The U.S. is pouring funds into upgrading its land-based nuclear deterrent, replacing decades-old long-range missiles while keeping a close eye on the weapons programs touted by Russia, China and North Korea.
The U.S. Air Force is replacing LGM-30 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with the LGM-35A Sentinel, a new ICBM to take over the most responsive part of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.
The U.S. has three strands to its nuclear network, known as the nuclear triad. Washington considers the weapons on land, on sea, and in the air the "backbone of America's national security," a deterrent force "ready, if necessary, to deliver a decisive response, anywhere, anytime." The 400 ground-launched Minuteman III ICBMs, kept in hardened silos in U.S. states including Montana and North Dakota, work alongside 14 ballistic missile submarines, or SSBNs, and nuclear-capable heavy bomber aircraft.
The U.S. has kept its ICBMs on non-stop alert since 1959, starting with its now-defunct Atlas missiles, but the Minuteman missiles making up the ground-based strategic deterrent are scheduled to be phased out from 2029. The missiles will be swapped and the launch facilities modernized in favor of the new Sentinel, previously known as the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent. The major overhaul of the ground-based deterrent also includes all the infrastructure around the system, covering almost 40,000 square miles of U.S. territory.
"Sentinel is the next-generation, capable ICBM we need," General Anthony Cotton, who heads up Air Force Global Strike Command, said in April 2022. "Nuclear deterrence is central to our defense posture and more important now than it's ever been."
The upgrade has been in the works for years, but comes at a time of heightened global tensions and the bandying around of nuclear rhetoric. Russia said in late October 2023 that it had rehearsed a "massive" retaliatory nuclear strike involving land, sea and air nuclear missiles as relations between Moscow and Washington continue to sour over Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
In mid-December, North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) into the East Sea, testing a missile that Japanese minister Shingo Miyake described as putting "the whole of the U.S. territory" within range. The launch came shortly after the U.S. said it would use "the full range of U.S. capabilities including nuclear" to support South Korea against any action from its northern neighbor.
In mid-October, a senior U.S. defense official said Beijing was "continuing to quite rapidly modernize and diversify and expand its nuclear forces," thought to have more than 500 operational nuclear warheads as of May 2023.
"They are expanding and investing in their land, sea and air-based nuclear delivery platforms, as well as the infrastructure that's required to support this," the official told the media.
"Russia and China are already increasing the capability and number of their ICBMs respectively, while the United States is transparently replacing ICBMs on a one-for-one basis," the Defense Department has previously said.
Against this backdrop, the new Sentinel "is the most cost-effective option for maintaining a safe, secure, and effective land-based leg of the nuclear triad and would extend its capabilities through 2075," said the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center.
Some parts of the Minuteman III system have been upgraded since it was activated more than half a century ago, but "most of the system's fundamental
infrastructure still uses the original equipment," according to the U.S. military. The U.S. has spent billions on upgrades to the Minuteman III missiles to extend the life of its only land-based deterrent after the U.S. pulled Peacekeeper ICBMs in 2005.
But the years are starting to show. In early November, the U.S. Air Force blew up a Minuteman III over the Pacific Ocean shortly after it was launched from California. The military detected an "anomaly" during the test flight.
"It has served our country well and we will continue to depend on it to deter nuclear war until the 2030s, but this week's test is a stark reminder that nothing lasts forever," the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, said at the time. "Further life extension is simply infeasible, and 50-year-old missiles are not the answer to China and Russia's expanding nuclear arsenals."
This chart, provided by Statista, shows the estimated global nuclear warhead inventories as of 2023.
The Minuteman missiles, weighing about 38 tons at launch, have a range of over 6,000 miles, and are able to travel at approximately 15,000 mph
An early 2023 report to Congress outlined the Sentinel's "modular design," meaning components can be swapped in or replaced throughout the life span of the system, unlike the Minuteman III. It will be "easier to maintain" than the Minuteman and use "low risk, technically mature components," the Defense Department has said, in the hope that Sentinel operates "well into the 2070s."
"This could potentially be a more cost-effective way to support the missile's intended 50-year life cycle than the life extension programs that replaced aging parts in the MMIII [Minuteman III]," according to the report.
The Sentinel missiles will be lighter than the Minuteman III missiles, which use steel casings to store the missile propellant, the Congressional report added. Although plans currently show the Sentinel to have one warhead per missile, there is the potential to deploy the missile with up to three warheads, the report said.
In June, the Government Accountability Office described the Sentinel as "a software-intensive program with a compressed schedule," adding: "Software development is a high risk due to its scale and complexity and unique requirements of the nuclear deterrence mission."
The program is "behind schedule due to staffing shortfalls, delays with clearance processing, and classified information technology infrastructure challenges," as well as being afflicted with supply chain disruptions, the Office said.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Ellie Cook is a Newsweek security and defense reporter based in London, U.K. Her work focuses largely on the Russia-Ukraine ... Read more
