Why Are We Spending $131 Billion on New Nukes? In Part Because Republicans Pulled a Fast One.

Maybe it’s because of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, but few gasps were heard, no jaws went slack, when the U.S. Air Force announced last month that the price tag for its new nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile, called the Sentinel, had suddenly gone up by 37 percent.

That would put the missile program’s total cost at $131 billion. That’s twice as much as what the Air Force had estimated back in 2015, when the program was first introduced.

The new estimate—and it’s just an estimate—includes the cost of developing the missile, buying 634 of them, installing 450 in silos (the rest will be for tests and spares), and connecting their launch-control centers to the command-control network. It does not include the costs of maintaining the missiles over the next 20 years, which would likely raise the total cost to well over $200 billion. Nor does it include the $15.9 billion price tag for the new nuclear warhead, called the W87-1, to be perched on top of the missile.

All of which raises the question: Are these new ICBMs—which will replace the 450 Minuteman IIIs—really necessary? The Minutemen are 50 years old, and while they’ve been modified many times, they will probably need to be mothballed someday. But that raises another question: Are silo-based ICBMs necessary at all? Might the other two “legs” of the nuclear arsenal’s “Triad”—the 970 warheads on submarines and the 500 or so bombs and cruise missiles on bomber aircraft—be sufficient to deter all enemies? And by the way, we’re also building 100 new bombers, called the B-21, at a cost of $750 million per plane, and the first of 12 new Columbia-class nuclear-missile-carrying submarines at a cost of $15 billion per boat.

Few outside the nuclear cognoscenti are asking these questions, but as America’s annual national security budget has passed $1 trillion, and as the demand swells for more conventional weapons (combat planes, warships, air-defense missiles, artillery shells, etc.), it’s time to start asking.

We know about the Sentinel program’s cost overrun only because a law—the Nunn-McCurdy Act, sponsored by Sen. Sam Nunn and Rep. Dave McCurdy back in 1983—requires the Pentagon to notify Congress when a weapon system exceeds its baseline cost by more than 15 percent. If a weapon overruns its cost by 25 percent or exceeds its original cost estimate by 50 percent, it is said to be in “critical” breach of Nunn-McCurdy and must be canceled unless the secretary of defense certifies that the program is vital for national security.

Just after hours on Jan. 18, the Pentagon notified Congress that the Sentinel was in critical breach. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is expected to certify sometime soon that the missile is necessary. But is it?

Among nuclear insiders, the sanctity of the Triad has been an article of faith for decades, as bedrock a belief as the Holy Trinity has been to the Catholic Church. But there’s little substance to the idea. It started as an outgrowth of bureaucratic politics, with each branch of the U.S. armed forces seeking its own piece of the nuclear arsenal—land-based missiles for the Army, bomber aircraft for the Air Force, and submarines for the Navy. (Around 1960, the Air Force beat the Army in the competition for land-based missiles, and separate factions within the Air Force clutched tight to both.)

For a while, the ICBMs did have one unique property: Their guidance systems were accurate enough to destroy discrete military targets, such as blast-hardened missile silos, without doing much damage to the area around the target. Bombers could do that too, but it would take hours for them to reach the target. Submarine-launched missiles weren’t accurate enough.

Then, in 1990, the Navy started putting D5 missiles in their submarines. The D5s are just as accurate as the ICBMs, and because the subs prowl under the ocean’s surface undetected, they are less vulnerable to an enemy attack. By contrast, land-based ICBMs sit fixed in their silos. They are accurate enough to launch a first strike and vulnerable to an enemy’s first strike. Because of that, in a serious crisis, their very existence might compel both sides—all countries with a substantial ICBM force—to launch a preemptive first strike, before any of the other countries launch a first strike. (Strategists call this situation “crisis instability.”)

As a result, several strategists and politicians—and not just doves or arms control advocates—started thinking that ICBMs were possibly more trouble than they were worth and, in any case, redundant. In response, the nuclear wing of the Air Force devised a new rationale for land-based missiles: the “sponge” theory. The idea was this: If we got rid of our ICBMs, there would be only a handful of nuclear targets in the continental United States—a few bomber bases and submarine pens, as well as the commanders in Washington, D.C. An enemy such as Russia might think that, by launching just a few handfuls of nuclear weapons, it could disable much of our ability to retaliate. The Kremlin’s master could then tell the U.S. president: If you do retaliate with your bombers in the air or submarines at sea, I will fire back at your cities. On the other hand, this argument goes, if we kept our 450 ICBMs, a Russian first strike would require them to launch a major attack; the radioactive fallout from such a strike would kill tens of millions of Americans, and a president would have to retaliate. So, we need to keep those ICBMs as a “sponge” to soak up the enemy’s attack—and thus to deter the enemy from launching an attack to begin with.

This is a very bizarre argument. The point of burying ICBMs in silos out in the middle of nowhere has always been to keep them away from cities to minimize the civilian casualties of a nuclear war (if doing so was at all possible). Now the Air Force was turning the concept on its head, saying that deterrence is strengthened by ensuring that millions of Americans die in a nuclear first strike.

But let’s accept the sponge theory as valid. Do we need 450 ICBMs to soak up the attack? Would 100 ICBMs—which would require the Russians or Chinese to launch at least 200 nuclear warheads, which would also kill millions of Americans—be enough? Would 50? Would a dozen?

The case to replace the entire Triad with new weapons began with an act of deception. Back in 2010, when President Barack Obama was trying to get the Senate to ratify New START, the nuclear arms–reduction treaty he’d negotiated with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Republican senators refused to go along unless Obama agreed to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on new nuclear ICBMs, bombers, submarines, and warheads. Obama wrote a carefully worded letter saying he would request funds to “replace or modernize” all three legs of the Triad. The key words were “or modernize”—that might mean he would simply upgrade the software or the communications system in some weapons. However, the Republicans started regarding “modernize” as a synonym for “replace” and boasted that Obama had agreed to spend $1.3 trillion over the next 30 years to do so. (The number was grabbed out of a hat; Obama hadn’t agreed to any dollar figure, nor had anyone calculated how much these new weapons, which weren’t even sketched on blueprints as yet, would cost.)

When Donald Trump took office in 2017, his defense secretary, retired Gen. Jim Mattis, thought seriously about dismantling the ICBMs. Mattis had been in the Marines, a service that had never possessed or desired long-range nuclear weapons. But the Republicans were by now referring to the plan of replacing the entire Triad, including ICBMs, as “the Obama program of record.” The idea of proposing something less hawkish than Obama was politically unpalatable. Also some Air Force generals successfully sold Mattis on the sponge theory.

It’s time to revisit all this. True, Russia and China are building new nuclear weapons—though Russia, which has about the same number of weapons as we do, isn’t expanding the size of its arsenal, and China, which is expanding theirs, right now has only about 500 nukes in all, many of them not terribly reliable. (This is a good argument for engaging China in arms control negotiations.) By all but the most fanciful measures, we have more than enough. We don’t need to match everything that the Russian or Chinese nuclear bureaucracies are doing. We don’t need to duplicate their waste—especially if it means proceeding with the critically overpriced mistake of the Sentinel.