Latest news with #Minuteman
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
US tests launch of nuclear-capable ICBM Minuteman III in show of force
The U.S. Air Force conducted a routine launch of an unarmed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead on Wednesday morning, the military said. The LGM-30G Minuteman III missile was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time, the Air Force said. The unarmed missile, equipped with a single Mark-21 High Fidelity Re-Entry Vehicle, traveled 15,000 mph to a test range near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, located about 4,200 miles from the launch site, the military said. "This ICBM test launch underscores the strength of the nation's nuclear deterrent and the readiness of the ICBM leg of the triad," Gen. Thomas Bussiere, commander of Air Force Global Strike Command, said in a statement. Trump Unveils 'Golden Dome' Missile Shield, Blindsides Key Senators The "triad" refers to the three different types of nuclear weapons delivery systems that the U.S. military can use to launch nuclear attacks. The systems are land-based ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and nuclear-capable strategic bombers. Read On The Fox News App The Air Force said the test was routine and "not a response to current world events," adding that more than 300 similar tests have been conducted in the past. Iran's Khamenei Says Americans Should Avoid Talking 'Nonsense' In Nuke Talks "This test launch is part of routine and periodic activities designed to demonstrate that the United States' nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure, reliable and effective in deterring 21st-century threats and reassuring our allies," the Air Force said. The Minuteman weapon system is a program that first became operational in the early 1970s, and has received enhancements over the course of nearly 60 years, the military said. The Air Force now plans to replace the aging Minuteman with the modernized Sentinel article source: US tests launch of nuclear-capable ICBM Minuteman III in show of force
Hindustan Times
22-05-2025
- General
- Hindustan Times
US launches Minuteman III missile to show ‘strength of the nation's nuclear deterrent': Watch
The US Air Force recently launched a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) which is capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to anywhere on Earth. The launch took place on Wednesday morning, May 21, as part of a regular test of the country's doomsday missiles. The Minuteman III missile launched from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, the military said, according to the New York Post. The missile was unarmed at the time of the launch. Officials confirmed that the missile traveled 15,000 miles per hour to a test site in the Marshall Islands 4,200 miles away. The Minuteman is a 1970-era program that the Air Force has planned to replace with the Sentinel system. However, delays and cutbacks have been plaguing the program. Wednesday's launch came with the message that America's nuclear deterrent is still ready. 'This ICBM test launch underscores the strength of the nation's nuclear deterrent and the readiness of the ICBM leg of the triad,' Gen. Thomas Bussiere, commander of the U.S. Global Strike Command, said in a statement. The Air Force also said that the test was routine and not a response to the world events taking place at present. The Air Force's initial plan was to decommission all of its Cold War-era missiles by 2039. However, the Sentinel has not been fully tested yet. In fact, delays plaguing the program could postpone the transition date to at least 2050, Bloomberg reported. The Air Force has insisted that the Sentinel program is on track, and that 'until full capability is achieved, the Air Force is committed to ensuring Minuteman III remains a viable deterrent.' In a clarification, the Air Force said that themissile test was "not a response to current world events.' It said it was only a routine test as part of the 1970-era Minuteman III program.
