Vox Populi:

Last December, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney issued a press release crowing about all the money he secured for his state in the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual bill that lays out what the government will spend on the US military in the following fiscal year. He specifically cited the $4.3 billion in the legislation for the new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system, a chunk of which will go to the system’s manager, the Hill Air Force Base, 30 miles north of Salt Lake City.

Ultimately, the Air Force is poised to spend more than $125 billion on 650 Sentinel ICBMs, deploying 400 of them to replace the Cold War-era Minuteman III ICBMs siloed in five Great Plains states. The new ICBMs are part of the Pentagon’s plan to spend more than $1.5 trillion over the next 30 years to replace the entire nuclear arsenal with new weapons and delivery systems.

Romney claims that the land-based leg of the nuclear triad is “vital” to nuclear deterrence. The evidence, however, suggests otherwise. That’s why experts inside and outside of the government have called for completely eliminating silo-based ICBMs, maintaining that a nuclear dyad of bombers and submarines would be more than adequate to deter a nuclear attack or, in the unlikely event of such an attack, retaliate. They also warn that the ICBMs are destabilizing—and deadly. Russian missiles could reach them within a half hour, giving the US president at most 10 minutes to decide whether to launch them before they were destroyed on the ground. 

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