A Minuteman III missile inside the silo known as Foxtrot 2 in Montana was on alert for nearly half a century, ready to fire a more than 300-kiloton hydrogen bomb to an adversary anywhere in the world in about 30 minutes.
That mission ended in February, when an Air Force crew ventured out onto the frozen Great Plains with a special crane and pulled it out of the hole. It was headed for sunny California.
The aging missile had been selected for a test fire, to prove it still worked and could hit a bull’s-eye — within several hundred feet, anyway — on a target in the South Pacific, 4,200 miles away.
About four times every year, the Air Force goes through the exercise of pulling an ICBM out of a silo, removing its nuclear warhead and sending it to Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc for a test launch.
The tests, which cost $18 million each, not only give the Air Force crucial data on the function of its aging missiles, but send a clear international signal, complete with high-definition photography, of America’s continued ability to launch a nuclear strike.
Upgrading U.S. nuclear missiles, as Russia and China modernize, would cost $85 billion. Is it time to quit the ICBM race?
The missile selected for testing had been chosen randomly in an improbable but apparently long-standing Air Force tradition: A map of missile sites was put on a wall and an officer was selected to throw a dart at it. The dart hit Foxtrot 2’s location, about 22 miles northeast of tiny Augusta, Mont., sometimes called the “last original cow town in the West.”
“We can’t think of a more random method than that,” said Maj. Gen. Fred Stoss, operations commander for the Global Strike Command. Stoss recalled that when it was his turn to select a missile, it took him a couple throws to even hit the list — a fact not to be taken as predictive of the Air Force’s actual targeting capabilities in the event of nuclear war.
The missile was transported by truck to Vandenberg, where the Air Force has been testing its ICBMs for more than half a century.
More:
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-na-nuclear-missile-test-20170612-story.html
