LGM-30 Minuteman: America's Nuclear Deterrent for 60 Years

the United States the world's first nuclear power got its hands on nukes 79 long years ago and for 62 of those years the venerable Minuteman ICBM an ICBM being a missile with a range of greater than 3,400 miles has been a vital Keystone of its nuclear Arsenal always ready to take flight at a moment's notice and reduce an enemy City or three to a sheet of atomic glass in a mere 30 minutes if you happen to be thinking that that's a really really long time for a single ICBM to be in service oh well you'd absolutely be right so what gives how on Earth has it managed to remain in service for so long and what does the future hold for this missile which is only four years away from being old enough to claim Social Security well don't switch over to another video because those questions and more should be answered in the next 20 minutes or so so let's [Music] go the developments of the minute man began in the mid to late 1950 s when the Soviets were really starting to pull ahead with their missiles and the US needed something a bit special to level the playing field for reference the US offerings around this time consisted of things like their first ICBM the sm65 atlas from 1959 which despite having a yield of up to 3.75 megatons in a range of 9,000 miles was not liked due to the fact that it had to be fueled up before launch and thus its response time was severely hampered plus the fact that it was genuinely quite crude and temperamental thing they also had the LG GM 25c Titan 2 which entered service in 1962 had a slightly lesser range of 8,700 Mi a much bigger 9 Megaton Warhead and was generally far better made but like the atlas it had to be fueled before launch and thus would have proved to be a tad slow to get off the ground had the Cold War ever gone hot they need to be filled up immediately before launch was due to the fact that they used liquid fueled engines there's many reasons why liquid fuel isn't an ideal choice for icbms but the one we're really interested in is the fact that liquid fuel has a limited shelf life and will eventually separate over time or which is why the atlas and Titan had to be fueled up before launch because if they just left them in the silos with the Go Juice already brimming in the tanks there's a good chance that the missile would just fail either in the silo or up in orbit as the degraded fuel wouldn't combust properly and thus cause all manner of issues and so the use of solid fuel propellants became the foundational demand of what would become the minute man then it'll be able to sit in its silos for decades at a time and be ready to go at a minute's notice just like the Revolutionary War era militia which it was named after many many wrinkly brains would lend their gray matter to the development but one who undoubtedly contributed more than any other was Colonel Edward Hall as it was he that spearheaded the effort in figuring out the technical nitty-gritty of its solid fuel engines his work led to the development of the Minuteman one which first entered service in October 196 2 at marstrom Air Force Base in Montana production and delivery continued for a few more years and eventually the missiles would be spread across six Air Force bases located across the Central and Northern Great Plains with the others being Ellsworth in South Dakota Min at North Dakota Whit men in Missouri Fe in Wyoming and Grand Forks in North Dakota this dispersion was very intentional as it made them both harder to take out in a single Salvo if the Soviets were to attempt a first strike as well as being relatively removed from populated Urban ERS in order to minimize civilian casualties in the event of set attack but of course lethality was not sacrificed for either of these things which were side bonuses in US defense strategy and so every single site was still very much in the range of the Soviet Heartland so then the job to many at least was a good in the US had got its first proper as in fully capable ICBM that could go on to form the ever so precious land component of its nuclear Triad alongside their submarines under the waves and their bombers in the sky but still some in the US defense establishment weren't satisfied seeing the Minute Man 1 as a flawed diamond in need of some Polish rather than a be all and end all wonder weapon and so work on an even better model began before the final Minuteman 1 had even been delivered and so the Min Man 2 entered service in 1965 as for what his improvements War we'll hold that thought because we're focusing on the story side of the missile present and we'll come back to the techy stuff later on in its own dedicated chapter so look forward to that but do know this those improvements were so well received that all 800 Minuteman ones began to be pulled from service in June of that same year with the final one finally being withdrawn in 1969 many of them were spared from the scrap man's cutting torch however because while they had become militar lead redundant they were still damn handy bits of Kit and so many found new leases of life in various research and testing roles with one particularly interesting example being one which was launched from a C5 Galaxy in 1974 in