The Pentagon has raised to $95.8 billion the estimated cost of fielding a new fleet of land-based nuclear missiles to replace the Minuteman 3 arsenal that has operated continuously for 50 years, officials said Monday.
The estimate is up about $10 billion from four years ago.
The weapons, known as intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, are intended as part of a near-total replacement of the American nuclear force over the next few decades at a total cost of more than $1.2 trillion.
Some, including former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, argue that U.S. national security can be ensured without ICBMs, but the Pentagon says they are vital to deterring war. The Trump administration affirmed its commitment to fielding a new generation of ICBMs in a 2018 review of nuclear policy.
Read more at AP.
{Matzav.com}
They most definitely have needed to make these new bigger missiles for quite a while. The Minutemen 3 is reported to be a very excellent high-quality well built rocket; however, it is relatively a “small” rocket, that can carry just three nuclear bombs. Already way back in the 1970’s, the Communist Russians had developed a huge monster rocket called the SS-18 that could easily carry TEN nuclear bombs. To match that, the U.S. had plans for a similar ten-bomb-carrying rocket called the MX, but its development was hindered by heavy political controversy. When Ronald Reagan became President in 1981, he strongly insisted on making the MX, and a few of them were actually put into the U.S. arsenal then. Do they still have any of them???
Recently, the Communist Chinese have developed a new ten-bomb-carrying rocket. With the growing tensions and severely dangerous threats from Communist China, it is especially gravely urgent for the U.S. to immediately make sure that is has all the appropriate weapons that are needed to match and even overpower the Communist Chinese enemy and any other enemy.