The unknown unknown: America's destruction of the nuclear triad

Hello ATS!

I have been subscribed to and read materials from the analytical portal “Strategic Culture Foundation” for many years. This is a unique online platform for analytics, comments, and discussions on a wide range of problems of international relations, the world economy, global security, history, culture, and regional studies, which has been operating since 2005, where many leading analysts from many countries of the world publish their research.

I would like to present to you one of the analytical reports concerning the state of US nuclear weapons. I hope that ATS members, former veterans and military personnel in the nuclear field will leave their comments under this thread and confirm or deny the facts presented. So, the article is called "America Could Lose the Nuclear Triad?"

"The decline of the nuclear industry has reached unprecedented depths

The US Air Force's ongoing LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program has encountered serious and unforeseen challenges, US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in remarks at an online conference organized by the Center for a New American Security. "

Problems with the development of the Sentinel missile, intended to replace the ground-based LGM-30G Minuteman III ICBMs currently in service, were first announced in June last year. The Pentagon is postponing the deployment of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile for at least a year due to logistics problems and personnel shortages, Bloomberg reported then, citing data from the US Congressional Accountability Office (GAO).

According to the agency, the launch of Sentinel was delayed from May 2029 to June 2030. The project is being developed by Northrop Grumman Corporation. The firm faced problems "due to staffing shortages, delays in permit processing, and problems with sensitive information technology infrastructure," according to the GAO report.

The audit revealed many deficiencies in the missile's commissioning schedule. Therefore, it is impossible to follow the previously agreed schedule, the GAO report said.

The Minuteman III missile is the only US intercontinental ballistic missile to enter service over fifty years ago. 400 of these ICBMs are located in underground mines in five states in the upper Midwest of the United States.

The commander of the US Strategic Command, Charles Richard, said two years ago that extending the service life of these missiles is not economically profitable, and soon it will become completely impossible. “Let me be clear: You will not be able to extend the life of Minuteman III any longer,” he said in a speech to a video conference organized by the Defense Writers Group.

“We can't do that at all... This thing is so old that in some cases the blueprints no longer exist [for upgrading the rocket]. Where blueprints exist, they are about six generations behind the industry standard,” he said, adding that there are also no technicians who fully understand them. "They are no longer alive."

Richard categorically rejected proposals from a number of American think tanks to extend the service life of the Minuteman III for reasons of savings on the development of the Sentinel missile.

“Frankly, I don’t understand how someone in a think tank who has never actually held a rocket, looking at the parts, the cables, all the parts inside,” can make any judgments about what to do next,” he said.

The main problem faced by Northrop Grumman engineers, who are forced to engage in industrial archeology and start developing a new rocket literally from scratch, is the lack of necessary documentation and specialists who can read it.

A generation of engineers and designers who knew how to read traditional drawings has retired or gone to another world, but young people no longer understand what is depicted and written on them. That’s why we have to look for old operating instructions and technical descriptions, manuals on technical processes, and put the elderly engineers who compiled them back into service.

“Sentinel is one of the largest and most complex programs I have ever seen,” Kendall said. “In some ways, this is probably the most important thing the Air Force has ever taken on.” The Sentinel program includes consideration of "complex real estate" for missile fields, as well as the construction of new launch control complexes and a new command and control system, he said.

At the outset of the program, “we had to evaluate all of this to understand what might need to be replaced and how hard of a job it would be,” Kendall noted, admitting that these complexities made him very nervous: “It was one of the sources of unknown unknowns.”

".

Continued below...

Kendall in this case made a reference to the famous statement of the US Secretary of Defense during the presidencies of Gerald Ford and George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld: “There are known knowns - things that we know that we know. There are also known unknowns—things we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns - these are things that we don’t know that we don’t know.”

British statistician David Hand once noted that Rumsfeld subtly grasped the essence of such a phenomenon as “dark data”, that is, data that you do not have.

Stating that there were “unknown unknowns,” the US Air Force Secretary made it clear that the development of a new ICBM may even be a big question mark.