order to explore the feasibility of an Airbase launch system for the upcoming lgm1 18 Peacekeeper ICBM ultimately a thousand Minute Man 2os were produced over the 4-year production run and then the exact same thing happened again Air Force bigwigs beheld the Minuteman 2 and still found its shine to be lacking in ler and so the Minute Man 3 the most advanced model of all was introduced in 1970 its younger sibling held on for a while however with minim man 2's remaining in service until June 1992 as well not perfect they were deemed perfectly capable of doing the job as long as they were supplemented by more advanced missiles it took until 1995 for all of them to be disposed of at which point the Minute Man 3 became the only variant remaining in service a state of affairs that persists this very day with give or take 450 of them still being in the US inventory so now that we know the story let's move on and have a look at the technical nitty-gritty of these deathly terrifying machines now let us begin naturally with the minute man one we've already discussed its solid fuel propulsion system at some length so we don't need to retread old water with that but we will say that it weighed give or take £65,000 stood at an inch short of 56 ft and was 5' 6 in wide at its broadest point now that number soup is all well and good if we do say so ourselves but what we really need to do is add some real world meaning to it all and to do so let us compare it to the rocket that all of you are most likely to be famili with thanks to it being in an ungodly number of museums worldwide and that's the Nazi V2 rocket in comparison the V2 weighs approximately 28,000 call it twice in a bit longer than the minute man one just for the sake of having a nice and simple difference that your brain can easily work with as for the height the V2 stood an inch off 46 ft as for the width there's only 1 in in it with the V2 being 5' 5 in wide so no need for any comparisons there we're sure you will have no issues at all picturing how big that is now we have to admit that we've done something a little cheeky here because what we just discussed wasn't entirely in Aid of allowing you to picture how big a minute man one is in your minds although that was certainly part of it it was also a cheeky segue into a fact that we really want to push deep into your brains the Absurd speed with which rocket technology improved in that period the V2 took its first flight in 1942 and the minute man one came only 19 years later in 1961 and in that time for the sake of being a a little over twice as heavy only a touch taller and near as dam it the exact same width the missile had gone from something that could hit a maximum speed of 3580 mph to something that could top out at 17,500 mph albeit in very different ways because the V2 was a single stage rocket I one that flew directly to its Target and went bang whereas the minute man one was a three-stage rocket I.E one that has multiple fuel tanks and Motors Each of which is sheded upon a scent to reveal another engine that's more efficient in those atmospheric I conditions this continues until you're just left essentially with a warhead in space ready to be propelled down to the ground at insane speeds but still the ludicrous leap and Tech must be recognized then there's the difference in lethality 2200 lb of oldfashioned explosives were in the nose of a V2 compared to the w59 nuclear warhead of the Minute Man 1 which detonated with a yield equivalent to 800 kilotons of TNT which to you do the math meet is about 82,000 times larger as for the later variance of the minute man we stress too much about the physical dimensions of them specifically as they are near as dam it the same anyway instead let's have a look at their improvements and changes to their specifications for the miniman 2 its lead Improvement was to its inertial guidance system which made it accurate to a degree of 1.2 Mi originally and later a mere 7 miles and that's compared to 1.5 mil in the original Minuteman 1 the range also improved with a healthy raise to 6,300 Miles speed remains more or less the same however for fire each carried a 1,200 kiloton w56 nuclear warhead which if you're wondering because we've done the maths again is 1.2 million times larger than the Warhead of a V2 it is with the miniman 3 however that things get really interesting as it was a so-called multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle type missile I.E it had more than one missile on top and when it reached orbit it shot them all out to different targets at the same time the specific types have changed what with the Minute Man 3 having been in service for so long with it starting out with up to 370 kilon w62 Warheads before moving on to 350 kilon w78 and then finally for some as the upgrade still being rolled out a 300 kiloton w87 Warhead range and accuracy also improved once again with the minan 3 able to travel for up to 8,700 mil and land with an accuracy of 240 M but while a minute in one form or another may have served the US dutifully for over 60 years now all good things must come to an end there will come a time oh when for a myriad of reasons be they technological economic or logistical the Minute Man simply will no