Are you ready for a blast from the past? The control stations for America’s nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles have a sort of 1980s retro look, with computing panels in sea foam green, bad lighting, and chunky control switches, including a critical one that says “launch.”
But hold on, those underground capsules are about to be demolished and the missile silos they control will be completely overhauled. A new nuclear missile is coming, a gigantic intercontinental ballistic missile called the Sentinel. It’s the largest cultural shift in the land leg of the Air Force’s nuclear missile mission in 60 years.
While we’re excited for the updates, there are questions as to whether some of the Cold War-era aspects of the Minuteman missiles that the Sentinel will replace should be changed.
Making the silo-launched missile more modern, with complex software and 21st-century connectivity across a vast network, may also mean it’s more vulnerable. The Sentinel will need to be well protected from cyberattacks, while its technology will have to cope with frigid winter temperatures in the Western states where the silos are located.
Let’s talk numbers – the $96 billion Sentinel overhaul involves 450 silos across five states, their control centers, three nuclear missile bases, and several other testing facilities. The project is so ambitious it has raised questions as to whether the Air Force can get it all done at once.
An overhaul is truly needed. The silos lose power and their 60-year old massive mechanical parts break down often. Air Force crews guard them using helicopters that can be traced back to the Vietnam War. Commanders hope the modernization of the Sentinel, and of the trucks, gear, and living quarters, will help attract and retain young technology-minded service members who are now asked each day to find ways to keep a very old system running.
Nuclear modernization was delayed for years because the United States deferred spending on new missiles, bombers, and submarines in order to support the post 9/11 wars overseas. Now everything is getting modernized at once. The Sentinel work is one leg of a larger, nuclear weapons enterprise-wide $750 billion overhaul that is replacing almost every component of U.S. nuclear defenses, including new stealth bombers, submarines, and ICBMs in the country’s largest nuclear weapons program since the Manhattan Project.
For the Sentinel, silo work could be underway by lead contractor Northrop Grumman as soon as 2025. That is 80 years after the U.S. last used nuclear weapons in war, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, which killed an estimated 100,000 in an instant and likely tens of thousands more over time.
The modern Sentinel is expected to meet threats from rapidly evolving Chinese and Russian missile systems. The Sentinel is expected to stay in service through 2075, so designers are taking an approach that will make it easier to upgrade with new technologies in the coming years, despite the risks involved.
“Sentinel is a software-intensive program with a compressed schedule,” the Government Accountability Office reported this summer.
