Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

Or even decoy missiles. The construction of the system would even allow them to add an additional layer of deception to the MX deployment scheme. During construction of the shelters, the plan called for the insertion of a mock missile in each one. Upon completion of the shelter, a transporter would bring over an MX and exchange it for the mock missile… or maybe not. As a result, even if there were Soviet spies nearby, “no observer can tell whether a missile has been moved or not. Most of the time, nothing has happened.”

The survivability of the system depends on keeping missile location uncertain. But if you pull that off, the Soviets would be in a tough position. This was the solution.

AND THEN WHAT?

And then the whole thing turned out to be for naught. The MX/MPS concept would cost $37 billion, and require a ridiculous amount of land for the two hundred missiles and four thousand-plus hardened silos (and even when that number was later significantly reduced, the land usage problem remained). When all was said and done, the Reagan administration decided to propose a… compromise? Shove the Peacekeepers inside of already existing Minuteman III silos. Congress loved the idea. It was cheap, easy, and they didn’t have to think about it all that much.

If this was in fact a viable solution to the problem, we could have avoided all this nonsense. But Congress (and Reagan) didn’t seem to care. Just get the Peacekeepers in the damn ground.

The first four Peacekeepers were delivered to the Strategic Air Command in late 1986. By January 1988, twenty missiles were operational inside converted Minuteman silos, and by the end of that year all fifty budgeted Peacekeepers had been deployed.

Just in time for the Cold War to end.

Decreased tensions between East and West virtually eliminated the need for a weapon system like the MX, and bilateral and international arms control agreements made it official. The Peacekeeper would be gradually retired. In 2003, SAC pulled seventeen Peacemakers offline, then nineteen more in 2004. The final missiles were removed from alert status and retired in 2005.

Yet although the tensions between East and West have lessened significantly since the time of the Peacekeeper’s heyday in the 1980s, the American nuclear arsenal still retains extraordinary destructive power. The nuclear triad remains intact, albeit in a far smaller form than during the height of the Cold War. The United States currently deploys four hundred single-warhead Minutemen III ICBMs in hardened silos scattered across several western and northwestern states. The sea leg of the triad is represented by fourteen Ohio -class ballistic missile submarines, each of them possessing more killing power than all but a handful of nations on Earth. Finally, the air contingent is made up of forty-six B-52H bombers and twenty B-2A stealth bombers, as well as a couple of F-15 fighter aircraft. The B-52s are ancient (every single airframe is older than the pilots who fly them), but they can still pack a punch, particularly when paired with air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs), whose long range allows the slow, antiquated bombers to stay outside the range of enemy air defenses.

Within the next ten to twenty years, each of the three legs of the nuclear triad will go through a major upgrade. The Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) program will begin its effort to replace the Minuteman III starting at the end of the 2020s. The B-21 Raider, a stealthier and more capable bomber than the B-2A, is already in development and should begin to replace its predecessor by the mid-2020s. And while there is no concrete timeline for the replacement of the Ohio -class submarines by their successor, the Columbia class, once that happens the United States will have a legitimate nuclear deterrent that will remain viable for decades to come.

As far as these things go, Camp Century was a pretty good cover. It was nominally designed as an underground military research station, located about 150 miles east of the American air base at Thule, Greenland. The stated purpose of Camp Century was to improve the American defense capability in the Arctic—to develop better survival and transportation techniques, and to obtain more useful knowledge about the harsh climate and the physical properties of the region. In essence, we covered up for a super-secret operation using a kinda-secret one.

The United States had been operating in the area since 1951, when the Thule air base and radar station first opened (it was a key cog in the Distant Early Warning—DEW—Line of radar installations). In 1958, the U.S. Army’s Cold Regions Research Engineering Laboratories (CRREL) sent more than two hundred men (the facility was a strictly male society) to be the first team to deploy to Century. Don’t let the “Camp” in Camp Century fool you. This wasn’t just a bunch of tents in the tundra. This was as close to a modern town as you could get in the middle of nowhere. The thirty-two buildings that comprised Camp Century included power stations, workshops, offices, a radio station, garages, waste management facilities, living quarters, a modern hospital (with an X-ray machine and operating room), a fitness center (unlikely anyone would be jogging outside), a hobby shop, barbershop, bathing facilities, canteens, storerooms, a movie theater, a library, and of course—to make everyone feel welcome—a chapel and a bar. All built partially or completely underground.

Which is good, because you wouldn’t want to spend too much time outside. This is an inhospitable environment to the extreme. Century was located only eight hundred miles from the North Pole. The average temperature was just under minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (for the Americans—minus 24 degrees centigrade for, well, everyone else). The average annual snow accumulation was four feet, and it wasn’t uncommon to see temperatures plunge into the minus 50-, 60-, or even 70-degree range when the wind, which could gust to over 125 mph, really got kicking. This meant that even simple tasks could be incredibly difficult, like basic resupply of the facility. Everything had to be brought in. Sure, you could fly in supplies fairly quickly from Thule, but that’s only if the weather cooperated—and that was rare.

The solution was to use what were known as “Swings.” These weren’t quite as fun as they sound, but they were pretty cool nonetheless. Swings were humongous wagons and sledges dragged over from Thule by even more ginormous tractors. The wheels of the wagon were more than twice as tall as an adult man. Swings were ridiculously slow—you could stroll leisurely beside them and keep up, even with periodic coffee breaks—but they could go anywhere and everywhere. Nothing the Arctic weather could throw at them could stop them. (I would say nothing could “slow them down,” but it’s really the same thing in this case.)

Camp Century was powered by the world’s first portable nuclear reactor, the PM-2A (“A” for “Arctic”). Designed as part of the U.S. Army Nuclear Power Program (ANPP), the Camp Century reactor was built by the American Locomotive Company and created to study the capability of generating electrical and space-heating energy at remote, relatively inaccessible sites. The Army was worried it might cost too much to deliver oil or coal to the facility, and also raised the possibility that some of their distant but vital bases might be cut off altogether in a war. The reactor could be a test model for providing constant power, regardless of geopolitical situation. The PM-2A at Camp Century would produce 1.5 megawatts of electricity each year and a huge amount of heat energy. According to scientists, it would take as many as 850,000 gallons of oil per year to run a diesel generator that would turn out as much power and heat.