longer be practical as a weapon system and actually according to a report by the center for strategic and budgetary assessments released in 2018 titled sustaining the US nuclear deterrent that time is rapidly approaching allow us to summarize this report's conclusions for you now in a nutshell it begins by stating that even the newest Minuteman 3s are old with the first ones already having entered service all the way back in 1970 and as we learned earlier they were only designed for a 10-year service life it then goes on to clarify this point however by saying that despite their age until relatively recently all was well and the Arsenal was kept at near as damn it full operational capacity without any major issues thanks to extensive and regular modernization and life extension programs the report goes on to further clarify that until relatively recently part by explaining that the missile's reliability is rapidly eroding due to aging components that are starting to wear out and fail and simply cannot be replaced either because there are no spare parts to replace them and trying to Source them nowadays would be a monumentally expensive pain in the ass or because the design of the Minute Man simply doesn't allow them to be replaced period as for specific examples of such components the report points to things like the gyroscopes and guidance systems which it claims cannot be refurbished at all and have long since had their spare parts stock bars dry up it also points to the propellant which will begin to deteriorate to the point of non-functionality in the late 2020s as even solid fuel has an eventual use by date and what's worse it cannot simply be brimmed up like one would a car the solid fuel is built into the rocket as though it were a component and thus it is a real pain in the ass to change it but it gets even worse because not only is changing an absolute nightmare but it's also a nightmare the rocket fuel can only endure once with certainty and maybe twice if you are lucky and all Minuteman 3s have already had both their first and second stages washed out and reported once before as for the third stage because it's made out of a specific and still seemingly classified composite it cannot survive being washed out even once and would instead need to be fully replaced to put it bluntly in the coming years the minute man Arsenal is absolutely this then raises a question if the US wishes to maintain its position as a preeminent nuclear power what needs to be done they could of course bite the bullet scoop up container ships worth of taxpayer cash and throw it at the minute man so that they can receive a full nut and bolt modernization that would see every single component of every single Mage checked over and pulled out to be refurbished if it was viable to do so or fully replaced with a fresh part if it was not but why bother doing that with a missile which and there's no two ways about putting this well be simply obsolete one major issue is with the guidance system this has already been upgraded before with the guidance replacement program which was initiated in 1993 and saw all missiles in inventory having their older ns20 guidance sets replaced with newer ns50 sets manufactured by Rockwell International this for complicated technical reasons that we don't need to worry about was a fair improvement over the ns20 which itself was an improvement over the even older ns7 and ns10 of earlier Minuteman but it is far from perfect it needs sporadic software for adjustments to stay accurate thanks to the occasional bit of bungled code that gets discovered and also it's depending upon inertial navigation properties I.E knowing where it started and then using measured changes in speed angle and altitude to figure out where it now is so system which is susceptible to cumulative errors over time and can only be corrected with external input then there are the issues with its re-entry Vehicles which do not have terminal guidance systems I.E a guidance system that can steer and guide them after they have separated from the main stage of the missile instead they simply follow a ballistic Arc akin to an artillery shell this naturally isn't ideal because should set Arc be messed up in orbit that's it your missile is going where it's going end of discussion it should be stressed however that this Tech which is very common on smaller missiles think AA missiles or even short and medium- range ballistic missiles has typically not been incorporated into any nation's icbms historically but that's rumored to change with Russia's new RF 28 also to note is the minut man's vulnerability to integrated air defense systems cyber threats and electronic warfare capabilities these modern defense mechanisms designed to disrupt or destroy incoming missiles and the Minutemen initially conceived as it was in the late 1950s and early 1960s simply is not equipped to deal with them so bad is this situation that in the 2018 nuclear posture review a document commissioned by then president Trump to look into and fully assess the US's nuclear capabilities simply says quote the Minute Man 3 will have incre increasing difficulty penetrating future adversary defenses just with these issues we've chosen to highlight and