U.S. Might Retain Multiple Warheads on 25 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles

By Elaine M. Grossman
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — New details have emerged about the future composition of the U.S. land-based, nuclear missile force following a number of Bush administration policy changes (see GSN, May 25).

A combination of factors — including negotiated force ceilings, unilateral reductions and a growing role for missile defense — is likely to leave the United States with a 2,200-warhead arsenal that includes a small force of multiple-warhead ICBMs.

Along with nuclear weapons on submarines and bomber aircraft, the deployed U.S. arsenal by 2011 is likely to include 25 land-based missiles armed with three warheads apiece.

Another 425 ICBMs would carry single warheads, according to defense officials and independent analysis.

The deployment of even a limited number of multi-warhead ICBMs is causing consternation amongst some nuclear experts, who assert that the weapons are unnecessarily provocative and could stoke tensions with Russia and other nuclear powers.

Until late 2005, the Defense Department was converting all its multiple-warhead ICBMs to become single-tipped, in compliance with the START II arms control treaty.

The 1993 accord banned the United States and Russia from fielding multiple-warhead, or “MIRVed,” land-based strategic missiles.  That provision stemmed from long-standing Washington concerns that the deployment of such powerful weapons could prove destabilizing in a crisis, because they are perhaps most useful in a pre-emptive knockout punch against an adversary’s ICBMs.

While the Bush administration initially endorsed the plan to shift all the Minutemen to a single-warhead configuration, that policy appeared to change following the U.S. decision to build an ambitious missile defense system.

In June 2002 — just one day after the United States withdrew from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty — Russia announced it no longer considered itself bound by START II.  That shift effectively lifted the bilateral constraints on multiple-warhead ICBMs. 

Both the United States and Russia have since moved to retain some of these weapons in their respective arsenals.  Officials from the two nations have cited a need to maintain multiple-warhead missiles as a hedge against actions taken by the other side.

Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, until recently the nation’s top strategic commander, told Congress last year he would keep an unspecified number of multiple-warhead Minuteman 3 ICBMs in the U.S. force.

The Air Force would implement this new approach as it reduced its Minuteman 3 fleet from 500 to 450 missiles, a plan first proposed by the Pentagon’s 1994 Nuclear Posture Review and later embraced by the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review.  Now under way, the initiative would allow 50 missiles to be used in testing as modifications and improvements are developed, Cartwright told the Senate Armed Services panel on strategic forces in March 2006. 

As part of that process, the service would effectively redistribute 50 warheads from the deactivated missiles to those remaining operationally deployed.  The measure would ultimately leave 500 warheads on 450 missiles, he said.

“So there is not a reduction in warheads,” Cartwright told lawmakers last year.  “This is a reduction in the number of launch vehicles.”

The general in August became the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

Under the 2002 Moscow Treaty, the United States and Russia each agreed to cap the number of operationally deployed warheads at 2,200.  However, the accord does not require either side to declare how many of the total warheads are loaded onto missiles or to submit to verification measures (see GSN, Oct. 30).

As recently as April, some senior defense officials anticipated that a number of the remaining missiles in the Minuteman fleet would feature a two-warhead configuration.  However, officials now expect that, within the next four years, each ICBM would carry either one or three warheads.

“In [fiscal] 2011, there will be no systems with two warheads,” Masao Doi, an Air Force Space Command spokesman, said Oct. 24 by e-mail.  “The remaining 450 systems will be configured with one or three warheads.”

Noting that “specific numbers are classified,” Doi would not say how many missiles would carry three warheads. 

However, simple math dictates that the 50 available warheads provide 25 pairs that could be added to 25 of the remaining single-warhead missiles in the ICBM fleet to make 25 three-warhead platforms.

Using new and previously available data, an independent nuclear weapons analyst last week speculated that the three-warhead missiles would reside at either Minot Air Force Base, N.D., or Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont.

The only Minuteman warhead capable of being loaded three per missile is the W-78, according to Hans Kristensen, who directs the Federation of American Scientists Nuclear Information Project.

Rather than sprinkle these 25 multiple-warhead missiles throughout the ICBM fleet — which could introduce undesirable logistical challenges and increased cost — the military would almost certainly assign all the three-warhead missiles to one of its three 50-missile squadrons at Minot or Malmstrom, the Washington-based analyst said.

The other installation housing Minutemen — F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo. — would be unlikely to host any three-warhead ICBMs because its version of the missile carries only W-87 warheads, which can be loaded up to just two per missile, according to Kristensen.

