Kathryn Bigelow’s gripping film A House of Dynamite vividly depicts the contradictions and failings of U.S. nuclear weapons strategy in 2025. In the film, no one knows where a single intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) aimed at Chicago is coming from. No one can shoot it down. Senior civilian bureaucrats and military officers race around in search of an impossible solution. The clock keeps ticking to 19 minutes before impact. The U.S. president, the man with his finger on the button, is torn by conflicting options. Do we retaliate? Against whom? How can we avoid escalating to apocalyptic nuclear war? Ten million people are condemned to die from the detonation of this mystery missile. U.S. nuclear forces are “standing by for fire alert.”
According to classic nuclear strategy, America’s first line of defense revolves around 400 Minuteman III ICBMs buried in silos under 60 feet of concrete and purposely spread out over the upper Midwest to complicate a nuclear adversary’s first-strike calculations and maintain the sacrosanct—yet shaky—deterrence mantra. These 400 missiles each carry one 300-kiloton warhead, 20 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. However, the Minuteman III’s on-call, hair-trigger prowess cannot resolve the strategic conundrum in A House of Dynamite. In the end, ICBM capabilities no longer respond to post–Cold War U.S. strategic priorities.
The National Defense Authorization Act that passed the House includes $34 billion for Defense Nuclear Programs, including the prohibitively expensive next-generation Sentinel ICBMs.
Even Donald Trump recognizes the madness of modernizing strategic nuclear weapons. He observed on January 23 that “tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about,” and on February 13, “We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully, much more productive.” Trump reiterated these beliefs in a high-profile 60 Minutes interview on November 2: “I think we should do something about denuclearization … and I did actually discuss that with both President Putin and President Xi.”
Yet the National Defense Authorization Act that passed the House of Representatives last week includes $34 billion for Defense Nuclear Programs, including full funding to develop the prohibitively expensive next-generation Sentinel ICBMs. This is a mistake. Rather than bolstering U.S. nuclear deterrence, the ICBM deployment has reached the end of its utility.
NUMEROUS STUDIES HAVE POINTED UP the fallacies and risks of relying on silo-based ICBMs to maintain what purports to be nuclear deterrence. The “use it or lose it” conundrum surrounding ICBMs on alert status would put an American president in an impossible quandary, as depicted in A House of Dynamite. The possibility of an accidental launch of a U.S. strategic weapon cannot be discounted. The Pentagon’s obsession with a triangular nuclear crisis (U.S.-Russia-China) assumes that each hypothetical adversary would go to the apocalyptic brink in defense of the other adversary’s strategic interests.
The Minuteman III was first deployed in the 1970s, and the missiles are ostensibly approaching their retirement. In their place, the Air Force has introduced the Sentinel ICBM with a skyrocketing cost of $140.9 billion at last report, almost double its initial price tag of $77.7 billion. That lowball figure emerged from contractor Northrop Grumman winning a 2020 sole-source contract. Boeing, its only challenger, withdrew from the competition, charging that Northrop received “unfair cost, resource and integration advantages.”
Responding to this mammoth cost overrun, Congress imposed a “critical breach” determination under the Nunn-McCurdy statute. This statute requires defense programs with a 37 percent or higher cost overrun to undergo a top-to-bottom restructuring and reassessment, including possible termination and evaluation of more cost-effective alternatives. Most of the Sentinel cost growth has not yet actually occurred, so this is an opportune time to cancel the program.
In a September report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a scathing critique, pointing out that the Air Force ICBM replacement program is “the most complex project the service has undertaken,” yet it has not developed a critical risk management plan “to anticipate, analyze, and solve problems” or “to address the risks associated with maintaining the aging [Minuteman III] system.” According to GAO, these delays will require prolonged operation of Minuteman III, potentially through 2050. Initially, the Air Force had anticipated phasing out Minuteman III in 2036.
Maj. Gen. Stacy Jo Huser, commander of the 20th Air Force, recently acknowledged that Minuteman III ICBM decommissioning will likely not terminate until 2050 and possibly beyond. In her briefing charts, Maj. Gen. Huser cited the imperative to “ensure the MMIII [Minuteman III] can deter aggression and execute nuclear strike on order until 2052.” A successful May 21 test launch of a Minuteman III from a surface facility demonstrated the ICBM’s continued readiness, traveling 4,200 miles to a target in the Pacific.
