by JAMES DREW

The U.S. Air Force has announced its strategy for replacing America’s Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles—which have stood alert, awaiting Armageddon, for nearly five decades.

Making nukes is hard. But squeezing another multi-billion-dollar project into the Air Force’s already bulging budget is perhaps the bigger challenge.

We’re talking about the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, an effort to replace the stockpile of Minuteman nuclear missiles Boeing built for the Pentagon back in the late 1960s.

This new program has actually been around for years but is only now starting to get some real traction in Washington.

According to a Jan. 23 notice on the government’s contracting Website, the Air Force wants to build an entirely new booster stack but keep the existing Minuteman payload assembly, capable of delivering one or multiple independent nuclear warheads.

The proposed missile will occupy renovated Minuteman silos and use the same launch control centers. Those have been in the ground since the ’60s.

If Congress funds it, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent program will deliver an entirely new command-and-control network that connects the president to his nuclear options. This replaces the network of outdated computers that perhaps should be in a museum instead of commanding the most fearsome weapons on Earth.

The notice comes as the White House prepares to submit its budget for fiscal year 2016, and as outgoing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel pushes for the Pentagon to direct more money toward the nuclear force.

Hagel’s not the only one calling for more nuke cash. Recently, a top Air Force general spoke in Washington to lobby for more money to replace almost every strategic weapon system in the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal.

Maj. Gen. Garrett Harencak, assistant chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, said the Air Force has been on a nuclear weapons “procurement holiday” for the past quarter-century. Modernization efforts should be a priority, Harencak said.

“Other countries have not, they did not take that procurement holiday,” Harencak claimed on Jan. 20. “It is unfortunate a lot of these bills are all coming due now. We should have been taking care of this, we didn’t. That’s in the past. I’ve got to deal with today and the future.”