The US is going to be test-firing an intercontinental ballistic missile across the Pacific Ocean this week, but not because of President Donald Trump’s confusing new nuclear testing plans.
The unarmed Minuteman III ICBM test is a routine way for the US Air Force to verify the missile is ready and accurate, especially as the service continues to rely on the 50-year-old system — as its replacement is delayed and over budget.
US Air Force Global Strike Command said the missile would launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California between 11:01 pm Tuesday and 5:01 am Pacific time Wednesday. The last test of Minuteman III was in May. The missile traveled over 4,200 miles to a target in the Marshall Islands.
Minuteman III tests like these are scheduled years in advance. But the Air Force currently only has them planned out to 2030, according to the US Government Accountability Office, and is still working on a post-2030 operational test launch plan.
Part of the challenge for scheduling future testing is the timeline for sustaining Minuteman III missiles and developing and fielding their replacements, the Sentinel ICBM.
US Space Force photo by Senior Airman Kadielle Shaw
Sentinel was supposed to replace all 450 Minuteman IIIs starting later this decade at an estimated cost of $78 billion. That timeline has now been pushed back to sometime in the 2030s — and the cost has ballooned to over $140 billion. The Pentagon has attributed this to an unrealistic delivery schedule, engineering and system design problems, an atrophied industrial base, and organizational issues within the Air Force, per the GAO.
In the meantime, the Air Force will have to maintain its Minuteman III stockpile potentially into the 2050s. ICBMs are the land-based element of the US nuclear triad, which also includes submarine-launched ballistic missiles and nuclear bombs carried by aircraft like the B-2 bomber.
This upcoming Minuteman III launch will take place amid confusing statements from Trump regarding the restarting of US nuclear testing.
In the days after the president announced new plans to immediately begin the process of testing nuclear weapons, nuclear experts were confused whether that meant explosive testing — something that the US last did in the 1990s — or the testing of weapons, like Minuteman III, capable of carrying nuclear weapons, which the US Department of Defense already does.
Trump has said that he intends to “test nuclear weapons like other countries do,” telling Norah O’Donnell during an interview for CBS News’ 60 Minutes on Sunday that “Russia’s testing, and China’s testing, but they don’t talk about it.”
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The president’s answer was a bit unclear during the interview, but it indicated plans to detonate a nuclear weapon. However, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who oversees the agency responsible for nuclear testing, shared with Fox News on Sunday that he thinks “the tests we’re talking about right now are system tests.”
US Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Michael A. Richmond
“These are not nuclear explosions,” he said. “These are what we call non-critical explosions.”
So the details of the administration’s plan remain murky, much like the definitions for what is considered a nuclear test.
Though some observers suspect that Russia and China have violated the “zero-yield” standard in weapons testing, with suspicions exacerbated by notable work at the Lop Nur and Novaya Zemlya nuclear sites in China and Russia, the only known and publicly acknowledged explosive nuclear testing in decades has been done at North Korea’s Punggye-ri test site.
Both CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, have said Trump’s claims on Russia and China secretly testing nuclear weapons are correct, with both posting on social media on Monday that Moscow and Beijing are conducting super-critical tests in excess of the “zero-yield” standard.
Vice Adm. Richard Correll, Trump’s nominee to lead US Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last Thursday that “neither China nor Russia has conducted a nuclear explosive test.” On Trump’s plans, he said he thought Trump might be talking about delivery system tests but noted he had no direct insight.
Correll did say, though, that he was confident in the readiness and capability of the US nuclear arsenal based on the current testing procedures, which include simulations and subcritical experiments.
