WASHINGTON (AP) — The new Sentinel nuclear warhead program is 81% over budget and is now estimated to cost nearly $141 billion, but the Pentagon is moving forward with the program, saying that given the threats from China and Russia it does not have a choice.
The Northrop Grumman Sentinel program is the first major upgrade to the ground-based component of the nuclear triad in more than 60 years and will replace the aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile.
It involves not only building a new missile but the modernization of 450 silos across five states, their launch control centers, three nuclear missile bases and several other testing facilities.
The expansiveness of the program previously raised questions from government watchdogs as to whether the Pentagon could manage it all.
Military budget officials on Monday said when they set the program’s estimated costs their full knowledge of the modernization needed “was insufficient in hindsight to have a high-quality cost estimate,” Bill LaPlante, under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, told reporters on a call.
The high cost overrun triggered what is known as a Nunn-McCurdy breach, which occurs if the cost of developing a new program increases by 25% or more. By statute, the under secretary of defense for acquisition then must **undertake a rigorous review of the program to determine if it should continue; otherwise the program must be terminated. **
The old nukes are very, very old. MAD doesn’t work if people question if your weapons actually still work. They need an update.
The way military contracts work doesn’t sound like it’s working anymore either
In what way? Them coming out more than expected? That isn’t a new thing, in fact I would say it is the norm for basically all contracts, and not just military ones.
Maybe I’m overly cynical, but it being “only” 81% over budget makes me pleasantly surprised.
I mean, I would love for all that money to go to things that help people directly, instead of “big scary stick to keep other people from maybe hitting us with their sticks at some theoretical point in the future”
Buuuuut honestly when it comes to it’s nuclear arsenal, I just assume all government contracts will eventually be 150%-200% over budget, with at least 3 committees assembled to investigate the expense.
It has seemed to get worse as systems get more complex but I’m admittedly an outsider to that world
There was a really good freakonomics podcast episode about that! https://freakonomics.com/podcast/heres-why-all-your-projects-are-always-late-and-what-to-do-about-it-rebroadcast/
The article explains that the scope of work was so big it was very hard to make a real estimate.
I can imagine that they also probably didn’t agree to use a contractor who made a more realistic estimation.
A program this big likely has a lot of contractors. The guys designing new rockets aren’t going to be the guys refurbishing the silos. Every so often the government does have projects that have “known unknowns” meaning they can’t effectively be accounted for. Should they have run 1,000 smaller projects? Maybe, but they didn’t and there’s trade offs with that too.
Seems to be working for Russia. No one has bothered to call their bluffs in the last year over all the nuclear posturing.
They need an update but we can reduce the number of warheads we have to save money. I forget the exact number but it’s around 3k war heads.
Well I mean it’s not like there’s hundreds of thousands of Americans with crippling food insecurity, no homes, no healthcare, inadequate wages, poisonous water, and/or gun violence; so the government is fine making sure it has the capacity it nearly exterminate the human race. Right guys?
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” - Dwight Eisenhower
So as far as legislators are concerned, a win-win.
What a fucking waste of our taxes
Other countries with nukes would simply bully us.
Why?
Nukes don’t just disappear. We’ve got loads. We don’t need to be constantly making more.
Have you heard of a half life? Or a shelf life?
They have devices in them that break over time as all devices do, and those devices have parts and designs that were contemporary before the people working on them today were alive likely with architectural and design decisions that were operationally required back when things were being drafted that no longer make sense to do today. Likely the nuclear materials will be reused, but that’s me thinking with my brainbox and not actually a thing I know.
For an example of what happens when we continue to rely on tech that really deserves to be updated and/or replaced, see the United States banking sector as compared to basically everywhere else.
Removed by mod
Yo, that was really rude, fascist, blocked
That’s pretty dumb as well, choom.
This community has a power-tripping moderator deleting comments in the guise of safety, but really just censoring people.
Well all you had to do.is read the article.you are.blindly responding to to learn we are only making one bomb but updating 450 silos to not sound like such an idiot.