India.com
22-05-2025
- Science
- India.com
World's most powerful nuclear missile tested by US, has alarming strike range, capable of global destruction, hard to intercept, it is called…, can travel at speed of…
The United States has once again tested its Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile. The launch was carried out on May 21 by a team from the US Air Force Global Strike Command at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. What makes this test significant is that the missile was equipped with a single Mk-21 high-fidelity reentry vehicle. This upgrade is expected to significantly boost America's nuclear strike capabilities. The Minuteman III missile can hit targets anywhere in the world and is extremely hard to intercept, even with advanced air defense systems. US air force issues statement In a statement, the US Air Force explained that Vandenberg Space Force Base is the primary testing ground for the deterrence capabilities of the Air Force's Global Strike Command. They clarified that the missile test was part of routine operations and not a response to any current global events. The statement clarified that over 300 similar tests have been conducted in the past. This latest launch was meant to demonstrate that the US nuclear deterrent remains secure, reliable, and capable of addressing modern-day threats while reassuring allies of its strength. US calls missile test essential for national security General Thomas Bussiere, Commander of the Air Force Global Strike Command, emphasized the importance of the recent ICBM test, saying, 'This launch highlights the readiness of the nation's nuclear deterrent and the ICBM leg of the nuclear triad.' He credited the dedicated team of Airmen including missile operators, defenders, helicopter crews, and their support teams for maintaining this powerful security system that ensures the safety of the U.S. and its allies. The test was overseen by the 377th Test and Evaluation Group at Vandenberg Space Force Base. This unit is the country's only dedicated ICBM testing organization, conducting professional evaluations that assess both current and future capabilities of America's land-based missile force. About the Minuteman III Missile The full name of the missile is LGM-30G Minuteman III. Here's what the designation stands for: L = Launched from a silo G = Ground attack capability M = Guided missile 30 = Part of the Minuteman missile series G (at the end) = Refers to the current Minuteman-III variant This missile is powered by three solid-fuel rocket motors: Stage 1: ATK M55A1 Stage 2: ATK SR-19 Stage 3: ATK SR-73 The total weight of the Minuteman III is approximately 36,030 kilograms. This powerful weapon can travel thousands of kilometers and is a key part of the US nuclear deterrent, designed to remain effective against 21st-century threats. Minuteman III can strike targets up to 10,000 km away The Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) has an impressive range of up to 10,000 kilometers, allowing it to strike targets across the globe. It can travel at a staggering speed of 24,000 kilometers per hour. One of its most powerful features is its ability to carry up to three nuclear warheads, which means it can hit three different targets in a single launch. Each Minuteman III missile costs around USD 7 million, and the United States currently has about 530 active units in its arsenal. The missile is developed and manufactured by Boeing Defense, one of America's leading aerospace and defense companies.
Time of India
22-05-2025
- General
- Time of India
US conducts successful test launch of Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile
Minuteman III ICBM launch The United States Air Force (USAF) on Wednesday conducted a successful test launch of the nuclear-capable Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) which can deliver a nuclear warhead to anywhere on Earth. The missile was unarmed when launched at 12:01 am Pacific Time from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base, USAF said in a statement . "This ICBM test launch underscores the strength of the nation's nuclear deterrent and the readiness of the ICBM leg of the triad. This is part of routine and periodic activities designed to demonstrate that the United States' nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure, reliable and effective in deterring 21st-century threats and reassuring our allies," the statement quoted USAF's General Thomas Bussiere as saying. "With more than 300 similar tests conducted in the past, this test is part of the nation's ongoing commitment to maintaining a credible deterrent and is not a response to current world events," Bussiere added. As per the statement, the missile travelled 15,000 miles per hour to the United States Army's Space and Missile Defense Command's Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site in the Marshall Islands 4,200 miles away. The Marshall Islands are a sprawling chain of volcanic islands in the central Pacific Ocean, between America's Hawaii province and the Philippines in Asia. The Minuteman is a 1970-era program which the Air Force plans to replace with the LGM-35A Sentinel system. Minuteman III is to be used as a "viable deterrent" until LGM achieves full capability.
