The Air Force is looking to get new ICBMs (the GBSD) to replace the aging Minuteman III. The estimated cost is over $80 billion.
ISTM that any such land-based ICBMs cannot confer any advantage or benefit that does not already exist from the other two elements of the Triad - the manned bombers and ballistic-missile subs. The land-based ICBMs would be fixed in one location and vulnerable to strike - can’t be moved, unlike ballistic missiles on transporter-erector launcher (TEL) mobile vehicles. “Launch on warning” is unnecessarily risky - it risks war over a false alarm, and the whole point of having submarines is so you don’t *have *to rush a retaliatory decision within mere minutes - you can ride out a first strike and still have time afterwards to decide what you want to do (i.e., hit back, or not.)
The cost is very significant, too, it’s well beyond the cost of the F-22 Raptor program. The U.S. military is already acquiring the B-21 Raider stealth bomber and also getting new Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines.
Time to ditch this leg and just go with a Diad instead of a Triad?
The one worthy point I’ve heard raised in favor of ICBMs is that so long as we have an adversary like Russia or China with a substantial numbers of nuclear weapons, having plenty of ICBM fields constitute a massive sponge to soak up a lot of their nuclear capability on the worst day of humanity. That’s because the adversary will likely seek to “win” a nuclear war by disrupting our command and control of submarines and bombers (which isn’t such a crazy idea in an era of cyber and electronic warfare) and take out the ICBMs with their own weapons (because the C2 is likely more survivable than depending on airplanes and satellites to communicate with the other legs of the triad). More bad guy missiles headed toward the plains states, fewer bad guy missiles headed toward Washington, DC.
I’m not sure I totally buy that argument, but there is logic to it.
What leaves me gobsmacked is how in the fucking world it takes $80 billion to build about a hundred or so ICBMs that need to be deployed. It’s nuts. I mean, I know there’s a lot of infrastructure and C2 stuff that needs to be upgraded – but even with those costs excluded, many hundreds of millions of dollars for each rocket? That’s offensive and ridiculous. We should be talking more like ~$100 million per ICBM, and even that is pretty damn generous.
So if the cost were, say, $30 billion dollars, I’d say “Oh yeah, in terms of the defense budget, that’s not actually a whole lot, of course we should keep ICBMs.” But at the estimated cost? That’s a true WTF from me.
By the way, just for comparison sake, the new ballistic missile submarines are estimated to cost in the neighborhood of $120 billion (though there’s no question that’s a lowball figure), and that’s not including the new missiles that will someday be put on them – which are NOT the missiles we’re talking about here.
ICBMs are faster to respond and launch than SLBMs or aircraft-carried weapons. They can be larger and carry more warheads, aren’t subject to being lost in accidents like a submarine, are more accurate, and are generally cheaper. You can argue that they have offsetting disadvantages, or aren’t necessary, but they do confer unique advantages.
Then why do we have 3 legs of the triad instead of two? Why do other countries? If it confers no benefit, then every major nuclear power has been wasting it’s time and resources.
IOW, if you can’t see an advantage but all other powers do something, perhaps you are missing something. Land based weapon systems do have some that bombers and subs don’t, but in this case the major part of the US deference comes from our land based weapons systems.
No, I would say it’s past time to update them. Both Russia and China are pouring money into new launch concepts, including hyper-sonic variants that can fly non-ballistic courses, and that seems like something we should (and actually are) be looking into.
Anyway, as that seems to have been answered, I’d like to ask a question that’s bugged me for a while and is sort of related to your OP. My dad and several other actual conservatives I know go on and on about updating our nukes, that we are behind on nuclear development or something and that this is something we should pour a ton into. Launch vehicles totally make sense, but why nukes? Why do conservatives think it’s important and where is that coming from? I get that they need to be reliable, but this doesn’t seem to be what they are talking about. It’s like we need better nukes or something, but I don’t see how they could be ‘better’. We can already dial the yield, we already have MIRVs and we’ve miniaturized them to what I assume is pretty much the greatest possible extent. We already know how to make them boom bigger if we really wanted too, already know how to make them to do a ground penetration mission as well as an EMP profile. So…what do we need to improve wrt the actual warhead??
AIUI, it’s not that we need new nuke designs - nukes are already as devastating and capable as they could ever need to be - but that the missiles and bombers and submarines themselves are aging out. Components getting old, etc. The warheads wouldn’t need any new designing.
Well, that’s what I thought too. When I brought that up (we actually DO testing, though obviously not actual full up testing), this didn’t seem to be what they were getting at. They were talking about NEW nukes, as if there is some sort of gap or something because we aren’t developing new ones. I brought up the launcher thing, thinking that must be what they are talking about, but again, nope. No idea where this concept that we are falling behind on nuclear weapons development, or even what we’d be developing comes from (well, ok…it’s GOT to be Fox News, but the why of it still alludes me).
It’s a recurring theme that a lot of conservatives I know, including my dad and his buddies, are constantly on about.
The only “new” nuclear weapons actually being looked at are reliability upgrades to existing weapons (like the B-61-12 gravity bomb) that are basically taking an existing weapon apart, tinkering with it a bit, and putting it back together; and a modification to the warhead in the missiles used by subs to make it very low yield.
There is no new-design nuclear weapon being contemplated.
A. You can’t consider yourself a compent nuclear weapons designer if you have not designed a warhead and detonated it. At this point everyone working for the national laboratories who can say they actually did this are elderly.
B. Apparently, while it is possible to keep making detonation tested warheads with the same designs as before - so you know they are sufficiently apocalyptic - the present designs are require a lot of expensive maintenance. There is a desire to make more reliable designs but this takes funding and really requires a few to be set off.
C. Somehow the Russians might get the idea our nukes might not be sufficiently lethal and decide to risk genocide of their entire population by nuking the USA first.
Anyways I think it’s all crazy talk. Technically if a nuclear war breaks out, and 90 percent of us nukes turn out to be duds so half the civilian population of Russia remains living, this doesn’t sound like a loss to the world to me.
Anyways maintaining a triad increases the probability that a systematic mistake somewhere causes none of the nukes to work. All submarine launched missiles are the same design of missile and warhead. Just takes one screwup and none of them might explode.
I think the real issue here is not so much newer designs (although I’m sure we could probably make a few good tweaks even now) so much as it is the actual warheads themselves. Nukes don’t last forever, and a lot of the ones we currently have are old. We probably do need to build some new ones, or at least do serious refurbishment on some of the old ones, even if the design stays the same.
The Air Force can save money by putting Tridents in the silos. That would free up money for them to spend elsewhere.
Oh, who am I kidding, the USAF leadership wants all of the money for everything and always has.
I agree, certainly we need to maintain some level of nukes just for deterrence, and that means old ones will need to be retired and new ones built. I just don’t see why this means we need to develop new nukes or do new testing (this is another recurring theme…we need to test them, as in we need to blow some up to see…something…that we haven’t seen in all the other live tests we did. Computer simulations are, apparently, for suckers. Or something).
Like I said, it makes no sense to me. I can see new launch vehicles and delivery systems. Those can certainly be developed and researched and put into the pipeline. They make sense. And keeping our nukes working and ‘new’ ones (using existing designs, maybe updated with new materials or something) in the pipeline to maintain numbers makes sense. But the designs we have work…and, really, at this point I don’t see how you make a nuke better, except perhaps wrt the materials or maybe extended shelf life, none of which needs a large scale new program and tons of money.
I’m not interested in riding out a first strike. Who exactly is? The idea is that they won’t try a first strike knowing they can’t take all our missiles and we’ll get them anyway. It’s all about deterrence.
How is a real, tested and maintained ICBM better than a pretend, untested, unmaintained one? Bombers and subs, sure, a deterrent the enemy can see. But an ICBM? Let’s just tell the Russians and the Chinese that we have lots of them, that they’re really super modern, and that we are crazy and the only country that has ever nuked another. Like we did with SDI. Wouldn’t that save us from spending another all-of-the-money on weapons we are only going to use at the end of the world?
Nuclear weapons have proven themselves to be a deterrent to their own use. Despite the wars and numerous tense situation over the last 74 years, there hasn’t been a single weapon detonated since Nagasaki. It’s well worth the money to have the latest and greatest in place.
I am not sure quickness is an advantage. As discussed, the fact that they don’t move means leadership is more trigger happy to use them because otherwise they get obliterated.
I will acknowledge that this is their one advantage.
We have had SLBMs for 60 years now. How many have been lost? Exactly zero. The Air Force has accidentally blown up two of its ICBMs and lost/destroyed many of its gravity bombs.
The article above seems to think that isn’t necessarily true anymore.
If you don’t need something, then buying it isn’t cheap.
I haven’t RTFA, but is a lot of that cost new warheads for the proposed new ICBM class? Or are we just porting over the Mark 12As from the MM3 fleet?
As far as replacement costs for the boosters, what’s the estimated lifetime for the solid rocket motors in the MM3 fleet, and are we coming up against it? Do solid rockets age out, or do they get so expensive to maintain that it’d be cheaper to just cast new motors?
SSBNs are only survivable so long as they are able to hide in the water. Is there a sensor breakthrough coming where that may no longer be the case?
:dubious: We aren’t talking about some new machine that’s never been built and tested and has only been developed in a simulation, perhaps using new manufacturing methods such as 3-D printing. We are talking about a machine that’s been built (mass produced almost) thousands of times (10’s of thousands) and extensively tested hundreds of times. The simulations we have for the things are…well, extensive.
To build ‘new’ ones (i.e. build new nukes using existing designs) we pretty much have everything we need to do that already. Even if there is going to be some change to the materials, those can be individually tested and that data plugged into the simulation.
Even building new designs I think we have enough simulation data to have a high confidence we could build the things and have them work using what we have. I don’t see the point except, as noted, to maybe incorporate new materials or features that prolong shelf life or something like that, but I think we (and the Chinese, Russians, Brits, French and the other nuclear powers) could do it without blowing them up. North Korea still has to because they DON’T have all that data…plus, it’s really to piss other countries, especially the US, off.
That is definitely true, but with enough billions in funding, it can help make the likelihood of success very good.
I do find it interesting that they felt confident enough in the “Little boy” design to drop it without testing. That is a crazy amount of confidence considering that nothing like it had been designed before.
