WASHINGTON — Modernization of U.S. nuclear weapons and delivery systems is moving too slowly and the Pentagon has heard about it, Nebraska’s senior U.S. senator said here Tuesday at a think tank.
“When we’re in classified briefings and I hear from the military and the department, they give me dates on when things are going to be ready, and I always look at them and go, ‘that’s too late,’” Sen. Deb Fischer (D-Neb.), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, told attendees of a Heritage Foundation event.
“We have to figure out how we can move faster while still maintaining… what we need to have into the future,” Fisher said.
The conservative think tank had Fischer on hand at the event, called “Nuclear Posture Review: Building Our Strength in 2025,” for the rollout of a new report, “A Nuclear Posture Review for the Next Administration: Building the Nuclear Arsenal of the 21st Century.”
In the report, the foundation said that while the next U.S. President should minimize the need to conduct critical tests of nuclear weapons, that person’s administration should be ready to test if the need appears and the role of the nuclear workforce is to certify “the reliability of the nuclear stockpile can be assured in the absence of nuclear testing” and maintain “a nuclear test capability that can be employed if testing becomes necessary.”
Some of the silos for nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, currently for Boeing-made Minuteman III and intended for Sentinel missiles that are supposed to replace Minuteman III, are located in Nebraska.
The Sentinel program has been on the rocks lately, with the Air Force acknowledging that the estimated per-unit costs of the missile had risen by more than 80% by 2024 compared with estimates from 2020, when the program entered the project management phase that was supposed to result in construction of more than 600 missiles.
Much of Sentinel’s trouble stems from silos and related infrastructure, which is proving more expensive to adapt for the new missiles than the Air Force and Sentinel prime Northrop Gruman had acknowledged. The service nevertheless declared it would continue with the program.
Asked last week on Capitol Hill about Sentinel’s overruns and the delay the Air Force now forecasts in deploying the first of those missiles, Fischer told the Monitor “it’s a program that we need and that we’re going to continue to move forward on and we’ll take the review seriously, but the main objective is to get the Sentinels deployed… with no gap.”
Despite the Air Force disclosing in January that the Sentinel program was facing a Nunn-McCurdy breach for projected-cost overruns, Northrop said last week in its most recent earnings report that the company “made no significant changes” to the program’s estimated profitability.
