(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Will the upgrades that are coming to our strategic nuclear arsenal be ready in time? Right now, hopelessly outdated Minuteman missiles that first went into service in the 1970s form the backbone of our strategic nuclear arsenal. The silos where they stand ready to be launched still use rotary phones and 8 inch floppy disks in many cases. Once they are launched, the brand new S-500 anti-missile systems that the Russians have deployed will be able to intercept them. Meanwhile, the Russians have introduced a brand new intercontinental ballistic missile known as the Sarmat. A single Sarmat carries enough firepower to destroy an area the size of Texas, and our anti-missile systems are not able to deal with this new threat. The balance of power has fundamentally shifted, and so we desperately need to update our capabilities.
Unfortunately, this process will not even begin until 2025.
So we better hope that we do not get into a shooting war with Russia during the next couple of years.
The U.S. has been developing a brand new ICBM known as “the Sentinel”, and it is desperately needed…
The control stations for America’s nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles have a sort of 1980s retro look, with computing panels in sea foam green, bad lighting and chunky control switches, including a critical one that says “launch.”
Those underground capsules are about to be demolished and the missile silos they control will be completely overhauled. A new nuclear missile is coming, a gigantic ICBM called the Sentinel. It’s the largest cultural shift in the land leg of the Air Force’s nuclear missile mission in 60 years.
These upgrades cannot happen fast enough, because right now the infrastructure of our strategic nuclear arsenal is constantly breaking down and falling apart…
The silos lose power. Their 60-year old massive mechanical parts break down often. Air Force crews guard them using helicopters that can be traced back to the Vietnam War. Commanders hope the modernization of the Sentinel, and of the trucks, gear and living quarters, will help attract and retain young technology-minded service members who are now asked each day to find ways to keep a very old system running.
This is something that I have been warning about for years, but most people didn’t want to listen.
Now our military is in a race against time, because the clock is ticking.
Overall, 750 billion dollars will be spent to overhaul our strategic nuclear forces, and it is being projected the silo work for the Sentinel could begin “as soon as 2025”…
The Sentinel work is one leg of a larger, nuclear weapons enterprise-wide $750 billion overhaul that is replacing almost every component of U.S. nuclear defenses, including new stealth bombers, submarines and ICBMs in the country’s largest nuclear weapons program since the Manhattan Project.
For the Sentinel, silo work could be underway by lead contractor Northrop Grumman as soon as 2025.
I am glad that they are moving forward.
But if work will not even begin until 2025, when will it finally be completed?
Until the Sentinel is ready, the Russians will continue to possess a major strategic advantage over us, and they know it.
If the war in Ukraine spirals out of control, we could easily find ourselves facing a nightmare scenario.
The Russians have been steadily gaining ground in Ukraine in recent weeks, and over the past few days they have started to gobble up significant chunks of territory.
The Ukrainians are running out of warm bodies to throw into the fight, and that is a major problem.
They are also running out of ammunition and equipment, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky just made a trip to D.C. to beg for more money…
Zelensky is in D.C. to ask Congress to pass $61 billion more for Ukraine, on top of the $113 billion they approved early this year. However, it looks increasingly likely that any more funding for Ukraine will have to wait until next year.
The Biden administration requested the funding as part of a $106 billion package, which includes only $13 billion for securing the border, but Republicans say it does not go far enough, and are calling for a number of reforms to reduce the number of asylum seekers and illegal border crossers, which recently hit 12,000 per day.
Johnson said at a Wall Street Journal event on Monday that Democrats and the White House must agree to some or all of the border-security measures outlined in H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act.
Even with all of the money that we have given him already, his forces are still losing.
And even if we give him what he is asking for now, Russians forces will continue to advance.
Zelensky is holding a losing hand, and as the Russians advance he is going to become very desperate. And very desperate people do very desperate things.
Eventually, I expect that events in Ukraine will force the U.S. and Russia into a showdown.
When that day arrives, will the U.S. be ready?
Earlier today, I came across an article about a calendar that is being sold in Russia that shows “a Russian soldier outside the US Capitol building in Washington DC with a drone and helicopter overhead”…
A Russian veterans organisation is selling a 2024 calendar featuring a muscle-bound Vladimir Putin.
The calendar continues a series of propaganda images including one showing a Russian soldier outside the US Capitol building in Washington DC with a drone and helicopter overhead.
Many Russians believe that a war with the United States is inevitable.
And as I have repeatedly warned my readers, the Russians have been feverishly preparing for such a conflict for a long time. Thankfully, the U.S. is finally starting to get prepared as well.
But if work is not even going to begin until 2025, will the much needed upgrades to our strategic nuclear arsenal be completed in time?
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
You know where the problem lies in this? (meaning a thought of having a positive outcome by this new initiative) Just two words from your text. COMMANDERS HOPE
Yes, that’s the whole and only problem. It means that commanders have nothing better left to do than hope. Sure, in themselves they’re probably very capable of getting this solved, but since they have to rely on and wait for government (whatever layer it might be), this is most likely becoming a very expensive disaster.
So, how to cure? Let the old collapse first, then start building, and don’t give away your responsibility.
I find the focus on only the land based missiles is very shortsighted. True, they are now inadequate, but they are also the least effective deterrent because of they are more likely to be taken out first. In the larger scheme of things, we are still so far ahead of not just Russia but other nuke armed enemies that it is not a fair fight. Do not take that statement to mean we are a clear winner if things go as planned, but neither are they as nuke war is total devastation if fought as it is expected. Local or “theater” war may not stay that way, things have a way of intensifying and escalating when rational thought is abandoned for the emotional win at any cost war mentality.
We have already lost the war without a single shot being fired. Biden did his best to destroy us economically. We are trillions in debt, that we cannot afford to repay. Inflation has destroyed our standard of living. 7 million illegal aliens in 3 years. We throw our veterans out in the streets, and put illegal aliens up in 4 star hotels.
China spend billions on our colleges and universities to fund the teaching of Marxism, socialism, communism, and anarchy. Our elections are compromised to where the latest polls show more than 20% of the mail in ballots in the 2020 election were fraudulent. The DC gulag is full of political prisoners. The leading candidate for the 2024 Presidential Election is being persecuted in a number of Kangaroo Courts by the current corrupt administration.
Our President and his family have been selling “Pay to Play” to our nation’s enemies! The Joint Chiefs of the military are more concerned with DEI and abortion than military readiness. Now, they want more money for obsolete war toys.
We lost!
No winner in an all-out nuke war, anyone that believes differently is delusional.