Long time subscribers to Closing the Loop already know my position on nuclear weapons, so have the right to wonder about the motivation for this post. Up front: One leg of the sacred nuclear "Triad", namely the land-based ICBM leg, has entered a window of vulnerability: Because of its ever upward spiraling costs, the Sentinel system has triggered a legal requirement for a Congressional review. This at a time when Republicans are demanding spending cuts and Democrats are looking for funding for various beneficial programs but fear backlash over an expanded budget. Eliminating the Sentinel ICBM would save hundreds of billions of dollars, even by the Air Force's fanciful reckoning. It would be mistaken, however, to assume that many from either party in Congress will be enthusiastic about cutting back on the nuclear weapons modernization program, because the program was their idea. Last October, the Congressional Commission on Strategic Posture released its report recommending a build-up of US nuclear war fighting capability to allow us to simultaneously fight nuclear wars against two adversaries simultaneously [1]. This prompted a small group of Congressmen to introduce a resolution aimed at bolstering arms control negotiations [2]. That resolution deserves our support.
We start with a brief jaunt down the memory lane of the nuclear arms race. When nuclear weapons were first invented, there was only one practical way to deliver them effectively to targets deep in the enemy's country, and that was with aircraft. The two long range strategic bombers that entered service in the 1950s - the B-52 and the Tu-95 - are still in service in the US and Russia. As bombers are relatively slow and are vulnerable to both fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft weapons, there was interest in developing a faster, more secure nuclear weapons delivery platform. [3] The first ICBM was flown by the USSR in 1957, and the US responded shortly thereafter. One might have thought that would put an end to bombers as strategic weapons delivery vehicles, but no, both sides saw the advantages of bombers which could be redirected or recalled, and could be moved around from one base to another to thwart a sneak attack. The problem with land based ICBMs is that their launch sites are usually - but not always - fixed. (The Russians have mobile land launchers but the US program was canceled for a variety of good reasons. Mobility does not complicate targeting that much, because the launch vehicles are easily detectable, slow moving and restricted to roads or railways, and a direct hit is not required to disable the weapons.) Both sides solved the ICBM vulnerability problem by developing submarines capable of carrying them. In the case of the US, at least, that was a very successful development, because each succeeding generation of SSBNs has been more difficult to detect than the previous one, and it's no secret that our subs are quite a bit less detectable than theirs. So why do we still have land based ICBMs?
Especially in light of arms control treaties and the discovery of the nuclear winter phenomenon, it makes no sense whatsoever for any country to maintain a nuclear arsenal of more that at most a few hundred strategic nuclear weapons, and by "a few" I mean one or two [4]. The New START treaty limits both sides to 1,550 deployed warheads and 700 ICBMs, SLBMs and heavy bombers capable of carrying strategic nuclear weapons. Since land-based ICBMs are most vulnerable to first strikes, it would seem very sensible to do away with them, concentrating all our capabilities in aircraft and submarines.
We expect that Defense Secretary Austin will argue for retention of funding for Sentinel for three reasons:
"Maintaining the nuclear triad", an article of faith in the military industrial complex. It is argued that land-based ICBMs offer redundancy, maintaining a credible capability in the event of failure of the bomber or submarine based forces.
Because land-based ICBMs are the most responsive, which is to say the time from detection of an attack in progress to launch of our counter strike is smallest for them. The Air Force doctrine is called "launch on warning", and it provides for starting the counter strike approval process as soon as a potential enemy attack has been detected.
To "raise the scale of a nuclear attack on the US homeland" [5]. You read it correctly, our strategy is to encourage our adversary to launch more weapons against us. This is based on the assumption that regardless of how the nuclear war starts, the Russians are going to target our ICBM silos first, thereby reducing targeting of our cities. Our land based ICBMs are referred to as a "sponge", as they ostensibly "soak up" a large fraction of Russia's ICBM force.
Let's now dissect the three arguments in turn.
As outlined in the historical review above, development of the triad did not come about as a result of some grand strategic design but was a response to evolving technological capabilities. Moreover, an important element in its evolution was keeping the three US service branches happy (as land based missiles originally belonged to the Army). Thus a major justification for the triad was maintenance of a bureaucratic compromise, giving each money- and mission hungry service a piece of the nuclear weapons pie. As the Air Force took over the Army's role, the pie sharing idea can be maintained without land-based ICBMs. As to the redundancy argument, it is simply fallacious. The land-based weapons are far more vulnerable than their airborne or under sea counterparts.
