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What Would It Mean to 'Absorb' a Nuclear Attack?
The missiles on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota make it a potential target for a nuclear attack. And that doesn’t come close to describing what the reality would be for those on the ground.
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November 22, 2023
What Would It Mean to 'Absorb' a Nuclear Attack?
The missiles on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota make it a potential target for a nuclear attack. And that doesn’t come close to describing what the reality would be for those on the ground.
By Ella Weber edited by Tulika Bose, Jeffery DelViscio & Sébastien Philippe
[A missle can be seen blasting off from an underground silo]
[Illustration of a Bohr atom model spinning around the words Science Quickly with various science and medicine related icons around the text]
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This podcast is Part 4 of a five-part series. Listen to Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here. The podcast series is a part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.
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[CLIP: Association of Air Force Missileers video: “Minuteman III consists of a three-stage solid propellant booster, which is almost 60 feet tall and five and one-half feet in diameter at its widest point. The fully outfitted missile weighs almost 80,000 pounds and can eventually reach a speed of about 13,000 miles per hour, or approximately 3.6 miles per second…”]
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Ella Weber: Members of my tribe live with nuclear missiles on the Fort Berthold Reservation. The weapons sit in underground concrete silos that are surrounded by antennas in small, fenced-off areas. The missiles are armed and ready to launch in 60 seconds. This is one reason they are called Minutemen missiles.
[CLIP: Air Force video: “The final page of history is in our hands. You can’t live your life within inches of a nuclear weapon and not feel the weight of the world. Our mission is to carry that weight. Theodore Roosevelt said, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick.’ Sticks don’t get much bigger than this.”]
[CLIP: Minuteman missile launch]
Weber: You are listening to Scientific American’s podcast series The Missiles on Our Rez. I’m Ella Weber, a journalist and an enrolled member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, or MHA Nation, a Princeton student and a journalist. This is Episode 4: “Catastrophic Risks.”
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Weber: After learning that the Air Force had not explained to my tribe what the new nuclear missiles were for–which the Air Force intended to deploy for another 60 years on our reservation–I decided to dig deeper.
I wanted to know what role the missiles and their silos play today in U.S. nuclear strategy and what the risks for the tribe were in hosting them—something that the tribe never agreed to in the first place.
[CLIP: General Jim Mattis speaking at confirmation hearing: “When looking at each leg of it, with the ICBM force, it’s clear that they are so buried out in the central U.S. that any enemy that wants to take us on is going to have to commit two, three, four weapons to make certain they take each one out. In other words, the ICBM force provides a cost-imposing strategy on an adversary.”]
Weber: That was General Jim Mattis, former secretary of defense in the Trump administration. During his confirmation hearing in front of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in 2017, he was explaining the role of the silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, referred to as ICBMs in military jargon.
I wasn’t really clear on what Secretary Jim Mattis meant by the ICBM force providing a “cost-imposing strategy,” so I talked to Leonor Tomero to get some clarity. She used to serve as deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy in the Biden administration in 2021.
Leonor Tomero: In terms of the ICBMs, it’s sort of strength in numbers because you’ve got so many, and they’re so spread out, that an adversary would have to commit a lot of nuclear weapons if they were to pursue a large-scale attack on the United States.
Weber: Leonor explained to me that should the U.S. face a potential nuclear attack, the president would have two choices with regards to the ICBMs: launch them preventively before the missiles possibly got destroyed, or decide to absorb the attack and retaliate later.
Weber (tape): What do you mean by absorbing an attack?
Tomero: I think, you know, it’s, you know, they’re considered a sponge.
Weber (tape): So it’s kind of like making these ICBMs, like, a target ….
Tomero: Yes…
Weber (tape): …. rather than, like, these other major cities or other places...
Tomero: Right.
Weber: In case you don’t know — the role of the ICBM is to force an adversary to use many nuclear weapons if they decided to attack the U.S. The silos are basically meant to divert and absorb the incoming nuclear missiles from important and critical areas in the country, like cities.
But what would that mean for the Fort Berthold reservation?
Frank Von Hippel: I’m Frank von Hippel. I’ve worked at Princeton [University] since 1974, and I’ve been working on nuclear arms control and nonproliferation—and also, among other things, the consequences of nuclear war.
Weber: Frank served as assistant director of national security at the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. This was during the Clinton administration.
He was also one of the first scientists to be involved with research on the consequences of nuclear strikes on U.S. nuclear weapons—including the Minutemen silos—which he described in detail in Scientific American in 1976.
There’s a particular hearing from around that time that he references.
Von Hippel: Basically the secretary of defense had come in and testified to Congress. When one of the senators asked how many people would such an attack kill, he estimated 15,000 to 25,000. And he said, ‘Well, that would be terrible, but it would be not what you would expect from a major nuclear attack.’
That seemed low to, actually, the senator from New Jersey [Clifford Case]. And he asked for a peer review of the Defense Department calculations, and, and I was then asked to be an unpaid consultant to look into that. And, in fact, I went over to the Pentagon to talk to the people who have done the calculations.
Weber: Frank found something unexpectedly horrifying.
[...]