U.S. military leaders appear intent on retaining a small fleet of multiple-warhead Minutemen to counterbalance the multiple-warhead missiles remaining in the Russian nuclear arsenal, he said.

Russia currently has 76 SS-18 ICBMs with up to 10 warheads apiece and 123 SS-19 land-based missiles with up to six warheads each, according to the Russian Nuclear Forces Project, an organization that tracks Moscow’s nuclear complex and strategic arsenal.

Russian military leaders have stated that within the next few years they plan to shift more of the weapons in their Moscow Treaty-capped arsenal onto their multiple-warhead, land-based missile force. Initiatives include extending the MIRVed SS-18’s service life; deploying dozens more SS-19s, thereby adding hundreds more ICBM warheads; and beginning to load multiple warheads onto their newest ICBM, the SS-27 “Topol-M,” according to Kristensen.

In his first year as defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld told an interviewer he had few concerns about seeing the Russians boost their multi-warhead ICBM force.

Notionally, if Moscow either kept single warheads on 20 missiles or loaded five warheads onto just four missiles, “they'd still have 20 warheads and it would make no difference,” Rumsfeld said on PBS’s “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” in August 2001.  “What really counts is not whether or not a country MIRVs.  What really counts is the total number of weapons and is it going to be reduced.”

Not everyone shares that thinking.

“Single [warhead] Minuteman is the right path to reducing nuclear tensions,” one defense expert, said recently on condition of anonymity.  “In a de-MIRVed environment of single [warhead] Minuteman, there is absolutely no pressure to ‘use or lose.’”

The phrase refers to a compulsion a U.S. or Russian leader might feel to launch nuclear missiles from land-based silos early in a crisis rather than await their elimination by an adversary’s pre-emptive attack.  Nuclear arms experts widely believe that multiple-warhead ICBMs compound the risk of an itchy trigger finger on both sides of a conflict because they represent more valuable targets than their single-warhead counterparts.

With a yield of roughly 1 megaton per missile, a Minuteman loaded with three W-78 warheads “would pack quite a punch,” Kristensen said.  Each of the warheads has an explosive yield of 335 kilotons.  By comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945 was estimated at 15 kilotons.

In an Oct. 18 interview with Global Security Newswire, Cartwright conceded that as the United States and Russia continue to reduce their nuclear arsenals, the possibility of a use-or-lose risk might grow because each missile has greater relative value.

However, he said the emerging combination of U.S. nuclear and conventional offenses, missile defenses and a more robust military infrastructure could mitigate any such concerns (see GSN, Oct. 22). 

In other words, a growing U.S. defensive capability to absorb limited nuclear strikes from abroad — and perhaps even retaliate with strategic conventional weapons rather than nuclear missiles — might decrease the risk that a president would launch nuclear weapons early in a crisis.

Still, lingering uncertainty over how the new U.S. offense-defense approach would play out in the dynamic international arena has spawned a hedge strategy, Kristensen said.

Having opted to jettison the Antiballistic Missile Treaty in favor of developing a new defensive system, “we threw out a lot of things we have gained” through the START arms control process, he said.  “Now we see this going in a direction with the Russians that we don’t like,” Kristensen said. 

“The intent had been to move in a direction where it was one missile, one warhead,” Cartwright acknowledged during last month’s interview. 

“But what I testified to [last year] was that I wanted to increase the flexibility [rather] than decrease the flexibility of that force,” the general said.

“And the thought process there,” he continued, “was that if we had no MIRVing, then if we had misjudged the world or the world changed over the next 10 or 15 years and became a more threatening place — or more appropriate for additional nuclear weapons — that option would be retained without having to build or retain unnecessarily more delivery systems than we needed.  And so that’s what this [approach] allowed us to do.”

Cartwright said the U.S. decision was made to retain some multiple-warhead missiles only after the military had begun converting ICBMs to single warheads.

Beginning in late 2005, “we kind of stopped in midstream” for selected missiles that would instead retain multiple warheads into the future, he told GSN.

Meanwhile, “the Air Force continues to de-MIRV [other Minuteman] missiles in the ICBM force to reach specified configurations by October 2011,” said Navy Lt. Denver Applehans, a spokesman for U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, Neb.

In the effort to reduce the operationally deployed ICBM force to a total of 450, “15 missiles have been removed to date and all 50 missiles are scheduled to be removed from their launch facilities by next summer,” according to Doi, the Air Force Space Command spokesman.

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