believe us there are more it's fair to say that the minute man needs quite a bit of work to remain competitive going forwards and that brings us back to our earlier point the cost of actually doing all of that work which in the Air Force's opinion simply isn't worth it to keep a 60-year-old missile going a touch longer instead they've reasoned that those resources would be better spent developing a brand new top-of-the line ICB this touch wood can be fully developed delivered on and deployed ready for when the Minute Man start well and truly falling apart towards the end of the decade and this is what has been chosen to pick up the mantle the lgm 35 Sentinel formerly known as the groundbased Strategic deterent prior to its formal designating it's part of a broader $ 1.5 trillion doll nuclear weapons modernization effort and no you didn't miss hear us there we did say trillion with a t I.E a little less and a little more than the entire G PS of Spain and Indonesia respectively just to give you an idea Beyond just the adoption of the Sentinel the eer will also see the replacement of the Ohio class ballistic missile submarines with the new Colombia class the introduction of the B21 Rider stealth bomber which will replace the Aging B2 life extension programs for existing Warheads such as the b61 gravity bomb and the w88 Warhead and the introduction of new Warheads like the w71 and so on and so forth as for the Sentinel itself however its range will be in excess of 3,400 miles the minimum threshold needed for a missile to qualify as an ICBM but also not an exact figure as it appears at the time of writing this hasn't been disclosed yet if you want to take a ballpark figure taken purely from our gut however call it 9500 Mars or so we reckon more than the Minute Man 3 for which it obviously has to be to be an upgrade but more crucially in the same kind of ballpark as missiles like the Russian r36 M or the Chinese df-41 which both have a range in that short area and are among the furthest flying missiles out there but while range May remain elusive we do know what will be bolted to the top of it courtesy of a 2019 press release by the national nuclear Security Administration the w71 we just mentioned which is improved in a number of ultr techy ways we don't need to worry about as compared to its standard 4Runner and will supposedly pack a punch of 475 kilotons what we don't know however is how many of them it will carry as summed up by the Congressional research service in a March 2024 defense primer quoting here the Air Force plan to deploy The Sentinel with one Warhead per missile however they could potentially instead deploy two or three Warheads in multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle configuration again if you want our gut instinct it'll almost certainly be a m if for no other reason than we doubt that National ego would allow the us to go back to a standard single Banger type given that the minute man was the first ever missile to deploy the technology we also know that the Sentinel will feature modular open system architecture in its design design which is all about allowing its parts to be swapped out and changed relatively easily during its lifespan the reason for this is obvious keeping the minan up to date proved to be such a pain in the ass that they'd like to avoid a repeat of that in the future given that the Air Force expects the Sentinel to remain in service until at least 2075 such a move in its design is certainly a big and clever idea for its Motors we know that it will be a three stage design and use solid fuel in all of them testing of these is thway as we speak with the first stage having under gone a full-scale static test fire in March 2023 with a second stage following it in January 2024 as for when we can expect to see it reach service the current time frame has the Sentinel reaching initial operational capability by 2029 with a full operational capability of 400 missiles expected to be achieved in 2036 included in this time frame is the decommissioning of the minute mans which the Air Force is currently vague on when it comes to specifics with most releases on the matter saying words to the extent of they'll start going out when the Sentinels start coming in and the cost of it all you ask at present it's estimated to be about 95.8 billion of that 1.5 trillion total modernization budget and they better be praying that it doesn't become another endless delayed defense project because as we have seen given the state of the Minute Men Arsenal they have left it a bit down to the wire with this one [Music]

Channel: Megaprojects

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Keywords: lgm-30 minuteman, minuteman missile, lgm-30 minuteman 3, lgm-30 minuteman iii, minuteman iii missile, minuteman ia (lgm-30c), minuteman ib (lgm-30d), minuteman ii (lgm-30f), minuteman iii (lgm-30g, minuteman iii icbm, minuteman i, how ballistic missile works, nuclear wordl, minuteman i (lgm-30ab), tests minuteman iii, minuteman 2, minuteman iii, intercontinental ballistic missile, intercontinental ballistic missiles (icbms), minuteman, us air force, nuclear

Id: A1Kl6bQ8hxo

Length: 19min 39sec (1179 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 08 2024