WASHINGTON (AP) — The new Sentinel nuclear warhead program is 81% over budget and is now estimated to cost nearly $141 billion, but the Pentagon is moving forward with the program, saying that given the threats from China and Russia it does not have a choice.
The Northrop Grumman Sentinel program is the first major upgrade to the ground-based component of the nuclear triad in more than 60 years and will replace the aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile.
It involves not only building a new missile but the modernization of 450 silos across five states, their launch control centers, three nuclear missile bases and several other testing facilities.
The expansiveness of the program previously raised questions from government watchdogs as to whether the Pentagon could manage it all.
Military budget officials on Monday said when they set the program’s estimated costs their full knowledge of the modernization needed “was insufficient in hindsight to have a high-quality cost estimate,” Bill LaPlante, under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, told reporters on a call.
The high cost overrun triggered what is known as a Nunn-McCurdy breach, which occurs if the cost of developing a new program increases by 25% or more. By statute, the under secretary of defense for acquisition then must **undertake a rigorous review of the program to determine if it should continue; otherwise the program must be terminated. **
The old nukes are very, very old. MAD doesn’t work if people question if your weapons actually still work. They need an update.
The way military contracts work doesn’t sound like it’s working anymore either
In what way? Them coming out more than expected? That isn’t a new thing, in fact I would say it is the norm for basically all contracts, and not just military ones.
Maybe I’m overly cynical, but it being “only” 81% over budget makes me pleasantly surprised.
I mean, I would love for all that money to go to things that help people directly, instead of “big scary stick to keep other people from maybe hitting us with their sticks at some theoretical point in the future”
Buuuuut honestly when it comes to it’s nuclear arsenal, I just assume all government contracts will eventually be 150%-200% over budget, with at least 3 committees assembled to investigate the expense.
There was a really good freakonomics podcast episode about that! https://freakonomics.com/podcast/heres-why-all-your-projects-are-always-late-and-what-to-do-about-it-rebroadcast/
It has seemed to get worse as systems get more complex but I’m admittedly an outsider to that world
The article explains that the scope of work was so big it was very hard to make a real estimate.
I can imagine that they also probably didn’t agree to use a contractor who made a more realistic estimation.
A program this big likely has a lot of contractors. The guys designing new rockets aren’t going to be the guys refurbishing the silos. Every so often the government does have projects that have “known unknowns” meaning they can’t effectively be accounted for. Should they have run 1,000 smaller projects? Maybe, but they didn’t and there’s trade offs with that too.
Seems to be working for Russia. No one has bothered to call their bluffs in the last year over all the nuclear posturing.
They need an update but we can reduce the number of warheads we have to save money. I forget the exact number but it’s around 3k war heads.
Well I mean it’s not like there’s hundreds of thousands of Americans with crippling food insecurity, no homes, no healthcare, inadequate wages, poisonous water, and/or gun violence; so the government is fine making sure it has the capacity it nearly exterminate the human race. Right guys?
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” - Dwight Eisenhower
So as far as legislators are concerned, a win-win.
What a fucking waste of our taxes
Other countries with nukes would simply bully us.
Why?
Nukes don’t just disappear. We’ve got loads. We don’t need to be constantly making more.
Have you heard of a half life? Or a shelf life?
They have devices in them that break over time as all devices do, and those devices have parts and designs that were contemporary before the people working on them today were alive likely with architectural and design decisions that were operationally required back when things were being drafted that no longer make sense to do today. Likely the nuclear materials will be reused, but that’s me thinking with my brainbox and not actually a thing I know.
For an example of what happens when we continue to rely on tech that really deserves to be updated and/or replaced, see the United States banking sector as compared to basically everywhere else.
Removed by mod
Yo, that was really rude, fascist, blocked
That’s pretty dumb as well, choom.
This community has a power-tripping moderator deleting comments in the guise of safety, but really just censoring people.
Well all you had to do.is read the article.you are.blindly responding to to learn we are only making one bomb but updating 450 silos to not sound like such an idiot.
They actually do disappear, it’s called radioactive decay. Tuck in your ignorance, it’s showing.
They kinda do, the reason no one bothers to find nukes lost back in the 50s is because they arent nukes anymore, hell they may not even be explosive. Half life means that the nukes just kinda become not nukes after awhile.
Half life means that the nukes just kinda become not nukes after awhile.
No, half life is the amount of time it takes the element to decay halfway. For Uranium-238, that is ~4.5 Billion years. Uranoum-235 is ~700 Million years. Plutonium-239 is ~24,000 years.
The issue with old nukes is all the other components aging, not the nuclear material.
The half life on tritium for h bombs is only 12 years, so those components need to be replaced periodically.
H bombs don’t use tritium for their main fusion stage. Even Castle Bravo used Lithium-6. Tritium was used in initiators to increase neutron flux and as a fission booster for dial a yield (once again, to increase neutron flux). Both of those are just as important for fission weapons as they are for fusion.
