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USA’s Land-Based Nuclear Missiles simply not financially or politically sustainable

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Why The U.S. Must Get Rid Of Its Land-Based Nuclear Missiles, Foxtrot Alpha, Terrell Jermaine Starr, 7/18/17 The Cold War is over. And so is the need for America’s land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. Not only are the costs of maintaining 450 Minuteman-III missiles unsustainable, keeping them in the nuclear arsenal is hardly practical. Maintaining hundreds of outdated, budget-draining Minuteman-IIIs when the Pentagon has the more accurate, multi-dimensional Trident II that can be shot from Ohio-class submarines that are virtually undetectable makes little sense.

It’s already estimated that modernizing America’s nuclear stockpile will cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion over 30 years. The U.S. Air Force wants to replace the current land-based ICBM force with newer missiles that are estimated to cost more than $100 billion, which is 60 percent greater than the figure the Defense Department set last summer.

 But scrapping the Minuteman-III will not only save money, it will show Russia, and other emerging nuclear powers like India and Pakistan that America is serious about non-proliferation. From both a financial, tactical and leadership standpoint, America and the rest of the world will be better off if Washington puts aside its political posturing and kill the land-based leg of its nuclear triad—the land, air and sea-based platforms America uses to launch its nuclear weapons……..

Funding Land-based ICBMs Is Financially And Politically Unsustainable

The Congressional Budget Office wrote in 2015 that it will cost $26 billion to maintain the Minuteman-III stockpile over a 10-year period, which is $3 billion more than the 2013 estimate. The U.S. Navy is calling for the entire land-based ICBM force to be replaced with new Minuteman-IIIs.

 The service, which is fielding vendors, says the new generation of ICBMs will last well beyond 2070— at a cost of at least $100 billion. In 2014, RANDpublished a report stating that new Minuteman-IIIs will cost “almost two times—and perhaps even three times—more than incremental modernization of the current Minuteman III system.”

All of this for a leg of the triad that is tactically obsolete……. http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/why-the-u-s-must-get-rid-of-its-land-based-nuclear-mis-1796677582



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