And financial difficulties are far from the first place here. The emergence of “unknown unknowns” in the field of missile technology was predictable.

The competition for the development of the rocket was announced seven years ago. The competitors then became two of the largest industrial companies - Boeing and Northrop Grumman. The Pentagon allocated money from the budget for them to create a preliminary design. It was no secret that the company that was best immersed in the topic was Boeing, which created the Minuteman III ICBM currently in service and this year signed a 16-year contract for the maintenance of the guidance systems of these missiles.

But Northrop Grumman decided to cheat and bought a company that supplies Boeing with solid rocket engines. As a result, Boeing had to abandon participation in the project.

On July 25, 2019, Boeing announced that it would not apply for the program, citing Northrop's recent acquisition of Orbital ATK (now Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems), a supplier of Boeing solid rocket motors. The Air Force stopped funding Boeing for the project, leaving Northrop Grumman as the sole bidder for the contract by October 2019.

In December 2019, it was announced that Northrop Grumman had won the competition for the future ICBM by default as its bid was the only one.

The program was called GBSD (Ground Based Strategic Deterrent). There are no details about what the new rocket should be like. It is known that the dimensions are approximately the same as the Minuteman III. There is information that the rocket will run on solid fuel, have three legs and a range of at least 15,000 km. It is planned to achieve good range using the latest fuel, and increased accuracy thanks to GPS.

In 2020, the Air Force awarded Northrop a $13.3 billion contract to develop the Sentinel program, which would replace the LGM-30G Minuteman III first deployed more than half a century ago.

Five years have passed since the conclusion of the contract, and a number of “unknown unknowns” have emerged quite clearly.

Thus, Northrop Grumman has not been able to create new warheads at the moment. They plan to equip Sentinel with obsolete W-87 warheads, some of which were withdrawn from service in 2005. Now they are trying to upgrade the warhead to the W-87-1 variant, but it will appear by 2030 at best. The first Sentinels in service will be with old W-87s. But even the W-87-1 version cannot be called fresh - the first developments on this topic began in 1988. However, the worst thing (for America) is that the United States cannot, as we wrote, produce nuclear warheads in sufficient quantities!

The decline of the US nuclear industry has reached such depths that it is no longer surprising that the American Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported: “The United States cannot produce enough plutonium cores for its nuclear warheads. By 2030, the Pentagon wants to make 80 new plutonium cores per year, but this is impossible because the US nuclear infrastructure is destroyed."

Plutonium cores are a critical component of American nuclear weapons. They act as a trigger: when detonated, the plutonium causes a small nuclear reaction, provoking a larger secondary explosion of the main nuclear charge. The United States produced up to two thousand cores per year during the Cold War at Westinghouse's Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado. The plant was closed in 1989 after the FBI and Environmental Protection Agency raided it for violations of environmental laws.

The FBI began an investigation, which ended in a fine of $18.5 million in 1992. The plant was closed and completely demolished. More than 1.3 million cubic meters of waste were removed and more than 72 million liters of water were recycled.

Continued below...

Now the United States has only one laboratory in Los Alamos, where plutonium cores can be produced, but in 2013 all work was stopped due to non-compliance with the rules for working with radioactive materials.

“The United States has not produced a single plutonium core since then. As a result, most cores in American warheads today are 30 to 40 years old... Plutonium slowly degrades over time, corroding the core and potentially affecting the effectiveness of the weapon. How long this process takes and how seriously it affects weapon performance is a matter of debate,” the Brookings Institution, a nuclear weapons control think tank, said in a report.

In 2019, US President Donald Trump ordered the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to resume production of nuclear weapons and increase it to 80 by 2030.

In a press release dated February 9, 2023, NNSA announced the launch of the Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project (LAP4) to produce plutonium cores. To this end, it is planned to “create the necessary infrastructure at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) that will allow the production of 30 military reserve plutonium cores per year,” as well as repurpose “the former mixed oxide fuel plant at the Savannah River site in Aiken, South Carolina to produce at least 50 cores per year under a project called the Savannah River Plutonium Reprocessing Facility."

