Assessing the Environmental Risk of
the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent
Nebraskans for Peace recently submitted the following statement to the Air Force Ground Based Strategic Deterrent Test Program: Environmental Assessment/Overseas Environmental Assessment in response to their request for public comment about the move to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
There’s a grim irony in the timing of this “Environmental Assessment” for the “Ground Based Strategic Deterrent” that cuts to the core of the entire proposed nuclear arsenal ‘modernization’ program. At the very moment our planetary ecosystem is being uncontrollably assailed by a devastating global pandemic and an escalating climate crisis, the U.S. Government (to the tune of $1 Trillion) is actively embarked on heightening the human-made peril of nuclear annihilation.
Given their respective biological and geophysical natures, the coronavirus and the climate crisis may never be fully subject to human management and control. The threat of nuclear holocaust, however, is a problem strictly of our own making. It’s a peril we are inflicting on ourselves—and on the natural world that supports us. In terms of sheer harm to the environment, what more instantaneous cataclysm (short of an asteroid strike) can be imagined than that of nuclear war? Any purported ‘environmental’ assessment of the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent must, accordingly, take into account the program’s intended purpose and projected effects.
While the very existence of nuclear weapons poses an existential threat to life on earth, land-based ICBMs constitute the most vulnerable leg of the U.S.’s deterrent triad.
As fixed-point targets easily identifiable from Google Maps, ICBM silos are ‘sitting ducks’, lacking the deception provided by mobile sea- and air-based systems. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, the built-in vulnerability of land-based missile deployment was openly acknowledged. Sometime later, however, that vulnerability got inverted by nuclear planners into a hideous ‘strategic advantage’, who reasoned that enemies would need to ‘waste’ precious warheads from their limited WMD arsenals to destroy these solitary silos (deployed in remote, sparsely populated areas) before these weapons could be launched in retaliation. Essentially, in this contest of missile attrition, land-based ICBM targets would be intended to ‘draw fire’—depleting the enemy’s stockpile while enhancing the strategic dominance of the U.S.’s sea- and air-based legs.
Apart from treating the Nebraska Panhandle (and the rest of the Warren Air Force Base area) as militarily ‘expendable’, such a war-fighting strategy—should a nuclear conflict erupt—does incalculable damage environmentally. Our entire region of the country would become an uninhabitable wasteland. But the ‘fallout’ would reach far beyond the U.S. heartland. A nuclear exchange of even modest scale would endanger the security and resiliency of the global ecosystem. As University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers have shown (“Nuclear Weapons in a Changing Climate: Probability, Increasing Risks, and Perception”, Adam Liska, et al., Environment Magazine, 2017, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=bseliska), even a limited nuclear strike could precipitate a worldwide “nuclear autumn”: throwing up such a cloud of dust, smoke and debris that the sun would be dimmed and global temperatures and precipitation levels would drop, leading to global crop failure and the collapse of our food system.
Instead of spending $100-200 billion on an imprudent and precarious modernization of the land-based leg of the nuclear triad, endangering the planet’s ecosystem (and our global food production and distribution system), and compromising our national security (by flouting the United Nations just-enacted Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons), the U.S. should be earnestly pursuing negotiations with the other nuclear states to abolish these Weapons of Mass Destruction. In the interest of national, economic and environmental security, the Department of Defense should decommission—rather than ‘modernize’—the land-based ICBM leg of the nuclear triad.
Nebraska is already a nuclear ‘bullseye’ as the headquarters of U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue. Continuing to weaponize the state’s Panhandle only further imperils the people and environment of Nebraska…
And, as we’re now learning, the very Earth itself.
There’s a grim irony in the timing of this “Environmental Assessment” for the “Ground Based Strategic Deterrent” that cuts to the core of the entire proposed nuclear arsenal ‘modernization’ program. At the very moment our planetary ecosystem is being uncontrollably assailed by a devastating global pandemic and an escalating climate crisis, the U.S. Government (to the tune of $1 Trillion) is actively embarked on heightening the human-made peril of nuclear annihilation.
Given their respective biological and geophysical natures, the coronavirus and the climate crisis may never be fully subject to human management and control. The threat of nuclear holocaust, however, is a problem strictly of our own making. It’s a peril we are inflicting on ourselves—and on the natural world that supports us. In terms of sheer harm to the environment, what more instantaneous cataclysm (short of an asteroid strike) can be imagined than that of nuclear war? Any purported ‘environmental’ assessment of the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent must, accordingly, take into account the program’s intended purpose and projected effects.
While the very existence of nuclear weapons poses an existential threat to life on earth, land-based ICBMs constitute the most vulnerable leg of the U.S.’s deterrent triad.
As fixed-point targets easily identifiable from Google Maps, ICBM silos are ‘sitting ducks’, lacking the deception provided by mobile sea- and air-based systems. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, the built-in vulnerability of land-based missile deployment was openly acknowledged. Sometime later, however, that vulnerability got inverted by nuclear planners into a hideous ‘strategic advantage’, who reasoned that enemies would need to ‘waste’ precious warheads from their limited WMD arsenals to destroy these solitary silos (deployed in remote, sparsely populated areas) before these weapons could be launched in retaliation. Essentially, in this contest of missile attrition, land-based ICBM targets would be intended to ‘draw fire’—depleting the enemy’s stockpile while enhancing the strategic dominance of the U.S.’s sea- and air-based legs.
Apart from treating the Nebraska Panhandle (and the rest of the Warren Air Force Base area) as militarily ‘expendable’, such a war-fighting strategy—should a nuclear conflict erupt—does incalculable damage environmentally. Our entire region of the country would become an uninhabitable wasteland. But the ‘fallout’ would reach far beyond the U.S. heartland. A nuclear exchange of even modest scale would endanger the security and resiliency of the global ecosystem. As University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers have shown (“Nuclear Weapons in a Changing Climate: Probability, Increasing Risks, and Perception”, Adam Liska, et al., Environment Magazine, 2017, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=bseliska), even a limited nuclear strike could precipitate a worldwide “nuclear autumn”: throwing up such a cloud of dust, smoke and debris that the sun would be dimmed and global temperatures and precipitation levels would drop, leading to global crop failure and the collapse of our food system.
Instead of spending $100-200 billion on an imprudent and precarious modernization of the land-based leg of the nuclear triad, endangering the planet’s ecosystem (and our global food production and distribution system), and compromising our national security (by flouting the United Nations just-enacted Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons), the U.S. should be earnestly pursuing negotiations with the other nuclear states to abolish these Weapons of Mass Destruction. In the interest of national, economic and environmental security, the Department of Defense should decommission—rather than ‘modernize’—the land-based ICBM leg of the nuclear triad.
Nebraska is already a nuclear ‘bullseye’ as the headquarters of U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue. Continuing to weaponize the state’s Panhandle only further imperils the people and environment of Nebraska…
And, as we’re now learning, the very Earth itself.
