Read Taylor Barnes’ deep dive into Northrup Grumman, chosen manufacture of the Sentinel ICBM, for which the Los Alamos National Lab and Savannah River Site would make new plutonium pits. As they are the ones doing the dirty work of preparing for full-scale nuclear war (a la the “Nuclear Posture Reviews” of Trump & Biden), all NNSA and DOE contractors need this kind of scrutiny. — Tom Clements, SRS Watch
Words: Taylor Barnes – Pictures: Aubrey Odom, Inkstick Media | June 4, 2024 inkstickmedia.com
On March 28, 1979, a handful of Air Force officers and a Mormon civilian employee from Utah’s Hill Air Force Base arrived in Salt Lake City for an unusual meeting. They were seeking a blessing: For the Church of Latter-day Saints’ top three leaders to endorse a plan to construct 8,500 miles of roads and 4,600 concrete garages for a nuclear weapons system. It would constantly shuttle 200 missiles on racetracks, playing a “shell game” intended to keep the Soviet military guessing where America’s nuclear warheads really were at any given moment. The Soviets could, of course, just build more nuclear weapons and take out the entire missile field at once, so American war planners imagined the project, called “Missile, Experimental,” or MX, would continuously grow, becoming 8,250 garages and 360 missiles by 1990. And so on.
That sort of arms race meant the Air Force needed Americans willing to host the ever-growing missile field. The desert landscape of the Great Basin spanning western Utah and central Nevada appealed to them. It had few highways, little infrastructure, and relatively sparse numbers of human residents. Of the population that did exist in the basing area, however, 80% was Mormon, according to an account of the MX battle in “The Mormon Military Experience,” a book recently published by historians Sherman L. Fleek and Robert C. Freeman from West Point and Brigham Young University.