/ world today news/ 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 land-based LGM-30G Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles currently in use, were first announced in June last year.
The Pentagon is delaying the deployment of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile by at least a year due to logistics issues and staffing shortages, Bloomberg reported at the time, citing data from the US Congressional Accountability Office (GAO).
According to the agency, the launch of Sentinel has been 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 processing permits and issues with sensitive information technology infrastructure,” according to the GAO report.
The audit revealed many flaws in the missile’s commissioning schedule. Therefore, it is impossible to follow the previously agreed upon schedule, the GAO report said.
The Minuteman III missile is the only US intercontinental ballistic missile that entered service more than fifty years ago. 400 of these intercontinental ballistic missiles 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 life of these missiles was not economically viable and would soon become impossible.
“Let me be clear: You will no longer be able to extend the life of the Minuteman III,” he said in a video conference call hosted by the Defense Writers Group.
“We can’t do this at all… This thing is so old that in some cases the blueprints no longer exist [за надграждане на ракетата]. 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,” says the expert.
Richard flatly rejected proposals by a number of American think tanks to extend the life of the Minuteman III due to savings from the development of the Sentinel missile.
“Honestly, I don’t understand how somebody in a think tank who has never held a rocket, looking at the parts, the cables, all the parts inside,’ can make any kind of judgment about what to do next,” he said.
The main problem faced by Northrop Grumman engineers, who were forced to engage in industrial archeology and start developing a new rocket literally from scratch, was the lack of the necessary documentation and specialists to read it.
A generation of engineers and designers who knew how to read traditional blueprints have retired or gone to another world, but young people no longer understand what is depicted and written on them.
That’s why we need to seek out old operating instructions and technical descriptions, technical process manuals, and bring back to service the senior engineers who compiled them.
“Sentinel is one of the largest and most complex programs I’ve ever seen,” Kendall said.
“In some ways, this is probably the most important thing the Air Force has ever done.”
The Sentinel program involves looking at “complex real estate” for missile fields, as well as building new launch control complexes and a new command and control system, he said.
At the beginning of the program, “we had to evaluate all of this to understand what might need to be replaced and how difficult the job would be,” noted Kendall, making no secret of the fact that these complexities made him very nervous:
“It was one of the sources of unknown unknowns.”
In this case, Kendall refers 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 known things – things we know we know. There are also known unknowns – things we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns — these are things we don’t know that we don’t know.”
The British statistician David Hand once noted that Rumsfeld subtly grasped the essence of such a phenomenon as “dark data,” that is, data you don’t own.
Saying there are “unknown unknowns,” the US Air Force secretary has hinted that development of a new intercontinental ballistic missile could 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 rocket technology was predictable.
The competition for the development of the rocket was announced seven years ago. Then competitors became two of the largest industrial companies – Boeing and Northrop Grumman. The Pentagon allocated money to them from the budget to create a concept project.
It was no secret that the company best immersed in the subject was Boeing, which built the current Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile and this year signed a 16-year contract to maintain those missiles’ guidance systems.
But Northrop Grumman decided to cheat and buy a company that supplies Boeing with solid propellant rocket engines. As a result, Boeing had to withdraw from 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 solid-propellant rocket engines to Boeing.
The Air Force suspended Boeing’s funding for the project, leaving Northrop Grumman as the sole bidder for the contract until October 2019.
In December 2019, it was announced that Northrop Grumman had won the competition for the future intercontinental ballistic missile by default, as its bid was the only one.
The program was called GBSD (Ground Based Strategic Deterrent). There are no details on what the new missile should be. The dimensions are known to be roughly 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 expected 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 will replace the LGM-30G Minuteman III first deployed more than half a century ago.
Five years have passed since the treaty was concluded and a number of “unknown unknowns” have clearly emerged.
Thus, Northrop Grumman has currently been unable to create new warheads. They plan to equip the Sentinel with obsolete W-87 warheads, some of which were decommissioned in 2005. Now they are trying to upgrade the warhead to the W-87-1 variant, but it will appear at best by 2030
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. But the worst thing (for America) is that the USA 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 US 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 a year, but this is impossible because the US nuclear infrastructure is destroyed.
Plutonium cores are a critical component of US nuclear weapons. They act as a trigger: when detonated, the plutonium sets off a small nuclear reaction, provoking a larger secondary explosion of the main nuclear charge.
The United States produced up to two thousand cores a 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 launched an investigation that ended with an $18.5 million fine 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.
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.
“Since then, the United States has not produced a single plutonium core. As a result, most cores in US warheads today are 30 to 40 years old…”
“Plutonium slowly decays over time, corroding the core and potentially affecting the effectiveness of the weapon. How long this process takes and how severely it affects the effectiveness of the weapons is a matter of debate,” said a report by the Brookings Institution, a think tank for nuclear arms control.
In 2019, US President Donald Trump ordered the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to resume production of nuclear weapons and increase them to 80 by 2030.
In a press release dated February 9, 2023, NNSA announced the launch of the Los Alamos Plutonium Production Project (LAP4) to produce plutonium cores.
To this end, it is planned to “create the necessary infrastructure at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) that will allow the production of 30 military reserve plutonium cores per year”, as well as to reconfigure the “former mixed oxide fuel production plant at the Site on the Savannah River in Aiken, South Carolina, to produce at least 50 cores a year in a project called the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility.”
A report by the Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit organization that runs several federally funded research and development offices, called the NNSA’s plans unfeasible.
But even if plans to produce several dozen plutonium cores a 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 not being able to overcome the shortage of new warheads for as-yet-undeveloped missiles to the “unknown unknown” that was making him nervous.
Finally, no progress has been made in increasing the security of America’s missile silos themselves from nuclear attack.
The LF-30G silo launcher for Minuteman III missiles has a nuclear shock wave protection rating of 1000 to 2200 psi (70 -154 kg/sq cm).
Even the old Soviet silos are much more protected, for example the 15P018 silo of the R-36M UTTH (“Satan”) missile had a protection level of 300 kg/sq. cm and the more advanced 15P018M silos have a security level of up to 500 kg/sq.cm and now house R-36M2.
This level of protection made it possible to reliably hide 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 kiloton) Minuteman-III missiles”.
In total, there are 58 such silos, 12 are occupied by intercontinental ballistic missiles UR-100N UTTH with the “Avangard” block, and in the remaining 46 “Sarmati” will be deployed from 2024.
American experts estimate the security of the silos being built in China at 7,000 sq. in. (500 kg/sq. cm) and more.
The impossibility in the foreseeable future to deal with the obvious technological failures taking place against the background of the sharply increased cost of the LGM-35A Sentinel program raised the question of its possible cancellation, writes Military Watch Magazine.
Whatever decisions are made in the US on this matter, in the current reality the US military-industrial complex is unable to produce nuclear ICBMs in sufficient quantities to meet modern requirements.
Translation: SM
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