I'm John Batchew with Henry Sikolsky of the Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center.

I read. U.S. Government Accountability Office report says U.S. may have to operate

Minutemen 3 ICBMs through 2050, 14 years beyond when it was originally intended the Minuteman 3 to be retired.

Translate this, Henry. It's all in government language.

Well, the Sentinel program, which is the modernized follow-on to the Minuteman 3, is

having a bit of teething problems. It's taking longer and costing a lot more to bring on board. And so

nominally, the argument is, well, we'll cover our strategic requirements by extending the

lifetime of the earlier system. I think that may not be the only way to look at this. It wasn't stated in the

report, but there's a real possibility that they will follow through on putting more warheads

on the Minuteman 3 during that period, which is something that's been discussed in both the Biden and this

administration. Instead of one miss warhead, you'd have three. Well, instead of, you know, 400

warheads, you'd then have, well, 1,200. Then if you combine that with the 400 Sentinels, which could have up to eight warheads,

and you combine that with the 12 boats that have 24 tubes with about five warheads or more,

you get north of 6,000 deployed warheads

in the arsenal of the United States.

Right now we have about 1,500.

So that's, you know, more than four times

of what we currently have.

Is that where we're headed?

I don't know that people have their headlights on,

but I would be looking for that brick wall.

Don't we retire weapons, Henry? I mean, they roll them back in the barn and break them down,

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