Importantly, alpha decay creates helium pockets which is a neutron moderator and screws up the bomb.
And Lithium-7 accidentally. They didn’t realize that the Lithium-7 would produce a fuckton more tritium, which is how a 4-6 Megaton estimated yeild became a 15 Megaton actual yeild, causing us to basically nuke our own civilians and some Japanese civilian sailors.
I’ll go against the grain as a liberal leftist and say 141 billion for upgrading our entire nuclear infrastructure in today’s political climate seems like a deal.
No shit. Wasnt the f35 total lifetime costs supposed to exceed 2 trillion?
Less moving parts and associated personel in nuclear silos and a big bomb. Absolute steal.
That being said, war is bad. But nukes are M.A.D.
I really hope they dont make enough to blow the whole planet again. Cold war quantity of nukes was absurd…unless Rodan shows up or something.
This isn’t the program to produce more warheads. It’s the program to update the missile force silos and rockets. Which was really needed.
Yeah I just mean we need to scale back What we update. Blowing the planet half way is enough.
You misunderstand, like a half dozen of the current high yield mirv ones could end most life on earth. This is just making them faster and as always the Pentagon lied and got caught.
My God, I certainly did. Such a pissing contest. Without threats like kaiju literally no reason to have this.
Really needed for what exactly? To exterminate all life on the planet a few minutes faster?
As dumb as it sounds, mutually assured destruction does have the perk of keeping everyone from using nukes. If modern countermeasures prevent that, it isnt a deterrent anymore. Updating these nukes improves the likelihood we dont have to use them.
Relevant example: russias tanks. They are outdated and weren’t adequately improved over decades. and are now getting wrecked by consumer grade drones and guys with while fancy, in all honesty, second grade hand me down rocket launchers. Before we knew this fact, they were a reasonable deterrent to not fucking with russia. Now, not so much.
Do the old ones work on floppy disks? Or was that still way too advanced at the time.
The really big ones
If you want to know why they’re overhauling them, John Oliver did an episode on it back in the first season or two of his show, which is now fully posted on YouTube
A lot of the old stuff isn’t less advanced than floppy disks in any way, but definitely not compatible. It’s all analogue components for most of the control rooms and computers.
Given the state of modern software design and corporate greed I’m not sure this will end well
I’m fairly sure it will end more poorly than I can possibly imagine.
We can probably save a couple save a couple dozen billion by running it all on Windows XP
WOPR IRL.
Joshua would like to talk to you
The 5 states are Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, North Dakota and Colorado.
Military spending budget? Military spending goal
Defense Department Dimmadollars
Healthcare please
The military spending isn’t the reason y’all aren’t getting healthcare. Nor is the cost of healthcare itself.
The current system costs the US government more than socialized medicine would. It’s all about the lobbying.
Yes, and military lobbies govt so we are forced to join them to get healthcare
Read that as “New Sentient nuclear warhead”
I want a nuclear test way out in space. Just to make sure they work.
Very cool read! Can’t believe I’d never heard of that before. It’s amazing all the equipment it broke and how far away it was visible and how big the EMP was. Truly terrifying these things are all over the world.
It’s honestly kinda scary that there are people who are unaware of the severity a High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) attack on the US poses. According to Homeland Security, Russia detonates a nuke 300 miles above sea level in the middle of North America and it wipes out the power grid for the entire continent. They estimate a year or more to replace the transformers and that the effects could kill as many as 90% of the American population in that time from total power loss and limited access to fresh water. His isnt from a YouTube influencer, this is from the Department of Homeland Security
Edit: I apologize for assuming you are from the US but even if younare not, you should still be knowledgeable of the threat because if it isn’t Russia, China or any country who detonates it, then there is still the threat of an equally threatening CME that we are over due for that could hit anywhere on the earth depending on where it flares on the sun.
Jeez, I’m going to have to learn more about this stuff.
I am in the US, more specifically between NYC and DC, so I always figured I wouldn’t have to worry much about nuclear war, as I’d probably be part of the first round getting vaporized. 😅
No shit I grew up in Frederick, MD till I was 12 then moved to Buffalo, NY region where I’ve been ever since lol but yeah, I have never been any sort of doomsday prepare and even when someone just told me about this I was super dismissive about it till I saw some very reputable reports on it. There are a bunch of videos from Dr. Arthur Braley a former NASA scientist who has been making instructional content about EMP attacks since way before Putin started fucking with Ukraine.
Thank you so much! I’ll check those out!
Way too close. That was in the atmosphere and horrible.
Well that’s one way to deal with space junk…
62 years ago today.
Uhhh…
We’ve seen them work. Hiroshima?
Yeah. But people need to be reminded of how powerful these weapons are. The dumbs will never have known what WWII even was.
Bad idea, instant international incident. We’ve detonated nukes in space before but it’s against all kinds of treaties to put them in orbit to start with.
Cold War go brrrrr