They actually do disappear, it’s called radioactive decay. Tuck in your ignorance, it’s showing.
They kinda do, the reason no one bothers to find nukes lost back in the 50s is because they arent nukes anymore, hell they may not even be explosive. Half life means that the nukes just kinda become not nukes after awhile.
Half life means that the nukes just kinda become not nukes after awhile.
No, half life is the amount of time it takes the element to decay halfway. For Uranium-238, that is ~4.5 Billion years. Uranoum-235 is ~700 Million years. Plutonium-239 is ~24,000 years.
The issue with old nukes is all the other components aging, not the nuclear material.
The half life on tritium for h bombs is only 12 years, so those components need to be replaced periodically.
H bombs don’t use tritium for their main fusion stage. Even Castle Bravo used Lithium-6. Tritium was used in initiators to increase neutron flux and as a fission booster for dial a yield (once again, to increase neutron flux). Both of those are just as important for fission weapons as they are for fusion.
Importantly, alpha decay creates helium pockets which is a neutron moderator and screws up the bomb.
And Lithium-7 accidentally. They didn’t realize that the Lithium-7 would produce a fuckton more tritium, which is how a 4-6 Megaton estimated yeild became a 15 Megaton actual yeild, causing us to basically nuke our own civilians and some Japanese civilian sailors.
I’ll go against the grain as a liberal leftist and say 141 billion for upgrading our entire nuclear infrastructure in today’s political climate seems like a deal.
No shit. Wasnt the f35 total lifetime costs supposed to exceed 2 trillion?
Less moving parts and associated personel in nuclear silos and a big bomb. Absolute steal.
That being said, war is bad. But nukes are M.A.D.
I really hope they dont make enough to blow the whole planet again. Cold war quantity of nukes was absurd…unless Rodan shows up or something.
This isn’t the program to produce more warheads. It’s the program to update the missile force silos and rockets. Which was really needed.
Yeah I just mean we need to scale back What we update. Blowing the planet half way is enough.
You misunderstand, like a half dozen of the current high yield mirv ones could end most life on earth. This is just making them faster and as always the Pentagon lied and got caught.
My God, I certainly did. Such a pissing contest. Without threats like kaiju literally no reason to have this.
Really needed for what exactly? To exterminate all life on the planet a few minutes faster?
As dumb as it sounds, mutually assured destruction does have the perk of keeping everyone from using nukes. If modern countermeasures prevent that, it isnt a deterrent anymore. Updating these nukes improves the likelihood we dont have to use them.
Relevant example: russias tanks. They are outdated and weren’t adequately improved over decades. and are now getting wrecked by consumer grade drones and guys with while fancy, in all honesty, second grade hand me down rocket launchers. Before we knew this fact, they were a reasonable deterrent to not fucking with russia. Now, not so much.
Given the state of modern software design and corporate greed I’m not sure this will end well
I’m fairly sure it will end more poorly than I can possibly imagine.
We can probably save a couple save a couple dozen billion by running it all on Windows XP
Do the old ones work on floppy disks? Or was that still way too advanced at the time.
The really big ones
If you want to know why they’re overhauling them, John Oliver did an episode on it back in the first season or two of his show, which is now fully posted on YouTube
A lot of the old stuff isn’t less advanced than floppy disks in any way, but definitely not compatible. It’s all analogue components for most of the control rooms and computers.
WOPR IRL.
Joshua would like to talk to you
The 5 states are Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, North Dakota and Colorado.
Military spending budget? Military spending goal
Defense Department Dimmadollars
Healthcare please
The military spending isn’t the reason y’all aren’t getting healthcare. Nor is the cost of healthcare itself.
The current system costs the US government more than socialized medicine would. It’s all about the lobbying.
Yes, and military lobbies govt so we are forced to join them to get healthcare
I want a nuclear test way out in space. Just to make sure they work.
Very cool read! Can’t believe I’d never heard of that before. It’s amazing all the equipment it broke and how far away it was visible and how big the EMP was. Truly terrifying these things are all over the world.