The wisdom of a hair-trigger system like launch on warning will be questioned in a past and future post, but for now it is sufficient to point out that the proposition that land-based ICBMs constitute the most responsive leg of the triad is simply not true. While it takes somewhat longer to communicate the launch orders to the ballistic missile submarines, some of those subs are much closer to their targets than the land based silos, and consequently can deliver their weapons on target faster than the land based ICBMs.
The sponge strategy is wrong in several respects, which are summarized by the list below. The remainder of the post will be devoted to expanding on each point:
It is wrong to deliberately sacrifice people in wartime;
It is questionable that the Russians would launch a first strike against our ICBM fields as opposed to our cities; and
It is questionable as to whether a first strike can succeed in preventing a devastating retaliation.
It speaks volumes that in developing the environmental impact statement for Sentinel [6], the Air Force neglected to consider the effects of the Sentinel system in the context of the situation where it is used. That's like conducting a study of the environmental effects of a pesticide under the condition that it is left in its sealed container, except several million times worse. Literally. None of the people living near the silos were asked to give their lives so that, ostensibly, someone else might live. The impact on the Native American population, which unsurprisingly is disproportionately affected by the Sentinel system and its wartime fate, is described in the December 2023 special issue of Scientific American [7]. Furthermore, those who devised the sponge strategy failed to take into account that, by design, they ensure the unnecessary radioactive contamination of vast areas of the US, Canada, and northern Mexico. What principle of morality grants the Air Force the authority to condemn our own citizens?
By burying the land-based ICBMs in deep underground, steel reinforced concrete silos, the Air Force has defined the means by which an enemy would have to attack them: by setting off their warheads on impact with the ground ("surface bursts") to maximize the intensity of the underground shock waves for purposes of collapsing the silos. When a nuclear warhead explodes at or very near the surface, enormous quantities of earth are made radioactive and lifted to the lower stratosphere, where the winds of the jet stream carry them away unpredictably. This phenomenon has been modeled by researchers at Princeton using modern atmospheric codes, using actual wind history data to compile a movie showing the patterns of radioactive fallout for attacks on each of 500 successive days [8].
To the second and third points, let's do a Gedankenexperiment on thermonuclear war, in the role of attacker. We'll ignore the reality of nuclear winter, so will be unconstrained regarding the size of our attack. Given we have land, sea and air nuclear forces, how do we coordinate the attack? As we know that we have around one hour from the time our attack is detected by the victim until their weapons start raining down on us, we set our plan in motion by getting all the subs in place and ready to launch, and loading and fueling all our bombers, their crews at the ready. The moment the first missile leaves its silo, the planes are launched and the subs given the launch command. As a result, if the enemy retaliates against our nuclear forces, he will destroy empty missile silos and deserted airfields. Whatever assets he launches against those facilities will do nothing to blunt our attack. That's the key point, and may be the rationale for attacking population centers whether as a first strike or in retaliation. It is also why there must be serious doubt that the Russians would launch a first strike against our land based ICBMs. As Guderian or Sun-tzu might say, it is good to place yourself in the shoes of your enemy, but bad to think he will follow your own doctrine.
It is predicted that in defending the Sentinel program, nobody in the military industrial complex will mention the fact that the Sentinel system as presently envisioned would be in violation of the New START treaty, and is therefore destabilizing [9]. Were we to cancel the Sentinel program, we would still exceed New START limitations with our planned modifications of the airborne and submarine nuclear weapons systems. Thus cancellation of Sentinel would not weaken the US negotiating position. Arguably, it might just provide the kind of signal that would bring the Chinese to agree to strategic arms limitation negotiations.
There is a coupling between the geoengineering stratagem of stratospheric aerosol injection and the nuclear war phenomenon of nuclear winter. The two are based on the same climatic phenomenology, differing only in degree and intent. There can be no doubt as to the reality of the effect. Why is it that our nuclear war planners are not taking into account the potential for causing a global catastrophe? Would it not be prudent to limit war planning to actions short of those that guarantee extinguishing life on this planet? Canceling Sentinel would be a step toward rationality in nuclear war planning.
