Without ICBMs: A Prescription for Nuclear War

However, without the Sentinel missile, the current Minuteman III will eventually go out of business over the next decade and one-half. That means no ICBMs in the near future.

1. The cost of modernization of our nuclear deterrent is not $1.7 trillion but actually $400 billion over the next three decades according to the Union of Concerned Scientists; the majority of the cost is for the current legacy force sustained for the same three decades;
2. The Sentinel is not part of a secret plot to build more weapons—the Triad system as well as the B21 bomber and its LRSO, as well as the Columbia SSBN and its compliment of D-5 missiles all fit within the warhead ceilings allowed by the 2010 New START treaty of 1550 countable warheads;
3. There are probably not any joint arms control limits as Russia no longer allows inspections as required;
4. Without Sentinel or MMIII, and with the remaining current force structure, the US would only be able to deploy a maximum of 1536 strategic missile warheads through 2042;  even with roughly 50%-67% deployed at sea at any one time, the US might have only 20% of the total strategic force of China-Russia deployed strategic warheads by early next decade; a condition we have never had to face in the 80 years of the nuclear age;
5. Unmentioned by Hartung is that the US has only one hundred theater nuclear weapons deployed in Europe, zero in the Middle East and zero in the Pacific, and thus is at least at a 20 to 1 and probably 40 to 1 disadvantage re Russia’s theater force;
6. Hartung seems also oblivious to Russia’s current major coercive nuclear capability which the elimination of the Sentinel would worsen;
7. The cost of replacing the on-alert ICBM warheads to just maintain New START warhead levels would be around $160 billion if done through submarines and SLBMs, which would actually cost more than the current modernization effort;
8. If the MMIII ICBMs were also eliminated, the US would have all of about one dozen nuclear assets, the elimination of which would disarm the United States—three bomber bases, two submarine bases and some 4-8 submarines at sea at any one time is not a robust force;
9. Reports are that China has developed new technology that could make the oceans transparent and make a submarine only deterrent for the United States totally susceptible to a one-technology-failure undermining of its entire nuclear deterrent;
10. What Hartung proposes would eliminate all leverage the United States needs to successfully seek some kind of nuclear arms control into the future;
11. Absent a new theater nuclear capability such as the SLBM-N, which Hartung disparages, the US and its allies in Europe and Asia become total victims of Putin and Xi and their common escalate to win use of nuclear weapons for purposes of extortion and coercion; and
12. According to Senator Hoeven, the total cost of the new elements of the Triad---B21, the D-5, the Sentinel, the LRSO, and Columbia class SSBN--- is $17.4 billion, which comes to one-third of all annual nuclear spending, 1.8% of the defense budget proposed by the Senate majority, 1% of discretionary spending, and .026% of the Federal budget.