WASHINGTON (AP) — The new Sentinel nuclear warhead program is 81% over budget and is now estimated to cost nearly $141 billion, but the Pentagon is moving forward with the program, saying that given the threats from China and Russia it does not have a choice.
The Northrop Grumman Sentinel program is the first major upgrade to the ground-based component of the nuclear triad in more than 60 years and will replace the aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile.
It involves not only building a new missile but the modernization of 450 silos across five states, their launch control centers, three nuclear missile bases and several other testing facilities.
The expansiveness of the program previously raised questions from government watchdogs as to whether the Pentagon could manage it all.
Military budget officials on Monday said when they set the program’s estimated costs their full knowledge of the modernization needed “was insufficient in hindsight to have a high-quality cost estimate,” Bill LaPlante, under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, told reporters on a call.
The high cost overrun triggered what is known as a Nunn-McCurdy breach, which occurs if the cost of developing a new program increases by 25% or more. By statute, the under secretary of defense for acquisition then must **undertake a rigorous review of the program to determine if it should continue; otherwise the program must be terminated. **
but the Pentagon is moving forward with the program, saying that given the threats from China and Russia it does not have a choice.
So fucking stupid. As if Russia or China would nuke the U.S. if the U.S. stopped making more nuclear weapons. Putin isn’t that crazy and neither is Xi.
You know what, there’s a small chance they would if they knew. But let’s say the Pentagon stopped all silos and kept it hush. Russia and China would never know whether they stopped or where remaining ones would be.
It’s not the weapons itself that protect the USA but solely the fact they are probably somewhere and they know how to trigger them.
This is overkill. In every aspect. Need, justification, budget, maintenance. The definition of a US defense department toy. It’s a flex. But it’s a covert flex, which is the definition of stupid. We’re not talking trap track but government decisions and that boggles my mind.
You know what, there’s a small chance they would if they knew. But let’s say the Pentagon stopped all silos and kept it hush. Russia and China would never know whether they stopped or where remaining ones would be.
Under the terms of the New START treaty, the US and Russia conduct inspections of each other’s nuclear weapons programs:
The treaty provides for 18 on-site inspections per year for U.S. and Russian inspection teams
Both countries are intimately familiar the other’s weapons systems.
One minor clarification (that doesn’t invalidate your point). The inspectors don’t inspect the weapons, but instead the methods for delivery (called “seats”). It doesn’t matter how many warheads you have. It matters how many you can put close to your enemy. So the critical tracking is how many warheads you can deliver across all methods (bombs, ICBMs, Sub launched, etc).
You know what, there’s a small chance they would if they knew. But let’s say the Pentagon stopped all silos and kept it hush. Russia and China would never know whether they stopped or where remaining ones would be.
If nothing else*, they would notice the changes in budgeting. The amount of money we spend every year on maintiaing the nuclear arsenal is staggering. if that suddenly paired back or chanced it’d be basically public information. Maybe not specifics, but there’s enough detail to know what’s being spent on what.
MAD only works if the other party thinks you can, and you will. Also, once you start using MAD it’s almost impossible to stop.
You have a nuclear triad. Even if all the silos went kaput (extremely unlikely) and everyone knew it there are still nuclear subs somewhere in the world carrying nukes. The truth is you only need to have enough functional nuclear weapons to make any attack a very bad day for everyone. That number isn’t that high given a nuclear weapons destructive capacity.
Eh, given how old the crap is, I’m not sure I agree. Cancel an aircraft carrier or some F-35s if necessary, but I do want a strong nuclear deterrent for whatever the future may bring, not shit that might become vulnerable to a new countermeasure.
Not a “good enough” deterrent, but a strong one.
That said, we probably could pare the stockpile back. But modernization and updates are important. These missiles are older than we are, unless you’re some hip Lemmy grandpa or something.
I guess, but the U.S. also supposedly has 3708 warheads, with another 1336 “retired” warheads which are supposedly just sitting around waiting to be disarmed, which sounds like code to me for “we can still use these if we feel like it.”
https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nuclear-weapons-who-has-what-glance
Maybe if we’re going to start updating our nukes, we can actually start dismantling the old ones?
If I remember right, we were dismantling a lot of them during the Obama administration, but they’re actually rather expensive to dismantle, since we were trying to recycle the plutonium for use in energy production. Go figure. It was also dependent on treaties Obama negotiated with Putin where we were both shrinking our arsenals.
People tend to forget, but nuclear reduction was a major goal of Obama’s, and he actually made some progress.
Putin isn’t that crazy and neither is Xi.
No. But the next guy might be. And we can’t just nip down to the store and pick up some nukes on a moment’s notice.
Nobody’s going to nuke anyone, and I’ll take this to my grave. The only worry would be extreme religious cultists getting nukes, like al queda or taliban who would actually use it, but they’ll never be even close to getting them or I’ll eat my shoe. Real powers will never let them.
All of the people that control the nukes are at the topmost rungs of society, with families and the most luxuries. They have the most to lose, no matter what.
Also, nobody has a big red button. There’s a massive chain of command that has to go along with it. The chain of command is not some 19yr old army grunt following orders. I’m talking the high up chain of command, many people, that have to go along with a launch for it to happen. These people are also high up, and know that their luxurious way of life, and families, are over forever in a nuclear war. They don’t want to survive in a bunker for a few years then die of starvation or cancer slowly.
I dont know for sure obviously, but I feel that the people who control the nukes are the ones with the most to lose. I have zero fear of a true nuclear war. Zero.
All it takes is one mad king who thinks he can get away with just one to win something.
A mad king who wants Ukraine, or Taiwan, or South Korea.
As soon as one launches, they all launch, other nuclear powers won’t believe they have a choice.
It takes 30 minutes or less for an ICBM to reach anywhere in America, really the world, from Russia, china, or North Korea. How much can you get done in 30 minutes? Could you organize a meeting in different time zones, and convince another person to stop being a lunatic? Could you convince another president, who is about to have one of his cities burnt to the ground, that he should just let it happen.
That’s a hell of an elevator pitch you’d have to pull.
It takes less time than a good pizza delivery for the world to end.
Putin keeps nuclear saber rattling against Ukraine aid. The US has limited it’s involvement because of it. The more sure you are in MAD, the less cautious you need to be of someone else miscalculating and hoping for a favorable exchange.
Do you really think he’s going to stop doing that whether or not these weapons are built? It’s pretty much all he’s got.
What a fucking waste of our taxes
Why?
Nukes don’t just disappear. We’ve got loads. We don’t need to be constantly making more.
They have devices in them that break over time as all devices do, and those devices have parts and designs that were contemporary before the people working on them today were alive likely with architectural and design decisions that were operationally required back when things were being drafted that no longer make sense to do today. Likely the nuclear materials will be reused, but that’s me thinking with my brainbox and not actually a thing I know.
For an example of what happens when we continue to rely on tech that really deserves to be updated and/or replaced, see the United States banking sector as compared to basically everywhere else.
They kinda do, the reason no one bothers to find nukes lost back in the 50s is because they arent nukes anymore, hell they may not even be explosive. Half life means that the nukes just kinda become not nukes after awhile.
The old nukes are very, very old. MAD doesn’t work if people question if your weapons actually still work. They need an update.
The way military contracts work doesn’t sound like it’s working anymore either
In what way? Them coming out more than expected? That isn’t a new thing, in fact I would say it is the norm for basically all contracts, and not just military ones.
Maybe I’m overly cynical, but it being “only” 81% over budget makes me pleasantly surprised.
There was a really good freakonomics podcast episode about that! https://freakonomics.com/podcast/heres-why-all-your-projects-are-always-late-and-what-to-do-about-it-rebroadcast/
The article explains that the scope of work was so big it was very hard to make a real estimate.
I can imagine that they also probably didn’t agree to use a contractor who made a more realistic estimation.
Cold War go brrrrr
Do the old ones work on floppy disks? Or was that still way too advanced at the time.
