The entire MX & basing & Midgetman issue sounds foolish to me.
I mean, in the British and French cases, SLBM got the final word...
- tactical nukes and airborne deterrent: died with WE.177, 1998 / languished with ASMP-A but at very small scale
- silo-based: GB had zilch, zero - France shut down Plateau d'Albion in 1996
Is it just me, or is the entire basing / MX / Midgetman saga is essentially - USAF never, ever accepting the SLBM had won the "deterrent war" ? Put otherwise - most expensive interservice rivalry, ever ?
Were there attempts at shutting down the US silo-based ICBM force / never replacing the Minuteman III ?
It's not just you. The whole Triad idea was developed to protect the Air Force's bombers and land-based missiles. Remember the B-36 vs. USS United States as well. But don't blame interservice rivalry alone. The defense industry and regional Congressional delegations were the ones that really kept these obsolete concepts alive.
And yes, as far as I remember, there was talk of not replacing Minuteman III and the B-52 as well. But we got a small M-X force and the B-1 instead, even after President Carter cancelled them.
Manned bombers have a number of qualities that make their leg of the triad unique. Most notable is their ability to scramble on warning, and then be recalled if it is a false alarm. That's kind of hard to do with a ballistic missile. The worry that land-based ICBMs can be destroyed in their silos by a preemptive first-strike puts a lot of pressure on them to be launched on warning. Use them or lose them. Sub-launched ICBMs ride around in huge targets that are more than likely tailed as soon as they steam out of harbor. The very real concern that a new technical means to make the oceans transparent to the sensors of our adversaries (ultra-sensitive sonar, or radar measurement of the wake or the surface bulge created by a large-displacement boomers) also looms large over the SLBM force. Finally, the then Soviet Union, and now Russia, are extremely paranoid about their expansive northern arctic border. Nuclear-tipped cruise missiles coming from bombers flying over the pole are still unstoppable by Russian air defenses. The more they try, the more they have to spend, and with oil at $50 a barrel, they will go broke.
The "uniqueness" of the manned bomber force was, of course, the USAF party line from 1945 through at least the 1980s. But "unique" does not mean cost-effective or necessary.
The alleged first-strike vulnerability of missile silos was debatable. It assumes an implausibly high accuracy, reliability, and/or yield on the part of Soviet ICBMs. It also ignores the fact that the USAF was, at the same time, arguing that the higher accuracy of its land-based missiles compared to the Navy's early SLBMs--a first-strike advantage--was the reason why the US needed them.
The "scramble on warning" argument is only as good as the warning and thus cuts both ways. Strategic bomber bases make excellent fixed targets for minimally accurate missiles with megaton-range warheads.
The claimed vulnerability of US submarines is suspect. US boats are and were known to be quiet enough compared to Soviet craft that it seems unlikely that they could be successfully tailed, especially if the latter were already being shadowed by USN attack boats. What's more, there has never been any evidence that US nuclear submarines can be detected under real-world conditions. Imagined, futuristic "new technical means" are simply fiction and, in any case, again cut both ways. We could just as well insist that "new technical means" in the form of laser-armed satellites will at any moment make all aircraft, manned and unmanned, highly vulnerable to Russian defenses.
Finally, I'll concede that bombers launching cruise missiles over the pole can successfully attack Russia. For that matter, B-52s carrying gravity bombs and Cessna 182s can probably do the same, given the real state of Russian defenses. But that is not the point. The point is that we did not and do not need three redundant and fantastically expensive ways of doing the same thing, even if we assume that nuclear warfare is a need.