It’s honestly kinda scary that there are people who are unaware of the severity a High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) attack on the US poses. According to Homeland Security, Russia detonates a nuke 300 miles above sea level in the middle of North America and it wipes out the power grid for the entire continent. They estimate a year or more to replace the transformers and that the effects could kill as many as 90% of the American population in that time from total power loss and limited access to fresh water. His isnt from a YouTube influencer, this is from the Department of Homeland Security
Edit: I apologize for assuming you are from the US but even if younare not, you should still be knowledgeable of the threat because if it isn’t Russia, China or any country who detonates it, then there is still the threat of an equally threatening CME that we are over due for that could hit anywhere on the earth depending on where it flares on the sun.
Jeez, I’m going to have to learn more about this stuff.
I am in the US, more specifically between NYC and DC, so I always figured I wouldn’t have to worry much about nuclear war, as I’d probably be part of the first round getting vaporized. 😅
No shit I grew up in Frederick, MD till I was 12 then moved to Buffalo, NY region where I’ve been ever since lol but yeah, I have never been any sort of doomsday prepare and even when someone just told me about this I was super dismissive about it till I saw some very reputable reports on it. There are a bunch of videos from Dr. Arthur Braley a former NASA scientist who has been making instructional content about EMP attacks since way before Putin started fucking with Ukraine.
Thank you so much! I’ll check those out!
Way too close. That was in the atmosphere and horrible.
62 years ago today.
Well that’s one way to deal with space junk…
We’ve seen them work. Hiroshima?
Yeah. But people need to be reminded of how powerful these weapons are. The dumbs will never have known what WWII even was.
Uhhh…
Bad idea, instant international incident. We’ve detonated nukes in space before but it’s against all kinds of treaties to put them in orbit to start with.
Read that as “New Sentient nuclear warhead”
but the Pentagon is moving forward with the program, saying that given the threats from China and Russia it does not have a choice.
So fucking stupid. As if Russia or China would nuke the U.S. if the U.S. stopped making more nuclear weapons. Putin isn’t that crazy and neither is Xi.
Putin isn’t that crazy and neither is Xi.
No. But the next guy might be. And we can’t just nip down to the store and pick up some nukes on a moment’s notice.
With this logic the whole world should arm themselves with nukes, like yesterday. We don’t know if the U.S.’ “next guy” won’t be Trump.
Nobody’s going to nuke anyone, and I’ll take this to my grave. The only worry would be extreme religious cultists getting nukes, like al queda or taliban who would actually use it, but they’ll never be even close to getting them or I’ll eat my shoe. Real powers will never let them.
All of the people that control the nukes are at the topmost rungs of society, with families and the most luxuries. They have the most to lose, no matter what.
Also, nobody has a big red button. There’s a massive chain of command that has to go along with it. The chain of command is not some 19yr old army grunt following orders. I’m talking the high up chain of command, many people, that have to go along with a launch for it to happen. These people are also high up, and know that their luxurious way of life, and families, are over forever in a nuclear war. They don’t want to survive in a bunker for a few years then die of starvation or cancer slowly.
I dont know for sure obviously, but I feel that the people who control the nukes are the ones with the most to lose. I have zero fear of a true nuclear war. Zero.
Nobody’s going to nuke anyone, and I’ll take this to my grave.
Conveniently for you, that’d happen whether you were right or wrong.
All it takes is one mad king who thinks he can get away with just one to win something.
A mad king who wants Ukraine, or Taiwan, or South Korea.
As soon as one launches, they all launch, other nuclear powers won’t believe they have a choice.
It takes 30 minutes or less for an ICBM to reach anywhere in America, really the world, from Russia, china, or North Korea. How much can you get done in 30 minutes? Could you organize a meeting in different time zones, and convince another person to stop being a lunatic? Could you convince another president, who is about to have one of his cities burnt to the ground, that he should just let it happen.
That’s a hell of an elevator pitch you’d have to pull.
It takes less time than a good pizza delivery for the world to end.
