Underground with America’s nuclear-missile crews

THERE ARE no big red buttons in the underground bunkers that control America’s nuclear missiles. Instead, launching an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) involves decrypting and verifying orders, receiving the unlock codes and then many hands turning many keys and levers at the same time: two per officer or “missileer”, two missileers per capsule and at least two separate capsules must act in unison. The redundancies ensure that no individual can fire a weapon—or block a launch.  Your correspondent went through the procedures in a simulator at the F.E. Warren air-force base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, home to the 90th Missile Wing. Even in a make-believe setting the dread was real enough. Little squares on a grid, each representing an ICBM silo, change colour, from red (launch in progress) to yellow (missiles away). There is no going back after a launch.

And then you wait. If you still have missiles, you stand ready to fire more. If you are out of weapons, you relay messages to other launch facilities. Above all, you wait for the enemy’s nukes, which are almost certainly coming your way. You might strap yourself into your chair, put on a hard hat and pray that you avoid a direct hit. You hope that the survival features—60 feet (18m) or more of earth above; blast doors; springs and shock absorbers all around; and supplies, backup power and air scrubbers within—will keep you alive. And if you eventually make it back to the surface, what would you find?

The mind-bending logic of mutually assured destruction, which holds that being ready to unleash a nuclear apocalypse serves to prevent it, faded from public attention after the cold war. Yet the terrifying questions of nuclear war are returning in a new age of big-power rivalry. The last treaty limiting American and Russian nuclear weapons, New START, will expire in February, with no replacement in sight. Russia has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons. China is fast building up its arsenal. It will have perhaps 1,000 warheads by the end of the decade, according to the Pentagon (fewer than the 5,000-odd that America and Russia each possesses).

In turn America is modernising all parts of its “triad” of land-, sea- and air-launched nuclear weapons, parts of which are half a century old. Minuteman III ICBMs will be replaced with Sentinel ones; B-2 bombers with the B-21s; and the Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs) with the Columbia-class subs. The government is also debating whether it needs more nuclear warheads. The most contentious element is the Sentinel programme, whose cost has exceeded its budget, raising questions: why has the air force botched its estimates, does America really need land-based nukes and would arms control be the better answer?

America’s ICBM infrastructure is vast, with 400 missiles deployed in 450 silos across the great plains. A spider’s web of cables connects them to 45 “missile-alert facilities” (MAFs), each consisting of a peanut-shaped capsule below and a support-building “topside” above. Maintenance teams tour the unmanned silos and, when necessary, pull ICBMs apart “like Lego pieces”, as one put it, to be worked on back at base. Armed teams in Humvees and helicopters secure the sites and convoys.

In 2024 the estimated costs of Sentinel jumped to $141bn, more than 80% higher than the previous projection. For critics such as Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association, a campaign group, the overrun amounts to rank incompetence. Having originally ruled out extending the life of the Minuteman III as uneconomical, the air force is having to do just that because of the delays to Sentinel, which was supposed to begin entering service in 2030 but may not do so until 2038.

General Andrew Gebara, the air force’s point-man on nuclear policy, says development of the Sentinel missile itself is progressing well. The problem is that the infrastructure to support it dates to the 1960s and 1970s, and is in worse shape than expected. The original plan had envisioned reusing existing facilities after a light refurbishing, but such are the problems with weakening cement and water infiltration that it would be “cheaper and faster to just dig a new silo”, he says. Similarly, other officers note, replacing old copper cables with fibre-optic ones would allow more data to flow and reduce the number of missile-alert facilities (from 45 to 24).

Sentinel is expected to remain in service until the 2070s, so the current facilities would be in operation for a century or more if they are not replaced. The air force says ever more work goes into keeping them running, and parts are ever harder to come by. Replacing the facilities sooner rather than later brings other advantages, the air force adds. New silos will more easily fit Sentinel, which is expected to be larger than the Minuteman III.

That prompts a heretical question. Does America need ground-based ICBMs at all? Mr Kimball argues that they are destabilising and should be phased out. Instead America should rely on a “dyad” of missiles launched from air and sea. The location of ICBM silos is no secret, he notes, and they would be a priority target, giving a president a few minutes to decide whether to use the missiles or risk losing them. “That vastly increases the risk of miscalculation,” says Mr Kimball; better to rely on submarine-launched nukes, which are nigh impossible to find and provide an assured second-strike capability.

Eric Edelman, a former Pentagon official, retorts that, on the contrary, ICBMs are stabilising. Without them an enemy might be tempted to try to decapitate America’s deterrent by striking the handful of nuclear-bomber and submarine bases, and command-and-control nodes. Moreover, China’s new hypersonic missiles are harder to spot. With ICBMs in silos, an enemy must fire hundreds of nuclear missiles at the American heartland to take them out, which would undoubtedly be detected and invite massive retaliation. “Why would you want to simplify your adversary’s targeting problem?” asks Mr Edelman. China, which has built hundreds of silos in recent years, seems to accept such logic.

Some argue that America should complicate the targeting even further by making at least some ICBMs mobile, as both China and Russia do. A congressionally appointed bipartisan commission in 2023 recommended examining the possibility. This would revive cold-war programmes such as the Midgetman, a small ICBM carried on a road-mobile launcher, and the Peacekeeper railway garrison, a large missile carried on special railway carriages. Both missile types were intended to be dispersed across America’s transport network in times of crisis, but the idea was abandoned with the end of the cold war. General Gebara says it was studied anew and judged to be too expensive and unpopular.

Beyond the cost and mix of nuclear weapons, a broader question looms. With the expiry of New START, America and Russia will no longer be bound by the ceiling of 1,550 “strategic“ (or long-range) warheads. Some experts say the two sides should continue to abide by the limit informally, pending new arms-control negotiations. Others advocate expanding the deployed arsenal by “uploading” stored warheads onto existing bombers, ICBMs and submarines, which would breach the current treaty but would be permitted once it expires. Congress has earmarked money to do this. It is the likely next step in the arms race.

President Donald Trump has spoken about his desire for “denuclearisation”, and for talks with China and Russia to halve defence spending. Neither power seems interested. James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, a think-tank, reckons nuclear policy is anyhow likely to be decided by the bureaucracy. “Among the majority of the Republican national-security establishment…there’s a pretty clear view that we need more nukes,” he notes.

As wonks debate, ominous responsibility rests on the shoulders of young officers on alert in the capsules, usually lieutenants and captains in their 20s. They typically work 24-hour shifts every three days, locked away in pairs, taking turns to sleep and work. In quiet moments they stream television and send text messages via a computer topside (no personal electronic devices are allowed). Many use the long hours to study for postgraduate degrees.

On the day your correspondent visited the Foxtrot-01 capsule near Kimball, the two women on duty spoke of the underground, of watching episodes of “Friends” and of their pride in keeping America safe. On a wall someone had drawn a whale with a spout in the shape of a mushroom cloud—a reference to the “Moby Dick” squadron of second-world-war bombers to which their unit, the 320th missile squadron, traces its origins. Next to it are words that summed up a mission they hope never to carry out: “Death from Below”. ■