A report from the Institute for Defense Analyzes, a nonprofit that runs several federally funded research and development bureaus, called the NNSA's plans unfeasible.

But even if plans to produce several dozen plutonium cores per year come true, the production of warheads for four hundred Sentinel missiles will drag on for many years. It can be assumed that Frank Kendall attributed the problem of the inability to overcome the shortage of new warheads for not yet created missiles to the “unknown unknown” that unnerved him.

And finally, no progress has been made in terms of increasing the security of the American missile silos themselves from a nuclear attack.

The LF-30G silo launcher for Minuteman III missiles has a nuclear shock wave rating of 1,000 to 2,200 psi. inch (70 -154 kg/sq. cm).

Even the old Soviet silos are much more protected, for example, the silo 15P018 of the R-36M UTTH (“Satan”) missile had a protection level of 300 kg/sq. cm, and more advanced silos 15P018M have a security level of up to 500 kg/sq. cm, and they now house the R-36M2.

This level of protection made it possible to reliably shelter the best Soviet missiles not only from the W-62/Mk-12 warheads (power - 170 kilotons), but also from the more powerful and accurate W-78/Mk-12A (power - 350 kilotons) Minuteman missiles -III". In total, there are 58 such silos, 12 are occupied by UR-100N UTTH ICBMs with the Avangard block, and the remaining 46 will house Sarmatians from 2024.

American experts estimate the security of silos being built in China at 7,000 psi. inch (500 kg/sq. cm) and above.

The inability in the foreseeable future to cope with the obvious technological failures taking place against the backdrop of the sharply increased cost of the LGM-35A Sentinel program has raised the question of its possible cancellation, writes Military Watch Magazine.

Whatever decisions are made in the United States on this matter, in the current reality the American military-industrial complex is not able to produce nuclear ICBMs in sufficient quantities that meet modern requirements."

I would like to add on my own behalf. I am interested in the state of the US nuclear triad. Therefore, I ask ATS members to move away from the usual propaganda rhetoric and, if possible, respond on the topic, responding to the facts described in the article. All necessary links to facts are given in the article.

Thank you.

a reply to: RussianTroll
Sorry RT; I didn't/wouldn't/couldn't stick to topic.

a reply to: RussianTroll

If your nukes are in the same sort of state as the rest of you're piss poor armed forces.

I suggest worrying about your own nuclear paper tiger as opposed to the other nuclear-capable nations.

The Grand Design – A Lecture by G. Edward Griffin

This links to one old presentation on USA Foreign policy and the nuclear issues. One direction to avoid a nuclear conflict that destroys the world is the rise of global governance where only one power has the capability to order a nuke strike. Biden is a globalists puppet handing over the nation. After Trump saying it was the time of the Patriots at the UN, it went down hill for him.

If some of this nuke technology is going the way of the Apollo program, will it be left to private multinational corporations to pick up the pieces of next generation mass destruction under the UN banner?

"add on my own behalf. I am interested in the state of the US nuclear triad. Therefore, I ask ATS members to move away from the usual propaganda rhetoric ".

Ahem. Pot, kettle?

As Andy pointed out, there are doubts about the viability of your own current nuke arsenal.

Any comment about that?

What "triad"?

Several countries have nukes.

a reply to: RussianTroll

American nukes don't work bla bla bla, Russian nukes are so much better bla bla bla....

Plutonium slowly degrades over time, corroding the core and potentially affecting the effectiveness of the weapon. How long this process takes and how seriously it affects weapon performance is a matter of debate,

Maybe do a little more research and actually read and research what you're posting instead of just thinking how to use it in one of your propaganda pieces.


www.llnl.gov...

Plutonium at 150 years
The article below presents a summary of ongoing work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The work is to assess how radioactive decay in plutonium affects its material properties as they relate to the performance of nuclear weapons. This work is a continuation of the joint plutonium aging study done by Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National laboratories. That original work was extensively peer reviewed by a number of external technical groups to include a JASON review in 2006.

