Minuteman missile silo9/3/2023 ![]() It’s a historic and complex program with national security interest, and some are suspecting it’s the reason a Chinese surveillance balloon was seen floating above the state this week. Possibly, the Air Force was concerned that grizzly bears would fall into them, or they would become little brown bat havens.BILLINGS- Montana’s 341 st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls is responsible for 150 launch facilities across Montana. ![]() Tunneling was also anticipated to have “extreme or insurmountable environmental consequences,” though what those consequences could be was left unsaid. The Air Force also abandoned tunnel basing for being prohibitively expensive: the service would need to dig hundreds of miles of shallow tunnels, while ensuring they are structurally sound, and set up new infrastructure to maintain both the rail network and the missiles. The missiles are more vulnerable, but arguably safer from attack, forcing an enemy to expend vast numbers of nukes in an attempt to destroy the tunnel system. Underground tunnel systems work by inducing “location uncertainty”: instead of making it harder to destroy a fixed target, like a land silo, it makes it hard to know where the true target, the missile, is at any point in time. Office of Technology Assessment via The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists government studied underground basing as a deployment scheme for the then-new MX, or Peacekeeper, missile system. Once the order is given to launch, the capsule is released, rushing to the surface, whereupon the missile rocket motor ignites and the Sentinel missile crawls skyward. In this scenario, the Sentinel missile is placed in a waterproof capsule that is anchored to the bottom of a deep lake. One such scheme was the use of “deep lake” tethered basing. The environmental impact study makes clear that the Air Force considered new basing schemes for the LGM-35A Sentinel. What If We Blew Up All the World’s Nukes at Once?. ![]()
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