Why the Pentagon Needs a New ICBM Force

by Peter Huessy, Warrior Maven Senior Nuclear Weapons Analyst, Senior Fellow Warrior Maven, Atlantic Council, Hudson Institute — President of Geo-Strategic Analysis

Bad ideas in Washington famously don’t die; they just hibernate and then come out of their caves every so often. The latest bad idea comes from a Andrew Jarocki, a graduate student at Georgetown University. He recommends that we unilaterally kill nearly 60% of our nuclear Triad. But instead of being posted by a progressive disarmament publication, the American Conservative published this essay, resurrecting an idea of killing our ICBM leg of the Triad, previously proposed by the CATO Institute in 2016 and the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2020. When Congress in 2022 last voted on such an idea, the House voted 308-116 to build the new Sentinel ICBM, a resounding pro-ICBM vote and crushing defeat of a proposal by Representative Garamendi (D-CA).

The issue is whether the United States should build a new ICBM force given our Minuteman III arsenal is now 53 years old and cannot be sustained for much beyond 2030-35. As Senator Jean Shaheen (D-NH) explained, keeping old legacy systems without a plan to replace them runs the risk of America’s leaders waking up one day and finding a large number of the country’s nuclear systems don’t work. Thus, the ICBM and Triad modernization choice is simple: either build a new ICBM and other elements of the Triad or as a former commander of US strategic forces explained we have to get out of the nuclear business.

To Jarocki, there is nothing to worry about. In his opinion, the US doesn’t need ICBMs anymore. He argues that the US has sufficient submarines and bombers able to retaliate against any Chinese or Russian first strike. And if need be, says Jarocki, we could always build more submarines to get more firepower. Not really, unfortunately. The next submarine after the 12 Columbia-class subs we are now building would come into the force no earlier than 2042 as our sole shipyard can only now produce one boomer per year– hardly a timely response! Building a new shipyard would take at least a decade, and then 5-7 years after that to bring a new submarine into production.

Jarocki admits that Russia and China also know the US would have enough retaliatory force to obliterate Russia or China. But for some strange reason, even knowing this nuclear fact of life, in a crisis Jaroki thinks it makes perfect sense for Russia and China to be inclined to strike our ICBMs, knowing they would be committing suicide as a result. A strike that by its nature would have to involve nearly 1000 warheads—to strike all 450 silos and 45 launch control centers.

Even more ludicrous, Jarocki buys into the even more fancible idea that US leaders, knowing the Russians and the Chinese know perfectly well any such strike on the US now would be suicidal, nonetheless would posture the US response in a crisis to launch not after the detonation of enemy nuclear warheads on US soil—currently one US option—but would launch our ICBMs in a crisis even without warning of an enemy attack. Under the assumption that the Russians and Chinese are willingly committing suicide, just as the US would be doing. So not MAD or Mutual Assured Destruction, but Mutual Assured Suicide or MAS.

Jarocki makes much of computer glitches in 1979-80 that warned of a Soviet attack which turned out to be a false alarm. He apparently thinks that it keeps occurring when in fact it has not occurred since 1979-80. One of those false alarms was that a submarine launched ballistic missile was on its way to hit the United States—but given the relative inaccuracy of the missile at the time, there was no danger the US ICBM fields were at risk. In any case, the warning never reached the White House, the US warning assessment process worked, within minutes it was determined the warnings were false, and the US nuclear guns stayed in their holsters. A subsequent Senate Armed Services Committee investigation and report determined that a subsequent computer technology fix eliminated the problem.