This continuing work shows that no unexpected aging issues are appearing in plutonium that has been accelerated to an equivalent of ~ 150 years of age. The results of this work are consistent with, and further reinforce, the Department of Energy Record of Decision to pursue a limited pit manufacturing capability in existing and planned facilities at Los Alamos instead of constructing a new, very large pit manufacturing facility (called the Modern Pit Facility or MPF) that would have been capable of producing hundreds of pits a year.

originally posted by: RussianTroll
I hope that ATS members, former veterans and military personnel in the nuclear field will leave their comments ...

1 - I"m a veteran and my comment is this ... that's three pages of walls of text and I lost interest. TOO MUCH.

2 - You asked for U.S. military personnel in the nuclear field to leave comments. HELL NO. You are asking people with security clearances to give information about US Military readiness on a chat forum. That isn't going to happen.

a reply to: Kurokage

Reproducing the composition of the likes of "Fogbank" apparently presented somewhat of a chemical/material science hurdle.

But i think they managed to master the process once again.

en.wikipedia.org...
www.twz.com...

originally posted by: FlyersFan

originally posted by: RussianTroll
I hope that ATS members, former veterans and military personnel in the nuclear field will leave their comments ...

1 - I"m a veteran and my comment is this ... that's three pages of walls of text and I lost interest. TOO MUCH.

2 - You asked for U.S. military personnel in the nuclear field to leave comments. HELL NO. You are asking people with security clearances to give information about US Military readiness on a chat forum. That isn't going to happen.

Are you saying that for a veteran of nuclear forces 3 pages of text is too much?

Then the degradation of nuclear forces is understandable.

originally posted by: RussianTroll
Are you saying that for a veteran of nuclear forces 3 pages of text is too much?.

No ... it was BORING.
Three pages of walls of text about a dry subject on a chat forum.
It bored me.
You wanted a veterans comment on what you posted. That's my veterans comment.

AND again .. you calling for military personnel in the nuclear field to discuss what they know about Americas military readiness ... NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. People with security clearances, or people that had security clearances in the past, aren't going to chat it up with some Russian dude on the other side of the planet in an online discussion forum about American military readiness.

a reply to: RussianTroll

Google Translate not working for you today comrade?

What she said was rather clear, same as why.

a reply to: FlyersFan

Fabulous. The topic of the state of nuclear forces with analytics from Western sources is boring and uninteresting for you.

You only convinced me even more of my conclusions.

a reply to: RussianTroll

If its conclusions you are after RT.

One has to wonder at your sheer fascination with the very things and places you profess to hate and/or wish to see wiped off the map via Russian nuclear fire.

I conclude you tick the "paradoxical enthusiast" box.

On the subject of nuclear saber rattling, well nuclear war is a mug's game in a M.A.D world.

As most sane people understand.

a reply to: RussianTroll

Do you have any "analytics" on the condition of your own nuclear arsenal to share?

Or, might that be called treason over there?

As would seem to be being critical of your armed forces.

originally posted by: Oldcarpy2
Do you have any "analytics" on the condition of your own nuclear arsenal to share?.

Excellent question. Here is what we know about Russias nuclear capabilities
CLICK HERE
RussianTroll wanted American military personal who work on nukes to come and tell all. So it's only fair that he go get some Russian military personnel with security clearances in the nuclear field to come on ATS and tell us all about the Russian nuclear capabilities.

a reply to: RussianTroll

What "triad"?

That makes no sense at all.

Please explain.

originally posted by: SchrodingersRat
a reply to: RussianTroll

What "triad"?

That makes no sense at all.

Please explain.

The nuclear triad is a necessary component of any state’s nuclear forces. This:
- ground-based silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles;
- strategic bomber aviation;
- ballistic missiles based on the submarine fleet.

a reply to: RussianTroll

Why did you make a thread about who has better nuclear delivery than the other?
I truly don't get the logic in doing so. I mean if you feel threated by another's aging delivery system then in some way sure it makes sense in a messed up world.

Why is Russia always pushing the topic of we have nukes and will use them?......BRAH we know you do and we know when you will use them and the moment you do the world will not be what we know it today.
Maybe drive that point home to your comrades.