NUCLEAR WEAPONSSpy Balloon Controversy Focuses Attention on Western Nuclear Missile Facilities
Experts believe the Chinese balloon downed over the Atlantic coast this month was snooping on U.S. missile defenses. Part of the landscape for a half-century, they are headed for a costly refresh in an era of rising global tensions.
If the news of the Chinese spy balloon did nothing else, it was a reminder of the breadth and ubiquity of military nuclear facilities in rural areas of the western United States. During the Cold War, the West, with its vast empty spaces and abundant government-owned land — not to mention its over-the-North-Pole proximity to the Soviet Union — was the most obvious place to install hundreds of silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles.
As The Washington Post reported last April, “About 400 of those missiles remain active and ready to launch at a few seconds notice in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska. They are located on bison preserves and Indian reservations. They sit across from a national forest, behind a rodeo grandstand, down the road from a one-room schoolhouse, and on dozens of private farms…”
The Post reported that Montana’s Malmstrom Air Force Base was worth more than $375 million to the local economy in the counties around Great Falls. Lewiston, the county seat of nearby Fergus County, features an unusual monument: an upright deactivated Minuteman III Missile. It stands as a marker both of the region’s central role at the beginning of the nuclear age, and the activity now beginning to replace first-generation nuclear missiles with new missiles to be constructed — once called the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent; now called Sentinels.
It’s a task that will span decades. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists noted in January that an estimated 1,370 nuclear warheads are deployed on ballistic missiles; and another 1,938 are in storage; several hundred of this group are in line to be retired in the next seven years. The Department of Energy has custody of the 1,536 or so warheads that are already retired.
Hopes for more international disarmament, particularly in the wake of the succession of treaties between Moscow and Washington that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century, have receded. The Russian President Vladimir Putin just made that clear by announcing he was withdrawing from the New START treaty of 2010 and its limits on offensive missiles. The move gives new significance to Washington’s decision to upgrade the nuclear weapons deployed throughout the West.