The Congressional Research Service, which is tasked with providing timely, objective and authoritative research and analysis to Congress, has yet to make the connection between the size of our nuclear arsenal and the global consequences of its use. In its recent report on Sentinel [10], the phenomenon of nuclear winter is not even mentioned, and a search of the web site revealed no reports on the subject [11]. It is therefore up to us to educate our Congressional representatives and implore them to compel the Defense Department to respond to the consequences of its nuclear strategy, and especially the sponge aspect.
Finally, insofar as I am aware, nuclear war planning over the past seven decades has focused exclusively on physical casualties, whether it be targets destroyed or people killed. No consideration has been given to the psychological or social effects of even a small nuclear war. Recalling the societal effects of relatively minor disruptions like the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, or the 2020-21 peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we might conclude that the targeting of even a few dozen cities with nuclear weapons, with the immediate blast and fire and enduring, invisible radiation effects, would cause such widespread panic and disruption, in addition to human casualties and physical damage, as to bring the functioning of society and government to a halt. This is speculation, but it would be highly beneficial for appropriate behavioral studies to be conducted with their results integrated into the nuclear warfare planning process, that we might avert the total annihilation of life on the planet when the nuclear war occurs, and save some money in the mean time.
Notes
[1] https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2023-11/focus/why-we-must-reject-calls-us-nuclear-buildup
[2] https://foster.house.gov/media/press-releases/foster-leads-bicameral-effort-bolster-nuclear-arms-control-regimes By the way, Bill Foster is the only physicist, and the sole physical scientist, in Congress.
[3] At least in the past. Within the recent decades both the US and Russia have developed air launched, long range, nuclear-armed cruise missiles that are far less vulnerable to detection and being shot down than the bombers that carry them. Also, in the case of the US, stealth bombers which are very difficult to detect. Nonetheless the nuclear weapons community plays up aircraft vulnerability when selling their ICBMs.
[4] As to the numbers, it gets down to what one wants to do. A range of strategies have been elucidated: the Strategic Air Command's barbaric overkill strategy, for which even 10,000 warheads would be insufficient at one extreme, and the Federation of American Scientists' key infrastructure strategy, targeting key industries to cripple the Russian economy at the other. My numbers are based on the assumption that we want to 1) be able to inflict terrible damage on anyone who does likewise to us while 2) averting the global catastrophe of nuclear winter and 3) maintaining sufficient reserves to do likewise to a second adversary at least a year later. So, fewer than 50-100 nukes per side per war, one coutry per side, maximum 2 wars. The Sentinel program includes 400 deployed missiles with up to 3 each, 300 kT yield warheads, providing a total yield equivalent to that of up to 24,000 Hiroshima bombs.
[5] Quoted from the Physicists' Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction (PCNTR) webcast of 24 January 2024: https://physicistscoalition.org/events/the-sentinel-icbm-program-risks-costs-and-alternatives/?emci=13428aac-f7be-ee11-b660-002248223197&emdi=c6d496cf-92bf-ee11-b660-002248223197&ceid=30571370
[6] https://www.afgsc.af.mil/Sentinel/Environmental-Impact-Statement/
https://disarmament.unoda.org/wmd/nuclear/npt/
[8] The missiles on our land web site, where you can see the range of fallout possibilities continent-wide or get the fallout numbers for your own location:
https://missilesonourland.org/
[9] For the record, as signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) both the US and Russia are obligated to negotiate a follow-on treaty to New START.
[10] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11681 . The non-partisan Center for Strategic and International Studies' latest report on US nuclear posture https://www.csis.org/analysis/project-atom-2023 likewise fails to account for nuclear winter effects.
[11] Search performed 29 March 2024 of https://crsreports.congress.gov/search/#/?termsToSearch=Nuclear%20winter&orderBy=Relevance
There is an error in Note [4]: Plans for Sentinel include upgrading the W87 warhead to the W87-1, increasing the yield from 300 to 475 kilotons, making it more 31.67 times as violent as the Hiroshima bomb. If MIRVd to 3 warheads per missile Sentinel alone would pack the punch of 38,000 Hiroshima bombs.