VIDEO: Pentagon & Raytheon Innovate New “Cyber Resilience” Tools to Stop Hackers
By Peter Huessy, President of GeoStrategic Analysis, Potomac, Maryland – Senior Warrior Maven Columnist
For the past two decades disarmament and global zero advocates have been pushing for the elimination of the ICBM leg of the US nuclear triad. The rationale? ICBMs were destabilizing, on a hair trigger alert status, and prone to being inadvertently launched in a crisis because if a president did not launch the missiles first, they could be destroyed in their fixed silos by attacking Russian warheads. A critical part of this narrative was the idea that in 1979 in 1980 there were false warnings of a Soviet missile attack that came perilously close to pressuring the President of the United States to mistakenly launch our ICBMs.
This argument failed to persuade the past four administrations to eliminate our 400 ICBMs from our nuclear Triad. Why? In large part because on close examination, the hair trigger narrative failed to be credible.
On the contrary the Obama and Trump administrations both went forward with plans to deploy a new land-based ICBM or the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, (GBSD) replacing the current 50 your-old Minuteman missiles. Sensing intellectual defeat, the disarmament community advocates of zero ICBMs suddenly switched gears. They made two completely new arguments.
First, they dropped the scare stories about Minuteman being on a hair trigger alert status. Instead, they argued that Minuteman would never be launched even in a crisis or following a Russian attack, because the missiles deployed over five states in 400 distinct silos each separated by at least 3 miles, are needed to, like a magic “sponge”, soak up nearly 1000 Russian warheads that would then not be available to target American cities. To be a sponge, the ICBM missiles never need to be launched.
Second, the disarmers surprisingly fervently embraced ICBMs and wanted to keep the old MM III around even longer than now planned. The new idea? The current 50-year-old Minuteman III missiles could have their life extended for an additional 15 years. But supposedly at a cheaper cost then the deployment costs of a new GBSD. A sponge indeed, but a cheaper sponge! Then down the road, United States would decide around 2050 whether or not to deploy a new ICBM or get out of the new ICBM business altogether, saving the cost of a new ICBM in the interim.**
