The U.S. is in the process of updating hundreds of nuclear missiles, and Wyoming may be the “guinea pig.”
“There's going to be a lot of lessons learned from this process that are, then in theory, going to be transferred down to Montana and then to North Dakota,” said Matt Korda, associate director of the Nuclear Information Project with the nonprofit Federation of American Scientists.
He said F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, which oversees missiles, will be the first to see changes, including more communication towers and land easements.
But the work is years behind schedule.
Cold War-era Minuteman III missiles in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota and Wyoming were supposed to be replaced with new Sentinel missiles and operational by 2029. Now that may not happen until 2033.
“Whenever a country says we're going to build a new nuclear related system by a certain date, you can probably add a few more years onto that,” Korda said during a Q&A session hosted by WyoFile.
He added that the U.S. government is millions of dollars over budget, and is now extending the life of the old missiles, since the new ones aren’t ready.
“All of these delays and these cost overruns are ultimately going to trickle down to people who live in these states and, really, to Americans who pay taxes,” Korda said.
Korda sat down with Wyoming Public Radio News Director Kamila Kudelska to talk more about the Sentinel project's potential impacts on Wyoming.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Kamila Kudelska: I'm eager to pick your brain about nuclear weapons in Wyoming, but first, let's get some context. You are one of the authors of the Nuclear Notebook, which puts together estimates of nuclear forces and trends around the globe. What's the big picture from this year so far?
Matt Korda: All nuclear armed countries, all nine countries with nuclear weapons, are currently modernizing their nuclear arsenals. What do I mean by modernizing? I mean that either they are qualitatively improving the types of weapons that they have, or they're quantitatively increasing the number of nuclear weapons in their stockpile.
KK: Wyoming has played a role in the nation's nuclear weapons program almost since the beginning. Can you give us some context of what the role of the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne has?
MK: Wyoming is really at the heart of the United States’ land-based nuclear missile component of the triad. The U.S. refers to its nuclear weapons as composing part of this triad of land, air and sea.
Wyoming plays a really big role in the land-based part of that program because there are 150 silos that are deployed around the F.E. Warren Air Force Base.
KK: And what is a silo?
MK: It's a big hole in the ground where missiles, which carry nuclear weapons, are placed into. These are something that the U.S. has had in its arsenal for the past 50, 60 years, and this modernization program that the U.S. is embarking on is going to have them for the next 50, 60 years, as well.
KK: The United States modernization effort, as I understand, it's from the new Sentinel Nuclear Missile Program. Wyoming, along with Montana, North Dakota, Utah and Arizona will get new intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMS, or provide support. Where is the project currently?
MK: This program has been in progress now for the past maybe 15 years or so, and this is kind of just the nature of nuclear weapons programs. They take a really long time to build.
Where we're at right now with the Sentinel is really challenging. It sort of seems like every month we get this new update as to how the missile program is either behind schedule or over budget, or there's some other sort of thing that's happening, whether it's relating to mismanagement of the program, poor contractor performance, that sort of thing. This has created a lot of problems.
The initial plan for this program was to reuse a lot of the old silo infrastructure. There's already been a ton of construction that was done during the ‘70s to build all of these different silos and place them into these various states. The hope was to save as much money as possible and reuse a lot of that infrastructure, and then just put a new missile into the same silo.
What the Air Force is now finding is that this is basically impossible. This program was sort of accelerated in many ways, but before the analysis was fully baked. And so what's happened now is acquisition costs of the program have risen to 81% over the baseline. The original acquisition costs were supposed to be somewhere in the realm of about $77 billion in 2020.
Now we're at about $140 [billion], and what's happened is that that has triggered a breach of what's called the Nunn-McCurdy Act, which is this act in Congress that says you're not supposed to go 25% over budget. If you do go 25% over budget, then the program basically has to be scrutinized really heavily by the Department of Defense.
There's a lot of work that has to be done to change things. We're seeing that there's gonna be a lot more construction than originally planned, because these various pieces of the silo that they thought they could reuse, they can't reuse anymore. What this means is that some of these costs are going to trickle down to taxpayers.
In addition, there are challenges with landowners, because the plan was originally that the Air Force was going to just use the same kind of cabling that already exists underground for the new silos. Now that that's not possible, they have to go and dig new holes, new passageways for the cabling.
This is going to require more land that gets leased to the Air Force by local farmers and ranchers, and other folks who own that land. The Air Force is preparing to go around to these different folks who own this land and basically offer to buy it. It's likely going to be that the landowners probably have no choice but to sell to the Air Force because this is the land that the Air Force needs for this missile program, and historically that's how it's worked.
KK: What's going to come to Wyoming as a result of this project?
MK: In terms of the construction, there's gonna be a lot of on-base construction at F.E. Warren. They're producing a lot of buildings and things like that, new facilities that are meant to help test out the new system, that sort of thing.
There's gonna be a lot of construction off-base as well. I mentioned that there's going to be these new easements that are required for the new cabling. That means that folks are going to have to sell their land to the Air Force to allow the Air Force to come in and add new fiber optic cabling underground, that sort of thing.
In addition, we're going to see a lot of these new construction camps that pop up in the area. There's a bunch of small ones that are coming and there's going to be one big one coming to Kimball, Nebraska, which is quite close by. That new workforce hub is going to have approximately 2,500 to 3,000 people that are going to be added into the community.
What's really interesting is that the Air Force completed what's called an environmental impact statement (EIS). They talk about how the program is going to impact the local ground squirrel population and all these things.
But what they also do is they talk about how it's going to impact local communities. They have all these statistics on how adding this kind of influx of folks into the area is going to impact things like housing costs, rental costs, crime rates, noise, things like that, where it kind of goes down the list. The statement itself notes that there's likely to be adverse effects to things like socioeconomics because folks are going to come into the community, and public schools will be even more in demand. So there's things like that, that do tend to get affected when you have these major construction projects.
KK: Do we know the timeline?
MK: The plans are for about three to five years. It's already kind of starting.
KK: You mentioned the construction site in Kimball, which is about 20 miles from the Wyoming border and about 40 miles from Cheyenne. And that could cause these local impacts, like housing and crime issues, potentially. How much say will the state or local communities have?
MK: In some ways not a ton.
The way it’s [this project is] sort of described is that it's too big to fail. A lot of money has already been sunk into it. It's really challenging to push back against that. It's challenging to even ask questions, I think, that are very reasonable: Why are we so over budget? Why are we so behind schedule? Why are landowners going to have to have these impacts to them that they didn't anticipate? Those type of questions I think are really valid and it's tough to even get concrete answers about those things.
What's historically happened is that when the Air Force was figuring out where to base their missiles back in the ‘60s, local landowners did not really have a ton of say in where those missiles would be placed. It did create quite a bit of tension between local landowners, who in many ways are actually quite supportive of the military and quite supportive of the nuclear complex, but did resent the fact that there was this faceless bureaucracy that would come down and say, ‘We're putting a missile next to your house. It's going to devalue your land, and there really isn't that much you can do about it.’
There are ways right now in which local residents can engage with the Air Force and they've set up a hotline and there were these public town halls and things like that for folks to go and ask their questions. These are all public record, and so we can see the types of concerns that people have had.
The big question is, are those concerns going to be taken into account? At least historically, they really weren't. There's one anecdotal instance in which the Air Force in the ‘60s sited a missile silo within spitting distance of someone's house. And then when that family complained, the Air Force said, ‘Okay, then move. We're not moving our missile. You have to move instead.’
I would hope that maybe there's some lessons learned from that this time around, but it's hard to know exactly how the process will go.
What we do know is that they've already begun to engage with local landowners. A letter was sent out from the Air Force to folks in the area surrounding F.E. Warren as recently as May of this year. It basically said, ‘Hey, we are about to start this process for the conversion of these silos. This is going to involve us acquiring more easements, and so we will be in touch shortly about how to evaluate your land and we will try and offer you fair market rate,’ and that sort of thing.
KK: You mentioned that there has been some public meetings and some concerns were raised. Do you know what those concerns were?
MK: You can bundle them into a few different categories.
Some are just folks writing in and saying, ‘I live nearby and I just wanna stay informed.’
You'll have some folks who are saying, ‘I'd really prefer that you don't build on my land. There's some much better land over there – my neighbor's land, you can build over there.’
Instead, there are folks who are writing in, who have legitimate questions and concerns about the ecology in the area. They're saying, ‘There are endangered plants and animals and trees and things like that. Is the construction going to disrupt those ecosystems?’ The Air Force has stated through their environmental impact statement that it will disrupt some of those endangered species, and so people have a lot of fair questions about that.
Then there's other people who are writing in who are saying, ‘I support this project, I wanna learn more about it. How can I help?’
It's actually a really wide range of things.
KK: What do you see as the benefits and downsides of this program?
MK: In terms of the benefits of this program, it fits what the U.S. deterrent strategy is right now. When you think about what nuclear weapons are for, you can really fall into a couple of different camps here.
One is just that the mere presence of nuclear weapons is enough to make your adversaries think twice about wanting to launch at you. So in that sense, if you only have a couple of hundred nuclear weapons, that's probably enough.
The U.S. has historically taken a really different approach to nuclear weapons. Their idea has been more about damage limitation. In the event of a nuclear crisis, the U.S. has all of these ICBMs, these intercontinental ballistic missiles that are deployed across these states to be able to hit another country with so much firepower that it will limit the damage coming back to the United States.
So it really sort of comes down to how you think about what nuclear weapons are for, as to whether or not this program is a good idea or whether it's an unnecessary public expense.
In terms of the downsides of the program, I can see a few. One is clearly the additional construction and cost is absolutely going to affect local folks, local community members, ranchers, farmers, landowners, that sort of thing. And the costs will be borne by Americans all across the country.
Another thing is that by having ICBMs in these areas, it makes you a target. The point of these ICBMs is they're there to launch in a crisis and have this damage limitation mission, but they're also there to be shot at with nuclear weapons. So if you are someone who lives in the state of Wyoming, whether you like it or not, you are a target and you are essentially the first target for a nuclear attack.
That, I think, sort of puts your relationship with, maybe, the military and with the United States government and thinking about what role you have – it raises significant questions as to whether or not that's the type of role that you want to have in relation to your government.
I think what's particularly interesting is that the ICBM force, this land-based missile force, is the only part of the nuclear triad that exists among the American population. The submarines, these are for the most part relatively isolated. There's two ports. The bomber bases, these are their own enclosed things.
[But] the silos, you can walk up to them. They're on people's land. That's amazing. They are dotted around the country. People live among them. I think that's something that people deserve to really think quite critically about and be empowered with the information to assess this for themselves, as to whether or not that's something that they want.
