(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in RealClearDefense. Without ICBMs: A Prescription for Nuclear War)

Mr. William Hartung of the Quincy Institute wants to kill the ICBM leg of the Triad, or the Sentinel missile system and he cites a new Stimpson Center report calling for just such an outcome.

However, without the Sentinel missile, the current Minuteman III will eventually go out of business over the next decade and one-half. That means no ICBMs in the near future.

Now Hartung wants to do all of this unilaterally, even in the face of a breathtaking nuclear build up by China and a Russia that can now breakout of the New START treaty limits by multiple thousands of additional nuclear warheads.

Hartung says more nuclear weapons are bad but seems oblivious to any possible effect of a combined Russia-China force of over 5000 long-range strategic nuclear warheads would have on the strategic balance around 2035.

Apparently if the United States builds more warheads– which Hartung says we are now doing by modernizing our Triad– that is a bad thing. But if Russia and China do so its apparently without consequence for the United States. And if the US deliberately cuts considerably below even the projected China level, as killing Sentinel could very well do, apparently nothing in the strategic balance could go wrong.

The mistakes and misunderstandings Hartung makes are legion. Here is the top dozen:

1. The cost of modernization of our nuclear deterrent is not $1.7 trillion but actually $400 billion over the next three decades according to the Union of Concerned Scientists; the majority of the cost is for the current legacy force sustained for the same three decades;
2. The Sentinel is not part of a secret plot to build more weapons—the Triad system as well as the B21 bomber and its LRSO, as well as the Columbia SSBN and its compliment of D-5 missiles all fit within the warhead ceilings allowed by the 2010 New START treaty of 1550 countable warheads;
3. There are probably not any joint arms control limits as Russia no longer allows inspections as required;
4. Without Sentinel or MMIII, and with the remaining current force structure, the US would only be able to deploy a maximum of 1536 strategic missile warheads through 2042; even with roughly 50%-67% deployed at sea at any one time, the US might have only 20% of the total strategic force of China-Russia deployed strategic warheads by early next decade; a condition we have never had to face in the 80 years of the nuclear age;
5. Unmentioned by Hartung is that the US has only one hundred theater nuclear weapons deployed in Europe, zero in the Middle East and zero in the Pacific, and thus is at least at a 20 to 1 and probably 40 to 1 disadvantage re Russia’s theater force;
6. Hartung seems also oblivious to Russia’s current major coercive nuclear capability which the elimination of the Sentinel would worsen;
7. The cost of replacing the on-alert ICBM warheads to just maintain New START warhead levels would be around $160 billion if done through submarines and SLBMs, which would actually cost more than the current modernization effort;
8. If the MMIII ICBMs were also eliminated, the US would have all of about one dozen nuclear assets, the elimination of which would disarm the United States—three bomber bases, two submarine bases and some 4-8 submarines at sea at any one time is not a robust force;
9. Reports are that China has developed new technology that could make the oceans transparent and make a submarine only deterrent for the United States totally susceptible to a one-technology-failure undermining of its entire nuclear deterrent;
10. What Hartung proposes would eliminate all leverage the United States needs to successfully seek some kind of nuclear arms control into the future;
11. Absent a new theater nuclear capability such as the SLBM-N, which Hartung disparages, the US and its allies in Europe and Asia become total victims of Putin and Xi and their common escalate to win use of nuclear weapons for purposes of extortion and coercion; and
12. According to Senator Hoeven, the total cost of the new elements of the Triad—B21, the D-5, the Sentinel, the LRSO, and Columbia class SSBN— is $17.4 billion, which comes to one-third of all annual nuclear spending, 1.8% of the defense budget proposed by the Senate majority, 1% of discretionary spending, and .026% of the Federal budget.

By comparison, the Federal government is victim of annual fraud that GAO says are15 fold these modernization costs. The newly calculated projected cost of meeting the Paris Treaty global climate objectives has climbed to $257 trillion through 2050 or $10.3 trillion a year which stands at 60 times the annual cost of the modernization costs of the B21, LRSO, the Columbia, the D-5 missile, and the Sentinel ICBM.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.