MATTHEW GAULT
If you’re one of the millions of Americans who live within range of its 450 intercontinental ballistic missile silos, the Pentagon has written you off as an acceptable casualty. The silos are scattered across North Dakota, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska in a zone of sacrifice—what lawmakers and military planners have long called the “nuclear sponge.”
Despite real concerns over cost overruns, human lives, and the general uselessness of ICBMs, the Pentagon is barreling forward with a plan to modernize those silos and their missiles. Right now the Department of Defense thinks it’ll cost $141 billion. Independent research puts the number at closer to $315 billion.
All of that is money the Pentagon plans to use to build a doomsday machine—a weapon that, were it ever used, would mean the end of human civilization. Such a weapon, most experts agree, is pointless.
ICBMs are a relic of the Cold War. The conventional thinking is that a nuclear power needs three options for deploying nuclear weapons—air-based strategic bombers, sea-based stealth submarines, and land-based missiles. That’s the nuclear triad. Should one leg of the triad fail, one of the other two will prevail.
No comments:
Post a Comment