The Rotting, Aging Silos Housing America's Nukes

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Critics, including the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), accuse the US Department of Defense (DOD) and its contractor of mismanagement and underestimating the program's complexity. Still, officials insist Sentinel is essential to preserving the nuclear triad and must proceed despite soaring costs and logistical obstacles.

Time and Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports describe near-daily breakdowns, water intrusion, misaligned doors, collapsed conduits and obsolete parts, some reportedly sourced from museums. Silo modernization now requires full reconstruction of command centers and thousands of kilometers of new fiber optics, those reports said.

But infrastructure woes aren't the only factor driving debate-there's also disagreement over whether fixed ICBMs still belong in the triad.

Steve Fetter and Kingston Reif argued in an October 2019 War on the Rocks piece that silo-based ICBMs act as a“sponge” deterrent: with 450 silos spread across vast territory, an adversary would need to expend hundreds of warheads to disable them in a first strike.

They also serve as a tripwire, guaranteeing retaliation if the US homeland is attacked, and provide a hedge against possible vulnerabilities in nuclear ballistic missile submarines (SSBN) and strategic bombers.

However, they warned that fixed ICBMs must be launched within 30 minutes of an incoming strike, giving the president less than 10 minutes to decide, raising the risk of mistaken retaliation based on incomplete data.

If submarines and bombers are already on alert and dispersed, they argued, they offer more than enough retaliatory capability, making silo-based missiles redundant in both survivability and flexibility.

However, if an SSBN is destroyed, unable to launch or loses contact with command, its entire missile load is lost. Thomas Mahnken and Bryan Clark noted in a June 2020 The Strategist piece that with as few as one SSBN on patrol at a time, a single loss could cripple a third of the triad.

Emerging sensor technologies could soon render oceans transparent , challenging the future viability of sea-based deterrents.

Likewise with strategic bombers, Sidney Dean pointed out in a December 2022 article for European Security and Defense (ESD) that they rely on forward bases with fixed locations, making them and their infrastructure susceptible to preemptive attack.

Dean noted that ICBMs can reach targets in under 30 minutes, while bombers may take hours to reach their weapon deployment zones, giving adversaries ample time to track, intercept or mount defenses. He added that bombers are vulnerable to enemy air defenses, interceptors and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks.