Davis Winkie
speaker
99 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 7 Jul
Davis Winkie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They were built in the 1960s.
You're starting to see infrastructure issues and potential reliability issues if you're trying to extend the Minuteman further.
That's at least what the Air Force and advocates of building the next generation Sentinel missile to replace the Minuteman argue.
Sentinel is going to be the replacement missile for the Minuteman 3 and that it is going to be the primary nuclear missile that sits in underground land-based silos here in the United States.
Originally, Sentinel was supposed to reuse the Minuteman silos, but as we just discussed, these silos are aging and there's infrastructure issues.
One example is the water table has risen in parts of North Dakota where there are currently Minuteman silos, and you don't want a flooded nuclear missile silo, you might imagine.
Ultimately, what this meant was that the Sentinel project was initially projected to be $77.7 billion.
It was going to be an expensive undertaking, but planners saw it as an investment in American security.
But as they got into the silo project and realized that it wouldn't be possible to just reuse the silos and they would, in fact, need to dig new holes across the Great Plains and mountains.
The cost has ballooned to up to $141 billion.
Yeah, it's one of those things where they didn't know what the issues were going to be until they got into trying to solve them.
Towards the end of President Donald Trump's first administration, the Air Force certified that the Sentinel project was ready to begin engineering development on silos and on other key aspects.
That meant that the main contractor was approved to start building the tools to start building the missiles and the silos.
What they found, though, was that they weren't ready to be at that point yet.
And we're not looking at having that equivalent certification in place again until mid-2027.
So they're not even going to start work on digging these silos until several years later than originally planned.
And right now we're looking at not having Sentinel missiles fully operational at the levels planned in the program until the 2050s.
The main argument in favor of continuing this modernization project and maintaining the land-based nuclear missiles is that they're seen as an integral part of what's called the nuclear triad.
Advocates for maintaining these systems say the triad, which has nuclear bombers and
nuclear submarines that can launch nuclear missiles, and then these land-based nuclear missiles say that each provides different advantages in the case of a nuclear war or in the case of deterring adversaries such as Russia or China from being aggressive in other ways.
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