Mattis flips on missiles

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Wednesday the United States must keep all three parts of its nuclear force rather than eliminate one, as he had once suggested.

Some argue that ground-based missiles may no longer be necessary to America’s policy of deterrence, and the Trump administration has been reviewing the military’s nuclear posture.

Mattis has called the submarine-based component “sacrosanct” and has said it is necessary to retain the ability to fire nuclear weapons from aircraft as well.

Together, those three prongs constitute what the military calls its nuclear triad.

Before he took over in January as President Trump’s Pentagon chief, Mattis, a former Marine Corps general, had suggested that long-range, silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles might be expendable.

“I’ve questioned the triad,” Mattis told reporters flying with him to Minot Air Force Base, a nuclear base in northwestern North Dakota. He said his view has changed.

“If I want to send the most compelling message, I have been persuaded that the triad in its framework is the right way to go,” Mattis said.

The key to avoiding nuclear war, he said, is maintaining a nuclear arsenal sufficient to convince a potential enemy that attacking the US with a nuclear weapon would be suicidal.