Inside the push to modernize the US nuclear arsenal
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This is USA Today's The Excerpt. Today is Tuesday, July 7th, 2026. One of your favorite episodes this year looked at the cost to modernize America's nuclear arsenal. This episode originally aired on January 7th, 2026. It's the worst-case scenario no one wants to talk about. What happens if America's nuclear missile silos are attacked? The Minuteman III is a powerful intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking targets on the other side of the world, and it could be our best bet. But it's aging, and land-based ICBMs have an Achilles heel. Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, January 7th, 2026. The Nuclear Sponge is a five-part project by USA Today that dives into the strategic debate and costs of modernizing the land leg of America's nuclear arsenal.
Join me to break down the design and finances of this undertaking, as well as insights into the delicate balance of global nuclear power at play. is USA Today defense reporter Davis Wienke. Good to have you here, Davis.
Thanks for having me.
Before we get into the cost of updating it, can you give me a brief history of the nuclear sponge?
Yeah, the nuclear sponge is a colloquial term used to describe the nuclear missile silos that the US has strewn about the Great Plains and Mountain West. There's currently 450 of them that house about 400 operational nuclear missiles. And the reason why it's called the nuclear sponge by some is that one of the strategic reasons for keeping these weapons, according to advocates, is they can be targeted in an enemy first strike and will therefore have enemy nuclear weapons strike these relatively remote areas rather than hitting more populated areas in the United States. The logic there is that if there's an all out nuclear war scenario, the anything that keeps more firepower from hitting American cities is a net good.
It's disturbing logic, but those are the kinds of things that nuclear strategists get into every day. The term itself dates back to Air Force General Lou Allen, who was the chief of staff in the late 1970s. Allen, believe it or not, was actually a nuclear physicist who rose all the way to the post of the Air Force's top officer. And he put a lot of thought into this thing. The term over time has been largely co-opted by arms control advocates because of how well it evokes this sense of terror, frankly, about the idea that there are these potential sacrifice zones within the United States. But it's a very useful metaphor for understanding this part of the strategic calculus.
What might happen if U.S. missile silos are attacked? And why was the nuclear sponge approved for an upgrade?
So destroying a fortified underground missile silo takes, in fact, a nuclear weapon to do, or even two nuclear weapons to do. So nuclear warfare planners believe that it would require a massive amount of firepower to attack the nuclear sponge. And because trying to kill an underground target requires setting off the nuclear weapon at ground level, that would kick a lot of dirt and other debris up into the atmosphere, creating what we understand is radioactive nuclear fallout. Those fallout clouds would then drift across the United States, depending on the wind, and could, as our project shows, lead to populated areas of the United States, contaminate parts of our agricultural heartland, and ultimately extend their impact beyond just the immediate area surrounding the sponge.
As for why the nuclear missiles in the region have been approved for an upgrade, ultimately it comes down to nuclear strategists believe that land-based nuclear missiles are still a very relevant part of America's nuclear arsenal. And the missiles that are currently underground, the Minuteman 3s, are venerable. They're older than a lot of us today. They were put into the ground in the early 1970s. These silos are even older than the Minuteman missiles as well. 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.
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