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The Pentagon Wants to Spend $141 Billion on a Doomsday Machine


The DOD wants to refurbish ICBM silos that give it the ability to end civilization. But these missiles are useless as weapons, and their other main purpose—attracting an enemy’s nuclear strikes—serves no end.

The silos are scattered across North Dakota, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska in a zone of sacrifice—what lawmakers and military planners have long called the “nuclear sponge.” “Military planners would be surprised to hear that,” says Joseph Cirincione, retired president of the Ploughshares fund and former director of nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A study from Sébastien Philippe at Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security found that an all-out attack on the nuclear sponge would lead to the deaths of millions of people in the US, Canada, and Mexico.

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