Daily Mail
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
REVEALED: The UFO sightings taken seriously by the US government
A 'flame in the sky,' eerie red glowing objects and swarms of UFOs over military bases are just some of the many sightings that have gravely concerned the US government. There are dozens of unsolved cases going back to the 1960s that occurred over nuclear missile installations, Navy ships and a desert in New Mexico. The FBI, CIA, and other government branches have spent years looking into these reports, but have yet to determine what the objects were and where they came from. One report in 2019 detailed how 'drones' appeared over Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Kansas as locals reported spying a mothership hanging in the sky. In just the last few months, the skies over New Jersey were filled with unidentified aircraft and drones that required a formal response from both the Biden and Trump presidencies. Now, as the current administration weighs declassifying many of these UFO-related incidents, there could soon be new information about some of the key close encounters the government has taken extremely seriously over the years. Base attacked for 17 days Swarms of small UFOs were tracked at dusk above Joint Base Langley-Eustis for at least 17 nights in December 2023. Witnesses reported them 'moving at rapid speeds,' displaying 'flashing red, green, and white lights' and sounding like a fleet of lawn mowers. These brazen penetrations over the base — home to at least half the Air Force's F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets — led to two weeks of emergency White House meetings. 'Drones' sweeping over the Midwest Reports of mysterious 'drones' swept through eastern Colorado and nearby areas of Nebraska, Wyoming, and Kansas over the winter of 2019 into 2020. The sightings were in close proximity to some of America's sensitive, nuclear-equipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). 'They all seem clustered in an area that has quite a few Minuteman sites,' an official confessed in one email. 'We do not know the origin of the drones,' wrote another official at the base, which houses 150 Minuteman III ICBMs. The author then added the hashtag '# aliens.' Witnesses reported that lights on these craft were sometimes 'flashing or steady white, red, or green.' Staff at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming claimed they also saw a 'mothership' six feet in diameter flanked by 10 smaller drones (some fixed wing, some not).' 'When deputies follow the drones, they clock them at speeds of 60-70 mph,' the base official continued. An internal January 8, 2020 email released by F.E. Warren's 90th Security Forces Group was adamant that drones are '100,000,000,000% not us.' 'I've seen some articles pointing the finger as us [sic],' one member of the base stated, 'but I can definitely say this is not our team.' An infrared image showed the three UAS off of the USS Paul Hamilton on July 17th, 2019. A 'swarm' of them hovered near the ship for several hours, in just one of the many occurrences Naval ships saw over the course of weeks Invasion over the Southern California coast Sailors on board a fleet of Navy warships sailing in the Pacific near San Diego witnessed their ships being swarmed by a host of UFOs from July 15 to 30 in 2019. The incident went on for hours, with craft hovering and zipping around near the fleet with flashing multicolored lights. Deputy Director for Naval Intelligence Scott Bray tried to dismiss the incidences, telling Congress in 2022 that he was 'reasonably confident' the objects were drones — but the solution raises its own national security concerns. One senior source from a defense contractor told the Liberation Times that same year that these strange swarms, appeared to be 'much more advanced' than traditional drones. This defense expert also noted that the crafts' behavior made little espionage sense. 'Chinese drones intent on spying would not announce themselves with flashing lights,' the source noted. There was a Hong Kong-flagged bulk carrier, the Bass Strait, which sailed past one of the US ships around the same time as one of these so-called 'drone swarm' incidents. That led to the US Navy suspecting that the Bass Strait was an espionage front, 'likely using UAVs to conduct surveillance on US Naval Forces.' All told, at least eight Navy warships off the coast of California faced these repeated aerial incursions by 'unmanned aerial system' (UAS) swarms. 'Go Fast' and 'Gimbal' Between the summer of 2014 and March 2015, UFOs were spotted almost every day over the skies off the East Coast, in a case made famous by Navy infrared footage released in 2017. Infrared cockpit-camera footage taken on a later sortie by the same U.S. Navy squadron reveals another immensely fast-flying object, this one spinning in mid-air and moving against a 120-knot wind, again accompanied by commentary from totally baffled airmen. The video showed one tiny white speck and one large, dark blob, which would later be known as 'Go Fast' and 'Gimbal.' These highly qualified Navy pilots, told superiors the objects seemingly defied the laws of physics. About 30-40ft long and shaped like a Tic Tac mint, they had no wings or rotors — in fact, they had no discernible means of propulsion or flight — and, yet, they could hover in the sky, slow suddenly and accelerate almost instantaneously to hypersonic speeds of a mile a second. Radar showed they could fly as high as 80,000ft. One pilot compared their remarkable maneuverability to a ping-pong ball bouncing off a wall. The resulting G-force would crush any humans inside. A near collision was recorded in an official mishap report, when, in late 2014, the pilot of a Super Hornet fighter jet almost hit one of them. The pilot said it looked like a sphere encasing a cube. Some of these UFOs, looked like a 'dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere,' said Lt Ryan Graves, a pilot of ten years' service. 