happen in a larger context – including a resolution of Russia’s violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Russian occupation of the Crimea, and Russia’s persistent concerns about US precision conventional weapons capabilities and missile defenses.

A less extreme option would be to stagger the ambitious modernization programs now being pursued and delay the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent program until the program to replace the Ohio-class ballistic submarines has begun to actually produce boats, and the B-21 bomber program is more advanced. This would flatten the much-discussed modernization “bow wave” (the budget crunch expected in the 2020s, when multiple weapons programs will reach their peak funding requirements at roughly the same time), and would give the Air Force and the White House time to consider a range of options for the total nuclear force – and for the ICBM leg in particular.

Such options could include extending the life of a smaller number of Minuteman III ICBMs and reducing the size of the force. To the extent that the new administration wants to maintain New START numbers, these weapons could be deployed with more than one warhead. While the United States had encouraged Russia to move away from heavy ICBMs with multiple warheads over the 1990s and 2000s, those efforts failed and Russia is now committed to such systems. The United States could follow this lead by deploying, say, 200 ICBMs with two weapons each instead of 400 missiles carrying a single warhead. Two hundred aim points are still enough for a nuclear “sponge” that complicates enemy planning, if that is the key consideration for the Trump administration. Technical programs to determine which 200 of the 450 current ICBMs are the most reliable – and how to enhance their reliability over, say, another decade – are feasible and should be formally reviewed by the Pentagon.

Reconsidering the nuclear strategy

Regardless of the controversial nature of almost every aspect of the Trump administration, the duly elected commander-in-chief should put his stamp on the nuclear mission. Nuclear issues were front and center in the campaign, and Trump’s election gives him the authority to determine, along with congressional approval, the future direction of US nuclear forces.

Given the limited utility and high cost of the proposed missile replacement program, it is important for the new administration to take the time to determine whether and how ICBMs fit into its nuclear strategy. Some modernization programs need to proceed apace, none more importantly that the Ohio-class submarine replacement program. Over this there will be little debate. But other systems, most notably the ICBMs, deserve more analysis – analysis that could lead to their reduction, or even elimination, with little if any detriment to the security of the United States or its allies.