From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject To Avoid Armageddon, Don’t Modernize Missiles—Eliminate Them
Date October 18, 2021 3:25 AM
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[Land-based nuclear weapons are world-ending accident waiting to
happen, and completely superfluous to a reliable deterrent.]
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TO AVOID ARMAGEDDON, DON’T MODERNIZE MISSILES—ELIMINATE THEM  
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Daniel Ellsberg, Norman Solomon
October 16, 2021
The Nation
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_ Land-based nuclear weapons are world-ending accident waiting to
happen, and completely superfluous to a reliable deterrent. _

A vintage Titan nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile in a silo.
, Michael Dunning / Getty Images

 

The single best option for reducing the risk of nuclear war is hidden
in plain sight. News outlets don’t mention it. Pundits ignore it.
Even progressive and peace-oriented members of Congress tiptoe around
it. And yet, for many years, experts have been calling for this act of
sanity that could save humanity: Shutting down all of the nation’s
intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Four hundred ICBMs dot the rural landscapes of Colorado, Montana,
Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Loaded in silos, these missiles
are uniquely—and dangerously—on hair-trigger alert. Unlike the
nuclear weapons on submarines or bombers, the land-based missiles are
vulnerable to attack and could present the commander in chief with a
sudden use-them-or-lose-them choice. “If our sensors indicate that
enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would
have to consider launching ICBMs before the enemy missiles could
destroy them. Once they are launched, they cannot be recalled,”
former Defense Secretary William Perry warns
[[link removed]].
“The president would have less than 30 minutes to make that terrible
decision.”

The danger that a false alarm on either side—of the sort that has
occurred repeatedly on both sides—would lead to a preemptive attack
derives almost entirely from the existence on both sides of land-based
missile forces, each vulnerable to attack by the other; each,
therefore, is kept on a high state of alert, ready to launch within
minutes of warning. The easiest and fastest way for the US to reduce
that risk—and, indeed, the overall danger of nuclear war—is to
dismantle entirely its Minuteman III missile force. Gen. James E.
Cartwright, a former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had
been commander of the Strategic Command, teamed up with former
Minuteman launch officer Bruce G. Blair to write in a 2016 op-ed
piece
[[link removed]]:
“By scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for
launching on warning disappears.”

But rather than confront the reality that ICBMs—all ICBMs—are such
a grave threat to human survival, the most concerned members of
Congress have opted to focus on stopping new ones from taking the
place of existing ones. A year ago, the Air Force awarded Northrop
Grumman a $13.3 billion
[[link removed]] “engineering
and manufacturing development” contract for replacing the current
Minuteman III missiles with a new generation of ICBMs named the Ground
Based Strategic Deterrent. Current projections peg the overall cost
over the next five decades at $364 billion
[[link removed]]. Northrop
Grumman calls [[link removed]] the GBSD
“the modernization of the ground-based leg of the nuclear triad.”
But if reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority
should be to remove the triad’s ground-based leg—not modernize it.

Many arms-control advocates, while understanding the inherent dangers
of ground-based nuclear missiles, have largely stuck to opposing the
GBSD. Instead of challenging ICBMs outright, a coalition of
organizations has concentrated on aiming a fiscal argument at Capitol
Hill, calling the GBSD program a “money pit” that would squander
vast amounts of taxpayer dollars. But the powerful chair of the House
Armed Services Committee, Adam Smith, executed a deft end run around
that strategy in early summer when he declared
[[link removed]] that
“Minuteman extension, as it is currently being explained to us, is
actually more expensive than building the GBSD.”

The same Congressman Smith said
[[link removed]] less
than a year earlier, “I frankly think that our [ICBM] fleet right
now is driven as much by politics as it is by a policy necessity. You
know, there are certain states in the union that apparently are fond
of being a nuclear target. And you know, it’s part of their economy.
It’s what they do.”

Senators from several of the states with major ICBM bases or
development activities—Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, and
Utah—continue to maintain an “ICBM Coalition” dedicated to
thwarting any serious scrutiny of the land-based weaponry. Members of
the coalition have systematically blocked efforts to reduce the number
of ICBMs or study alternatives to building new ones. They’re just a
few of the lawmakers captivated by ICBM mega-profiteers. In a report
issued this year by the Center for International Policy, nuclear
weapons expert William Hartung gives readers a detailed look “Inside
the ICBM Lobby
[[link removed]],”
showing how ICBM contractors get their way while throwing millions of
dollars at politicians and deploying battalions of lobbyists on
Capitol Hill. As the recipient of the sole-source contract to build
the proposed new ICBMs, Northrop Grumman has joined with other top
contractors to block efforts to reduce spending on these dangerous and
unnecessary systems—or even simply to pause their development.

When opponents of the GBSD decline to challenge the currently deployed
Minuteman III missiles, the effects are counterproductive if their
ultimate goal is to get rid of ICBMs. Tacit acceptance of the
Minuteman missile force while attempting to block the GBSD sends a
message that the ICBM status quo isn’t so bad. Such a tactical path
might seem eminently pragmatic and realistic. But sooner or later, the
extraordinary dangers of keeping any ICBMs in place must be faced,
exposed, explained to the public—and directly challenged.

Getting trapped in an argument about the cheapest way to keep ICBMs
operational in their silos is ultimately no-win. The history of
nuclear weapons in this country tells us that people will spare no
expense if they believe that spending the money will really make them
and their loved ones safer—we must show them that ICBMs actually do
the opposite. Unless arms-control and disarmament groups, along with
allied members of Congress, change course and get serious about
addressing the fundamentals of why ICBMs should be eliminated,
they’ll end up implicitly reinforcing the land-based part of the
triad.

“First and foremost,” former Defense Secretary Perry wrote
[[link removed]] five
years ago, “the United States can safely phase out its land-based
[ICBM] force, a key facet of Cold War nuclear policy. Retiring the
ICBMs would save considerable costs, but it isn’t only budgets that
would benefit. These missiles are some of the most dangerous weapons
in the world. They could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.”

Contrary to uninformed assumptions, discarding all ICBMs could be
accomplished unilaterally by the United States with no downside. Even
if Russia chose not to follow suit, dismantling the potentially
cataclysmic land-based missiles would make the world safer for
everyone on the planet. Frank von Hippel, a former chair of the
Federation of American Scientists and a cofounder of Princeton’s
Program on Science and Global Security, wrote
[[link removed]] this
year: “Eliminating launch on warning would significantly reduce the
probability of blundering into a civilization-ending nuclear war by
mistake. To err is human. To start a nuclear war would be
unforgivable.”

Better sooner than later, members of Congress will need to face up to
the horrendous realities about intercontinental ballistic missiles.
They won’t do that unless peace, arms-control, and disarmament
groups go far beyond the current limits of congressional
discourse—and start emphasizing, on Capitol Hill and at the
grassroots, the crucial truth about ICBMs and the imperative of
eliminating them all.

Daniel Ellsberg
[[link removed]] is a former
American military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who
precipitated a national uproar in 1971 when he released the Pentagon
Papers, the US military’s account of activities during the Vietnam
War, to _The New York Times_. The release awakened the American
people to how much they had been deceived by their own government
about the war. Ellsberg has continued as a political activist, giving
lecture tours and speaking out about current events.

Norman Solomon
[[link removed]] is  is the
executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, the author
of _War Made Easy_, and a cofounder of RootsAction.org
[[link removed]].

_Copyright c 2021 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission
[[link removed]]. May not
be reprinted without permission. Distributed by PARS International
Corp [[link removed]]._

_Please support  progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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for just $24.95!_

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