'These things would be there all day.' Orbs and flying saucers in New Mexico Scientists at the top secret White Sands missile test range witnessed waves of orb-like UFOs and 'flying saucers' seemingly spying on their work in 2013/ The smaller, more orb-like UFOs appeared to be greatly interested in the White Sands team's current classified projects, perhaps aware of the site's long history with the WWII-era Manhattan Project that built America's first atomic bomb. Witnesses said the 'orbs moved toward the test site, hovered over the device as if scanning it for intel, 'then zipped away ... over the heads of bewildered scientists.' Witnesses said the ' orbs moved toward the test site, hovered over the device as if scanning it for intel, 'then zipped away ... over the heads of bewildered scientists' 'Tic Tac' UFOs in 2004 Witnesses to an infamous 2004 UFO incident reveal 'Tic-Tacs' spotted flying at incredible speeds by top Navy pilots off the California coast were also picked up on sonar speeding underwater. On November 14 2004, Top Gun fighter pilot David Fravor was flying a training exercise off the coast of San Diego when he was re-routed to investigate a strange object spotted on radar by warships protecting his aircraft carrier the USS Nimitz. What he found was a roughly 40-foot white object with no windows or wings, shaped like a Tic-Tac, flitting about above the sea that was roiling below it, disturbed by something large submerged beneath the surface. Commander Fravor told Congress in 2023 that as he circled the object, it turned to mirror his movements, then shot off past him at thousands of miles per hour. It then stopped a second later at a secret pre-designated rendezvous point 60 miles away that only he and a handful of Navy staff on his ship were given ahead of their training exercise. UFOs larger than an aircraft carrier Japanese pilots flying over Alaska in 1986 radioed to air traffic control in shock over seeing three unidentified lighted objects keeping pace with their aircraft. According to Captain Kenju Terauchi, his first officer and flight engineer saw a giant round UFO as big as an aircraft carrier and flashing multicolored lights. The UFOs were releasing fire similar to that of jet engines and then formed a small circle of lights that transformed into a square. The FAA's then-division chief for accidents and investigations, John Callahan, investigated this case, pouring over radio communications, radar data, witness statements and more. Callahan briefed the Reagan White House on JAL1628's gigantic UFO sighting, in a meeting also attended by representatives from the FBI, CIA, and three people from President Reagan's scientific study team. According to Captain Kenju Terauchi, his first officer and flight engineer saw a giant round UFO as big as an aircraft carrier and flashing multicolored lights According to Captain Kenju Terauchi, his first officer and flight engineer they also saw a giant round UFO as big as an aircraft carrier with flashing multicolored lights. FAA's then-division chief for accidents and investigations, John Callahan, personally investigated this case 'One of the guys from the CIA,' Callahan recalled, 'they actually swore all these other guys into, 'This never took place. We never had this meeting, and this was never recorded.'' 'I asked them at the time,' he continued, ''If there was something there and if it's not the [then in development] Stealth Bomber, then you know it's a UFO. And if it's a UFO, why wouldn't you want the people to know?'' 'He said if they come out and told the American public that they ran into a UFO out there,' the senior FAA investigator said, 'it would cause panic across the country.' UFOs appearing during the Cold War At the height of the Cold War, a then 26-year-old US Air Force Lieutenant Salas was underground overseeing Malmstrom Air Force Base's nuclear equipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in Montana. He claimed an eerie red glowing UFO above the base's front gate temporarily disabled 10 ICBMs on the night of March 24, 1967 — a case that has since brought Salas to Congress and to the offices of the Pentagon's new UFO-hunters at AARO. 'I offered to even go there on my own expense. I would be happy to fully brief any congressman, or anybody from DoD,' Salas told in 2022. A USAF Strategic Air Command document written for ICBM manufacturer Boeing and released via FOIA seems to confirm the event, saying: 'All ten missiles in Echo Flight at Malmstrom lost [strategic] alert within ten seconds of each other.' Strategic Air Command noted having a 'grave concern' about the case. 'Flame in the sky' over New Mexico A police officer stands near to his patrol car outside the town of Socorro, New Mexico where a flying saucer was spotted in 1964 Socorro Police Department officer Lonnie Zamora was chasing a speeder in 1694 when he spotted what he later described as 'a flame in the sky' about a half-mile away accompanied by a loud 'roar.' Zamora followed the 'bluish and sort of orange' flame in his patrol car, soon witnessing an egg-shaped white craft parked in the desert with 'two people in white coveralls' standing near the parked UFO. 'One of these persons seemed to turn and look straight at my car and seemed startled,' Zamora told investigators, who collected physical evidence of burns and landing gear marks at the site. Despite the FBI, the CIA, and the Air Force having a go at the case, they confessed they came up empty handed.