The 2050 date means that the U.S. will rely on at least some of the 400 silo-based Minuteman III ICBMs for deterrence across the next six presidential elections. Consequently, there exists critical breathing space for the U.S. to negotiate strategic arms reduction agreements that would call a halt to the absurdly expensive and strategically outdated Sentinel program. The current New START treaty between the U.S. and Russia that placed limits on strategic weapons systems, including the Minuteman, has been extended to February 4, 2026, and neither President Trump nor Putin has advocated abrogating it.
There is a precedent for the U.S. eliminating a key element in the ICBM leg of its nuclear triad. The giant Peacekeeper (MX) ICBM, carrying at least 11 re-entry vehicles each, was touted by the Pentagon as essential to U.S. nuclear deterrence. To ensure Peacekeeper survivability in the wake of a Soviet first-strike attack, it was proposed to shuttle the missiles in rail-mobile underground tunnels or in a road-mobile configuration on hardened launchers patrolling a 5,000-square-mile reservation. Sentinel proponents have resurrected the option for the prohibitively expensive and environmentally disastrous road-mobile deployment, but such a Cold War throwback has largely been dismissed. As part of U.S.-Russian START agreements, the last Peacekeeper was deactivated in 2005 in favor of continued reliance on Minuteman.
GAO pointed to “aging facilities, aging infrastructure, and parts obsolescence” as key factors inhibiting Minuteman III overhaul and slowing the Sentinel development calendar. Furthermore, this dual project will require more trained personnel, adding to costs. Air Force officials had also pointed to uncertainties in Minuteman ground electrical subsystems and electronics stretched over 30,000 square miles in five states. The Air Force had assumed that Sentinel could utilize a large share of the original Minuteman launch infrastructure, including silos, but these ground infrastructure costs, not missile development, are largely responsible for the ballooning expenditures of the program.
THE DETERIORATED STATE OF THE LAUNCH FACILITIES was one reason for completely replacing this infrastructure, but health issues among launch control officers have raised serious questions about Air Force complicity in putting its personnel in harm’s way.
Each pair of launch officers is buried in underground command capsules with control over ten nearby ICBM silos. They work 24-hour shifts (often extended to 48 hours) and constantly monitor the readiness of their missiles. When ordered, they must agree to turn the launch keys and initiate nuclear Armageddon.
The only casualties among Minuteman crews have resulted from environmental contamination. Over 800 Air Force personnel have independently reported cases of cancer and other serious illnesses due to extended exposure to toxic chemicals while serving at three Minuteman ICBM bases since 2023. These claims have been backed up by an April 2025 statistical analysis undertaken by University of North Carolina specialists, one of whom served as an ICBM launch officer. The results demonstrate a statistically significant increase in non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnoses among personnel.
To date, the Air Force has refused to acknowledge any basis for these findings, while engaged in its own protracted investigation. The controversy raises questions about the ability of the Air Force to recruit qualified junior officers to fulfill such high-pressure, environmentally suspect missions.
The Air Force hierarchy is counting on artificial intelligence to play a growing role in processing intelligence data and enhancing communication systems within nuclear command, control, and communications networks. Gen. Thomas A. Bussiere, then commander of Air Force Global Strike Command with jurisdiction over ICBM deployment, stated, “As we recapitalize and modernize the structure of how we carry out nuclear command and control, AI could help assess the different communication pathways and make effective, agile decisions to maintain a clear line of communication.”
He continued: “We probably won’t see artificial intelligence involved directly in the human decision-making process in our line of work, simply because of the nature of nuclear operations and deterrence.”
At what point will artificial intelligence supersede the capabilities of human launch crews in the decision-making process? In the House of Dynamite scenario, would AI’s ability to “assess the different communication pathways and make effective, agile decisions to maintain a clear line of communication” resolve the strategic dilemma?
Other options to maintain a nuclear deterrent exist, like submarine-launched ballistic missiles or recallable bombers. These systems provide more than enough deterrent power to dissuade Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping from undertaking a reckless gamble risking the total destruction of their own countries.
That raises the key question: Do we really need an expensive, destabilizing, environmentally hazardous ICBM deployment to ensure a sufficient nuclear deterrent?