Eh, given how old the crap is, I’m not sure I agree. Cancel an aircraft carrier or some F-35s if necessary, but I do want a strong nuclear deterrent for whatever the future may bring, not shit that might become vulnerable to a new countermeasure.
Not a “good enough” deterrent, but a strong one.
That said, we probably could pare the stockpile back. But modernization and updates are important. These missiles are older than we are, unless you’re some hip Lemmy grandpa or something.
I guess, but the U.S. also supposedly has 3708 warheads, with another 1336 “retired” warheads which are supposedly just sitting around waiting to be disarmed, which sounds like code to me for “we can still use these if we feel like it.”
https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nuclear-weapons-who-has-what-glance
Maybe if we’re going to start updating our nukes, we can actually start dismantling the old ones?
If I remember right, we were dismantling a lot of them during the Obama administration, but they’re actually rather expensive to dismantle, since we were trying to recycle the plutonium for use in energy production. Go figure. It was also dependent on treaties Obama negotiated with Putin where we were both shrinking our arsenals.
People tend to forget, but nuclear reduction was a major goal of Obama’s, and he actually made some progress.
Goddamm homie just read the damn article. We are only making 1 bomb but updating 450 silos. That’s prolly where much of the unexpected costs is. Not like we’re testing these silos regularly and what good is any nukes if the silos themselves get jammed or fuck up anywhere.
You know what, there’s a small chance they would if they knew. But let’s say the Pentagon stopped all silos and kept it hush. Russia and China would never know whether they stopped or where remaining ones would be.
It’s not the weapons itself that protect the USA but solely the fact they are probably somewhere and they know how to trigger them.
This is overkill. In every aspect. Need, justification, budget, maintenance. The definition of a US defense department toy. It’s a flex. But it’s a covert flex, which is the definition of stupid. We’re not talking trap track but government decisions and that boggles my mind.
You know what, there’s a small chance they would if they knew. But let’s say the Pentagon stopped all silos and kept it hush. Russia and China would never know whether they stopped or where remaining ones would be.
Under the terms of the New START treaty, the US and Russia conduct inspections of each other’s nuclear weapons programs:
The treaty provides for 18 on-site inspections per year for U.S. and Russian inspection teams
Both countries are intimately familiar the other’s weapons systems.
One minor clarification (that doesn’t invalidate your point). The inspectors don’t inspect the weapons, but instead the methods for delivery (called “seats”). It doesn’t matter how many warheads you have. It matters how many you can put close to your enemy. So the critical tracking is how many warheads you can deliver across all methods (bombs, ICBMs, Sub launched, etc).
You have a nuclear triad. Even if all the silos went kaput (extremely unlikely) and everyone knew it there are still nuclear subs somewhere in the world carrying nukes. The truth is you only need to have enough functional nuclear weapons to make any attack a very bad day for everyone. That number isn’t that high given a nuclear weapons destructive capacity.
You know what, there’s a small chance they would if they knew. But let’s say the Pentagon stopped all silos and kept it hush. Russia and China would never know whether they stopped or where remaining ones would be.
If nothing else*, they would notice the changes in budgeting. The amount of money we spend every year on maintiaing the nuclear arsenal is staggering. if that suddenly paired back or chanced it’d be basically public information. Maybe not specifics, but there’s enough detail to know what’s being spent on what.
MAD only works if the other party thinks you can, and you will. Also, once you start using MAD it’s almost impossible to stop.
Putin keeps nuclear saber rattling against Ukraine aid. The US has limited it’s involvement because of it. The more sure you are in MAD, the less cautious you need to be of someone else miscalculating and hoping for a favorable exchange.
Do you really think he’s going to stop doing that whether or not these weapons are built? It’s pretty much all he’s got.
I think the US will be more bold in escalation than otherwise. It doesn’t really matter what he says, just what the US things he’ll do.
Small correction: It’s not a warhead expansion, it’s a delivery system update. 60 year old rockets and silos don’t cut it.
Cold War go brrrrr
