Antinuclear

One resident, whose husband worked at Offutt, told the Omaha World Herald that she began suffering from “joint pain, headaches, shortness of breath, muscle twitches, brain fog and panic attacks within a few weeks,” and that it “almost ruined my life and put my family in serious financial burden.”

Latest estimates predict that complete recovery of the base will cost over $1 billion and will take at least five years––and what’s worse, the Pentagon had apparently been made aware of the flood risks since 2011, but simply didn’t act in time.

It is increasingly evident that the U.S. nuclear enterprise is ill-equipped to deal with the inevitable onslaught of climate catastrophes that will devastate nuclear bases and their employees in the coming months and years.

And, by the Pentagon’s own admission, incidents like the flooding at Offutt are going to happen more frequently––and are going to get worse.

In 2019, the Department of Defense delivered a report to Congress listing the top military facilities vulnerable to climate catastrophe. Of the 79 installations listed, 23 of them are related to the nuclear mission, and seven actually store nuclear weapons onsite.

Those seven bases include both ballistic missile submarine bases at Kings Bay, Georgia, and Kitsap, Washington; the three ICBM bases in Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming; Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, which houses 100 warheads for deployment aboard B-2 nuclear bombers; and the Kirtland Underground Munitions and Maintenance Storage Complex in Albuquerque––the largest nuclear weapons storage site within the United States. Collectively, these seven facilities are home to nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads––almost the entirety of the U.S. nuclear arsenal––and all are will be increasingly threatened by extreme weather events.

According to the Pentagon report, all of these facilities are currently affected by some combination of flooding, drought, desertification, and wildfires, and the devastation will only increase in the years to come. This is highly dangerous, as nuclear warheads and their delivery systems are relatively delicate: stored warheads need to be cooled, missile silos need to be kept clean and dry, runways can’t be underwater, and shipyards can’t be flooded.

In addition to those installations that actually store nukes onsite, other mission-critical facilities like strategic radar stations, nuclear command centers, missile test ranges, and ballistic missile defense sites are also at risk.

A 2018 study found that many Pacific atolls––including Kwajalein Atoll, home to the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site and approximately 13,500 Marshall Islanders––will likely be uninhabitable by 2030, as rising tides will eventually ruin groundwater supplies and damage crops beyond recovery. Despite the inevitable, the Air Force is still spending over a billion dollars to build a new radar installation on the island, amid reports that neither the Pentagon nor the primary contractor, Lockheed Martin, “gave serious consideration to that threat when designing the installation and choosing a site.”

In addition to its missile defense test range, both of the United States’ interceptor launch facilities at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California are expected to experience an uptick in serious climate incidents. By the Pentagon’s own admission, Fort Greely is dealing with melting permafrost, and Vandenberg is subject to periodic wildfires. In 2017, a wildfire burned 380 acres of the Vandenberg base and triggered an evacuation, and in 2016, the Canyon Wildfire burned over 10,000 acres and “came very close to two Space Launch Complexes,” delaying a scheduled rocket launch. Other nuclear-related facilities like Clear Air Force Station, Barksdale Air Force Base, Andersen Air Force Base, and the White Sands Missile Range are also at risk of climate catastrophe.

There is little evidence that military leadership is taking the climate-nuclear threat seriously. Not only was the Pentagon’s first attempt at writing its 2019 report sent back for not meeting the legal requirements, but its revised report included no consideration of other types of extreme weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes; it also did not list a single overseas base. Meanwhile, the Navy quietly disbanded its climate change task force in March 2019, ridiculously claiming that it was “no longer needed.” The former commander of the task force subsequently remarked that he saw “little evidence” that the task force’s recommendations had been implemented by the Pentagon.

All the while, U.S. emissions are increasing: a recent study by the Costs of War Project revealed that the Pentagon is the single largest institutional carbon emitter on the planet. If it were a sovereign nation, its greenhouse gas emissions would be greater than the output of entire industrialized countries like Sweden or Denmark.

The United States is trending in the wrong direction. While barely acknowledging the climate risks, Congress has continuously voted in favor of needless nuclear initiatives, such as a like-for-like replacement of the entire ICBM arsenal. Not only will this cost anywhere between $85 and $150 billion to complete, but by the Air Force’s own admission, its Midwestern silos are highly vulnerable to flooding.

In 2009, the Air Force was forced to physically remove and inspect a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile from its silo in North Dakota after a record snowfall caused water to penetrate the permanent berm surrounding the site and leak into the silo. According to the Air Force, 40 additional silos in North Dakota alone are located in similarly vulnerable locations that are prone to drainage problems.

Congress cannot continue blindly underwriting a nuclear force posture that is ill-suited to the inevitability of climate change. What is the point of re-capitalizing on outdated pieces of the nuclear arsenal that are likely to be rendered ineffective by flooding, when some of that money could be put towards more essential priorities––like offering free COVID-19 testing and treatment to all Americans?

It is expected that the Pentagon will revise its climate report sometime in early 2020. If its drafters are thinking proactively, they will include a blunt assessment of how the U.S. nuclear complex in particular will be affected by climate catastrophe. This will give Congress, policymakers, and the public a highly useful tool with which to assess the best direction for the future of U.S. nuclear force posture.