Decades ago, peace activists helped keep a major nuclear weapons system out of Utah with an assist from key figures, chiefly Spencer W. Kimball, then the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Now some of those same individuals are calling on the church’s newly ascended president, Dallin H. Oaks, to follow in his predecessor’s footsteps and speak out against the federal government’s development of a new generation of nuclear missile, known as Sentinel, partly in the Beehive State.
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) President Dallin H. Oaks in his first official portrait. He is being urged to speak out against U.S. development of a new nuclear missile.
“The arms race continues,” the group of 12 Utahns and one former resident write in a letter mailed to church headquarters in early October, “and a new moral challenge faces” the leaders of the Utah-based faith.
Indeed, President Donald Trump recently ordered the U.S. military to resume the process for testing nuclear weapons. Still unclear is whether Trump meant nuclear-explosive testing — something no country but North Korea has done in more than a quarter century — or flight testing of nuclear-capable missiles.
The plea from the grassroots group to the church is twofold: First, for the faith to “[express] your opposition to the Sentinel missile program through your spoken word.” Second, to divest from the weapon’s primary developer, Northrop Grumman, plus other missile manufacturers.
The activists, now in their 70s, said they mailed the letter to church headquarters a month ago and have yet to receive a reply. Nonetheless, they remain optimistic, given their past success, that church leadership will once again take a stand against the weapons.
“It’s an even more precarious situation now,” signer Mary Dickson, a downwinder and cancer survivor who grew up in Canyon Rim neighborhood in east Salt Lake City, said in an interview. “We’re hopeful…they will speak up for humanity.”
A church spokesperson did not provide responses to questions about the petition, including whether faith leaders had a response and if they planned to divest from Northrop Grumman.
The MX — a plan thwarted
The MX mobile missile, as outlined by the Air Force in the late 1970s, would have shuttled 200 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) — each armed with 10 independently guided nuclear warheads — around the West Desert on both sides of the Utah-Nevada border. The missiles were to be hidden among thousands of shelters in something of a nuclear hide-and-seek shell game.
After petitions from Dickson and other nonproliferation activists, Kimball and his two First Presidency counselors, apostles N. Eldon Tanner and Marion G. Romney, denounced the plan in an impassioned 1981 statement that reached beyond the MX missile project to condemn the arms race globally.
(Tribune file photo) N. Eldon Tanner, Spencer W. Kimball and Marion G. Romney helped thwart the MX nuclear missile system proposed for the West Desert by speaking out against the project in a joint 1981 statement.
“We deplore in particular,” they wrote, “the building of vast arsenals of nuclear weaponry.”
The church leaders worried that such a major project would turn Utah into a prime target if the Cold War ever boiled over and about the environmental degradation such a vast undertaking would entail.
Warning that entities that stood to gain financially from the project were sure to downplay the risks, they wrote: “We plead with our national leaders to marshal the genius of the nation to find viable alternatives which will secure at an earlier date and with fewer hazards the protection from possible enemy aggression, which is our common concern.”
The faith’s opposition helped to turn the tide of public opinion against the Cold War-era proposal and the project fizzled.
“The Sentinel missile program, like MX, is unnecessary, counterproductive and immoral,” the activists argue in their letter to the church. “... The case that LDS Church leadership made against MX in 1981 resonates true today.”
(Tribune file photo) The MX missile pictured in 1980.
About the Sentinel missile
The Sentinel ICBM, currently under development, is a new generation of missile meant to replace the 50-year-old models, known as the Minuteman III, the Air Force currently has in its arsenal.
“The transition,” a Government Accountability Office report states, “is the most complex project the service has undertaken.”
So complex, in fact, that the Air Force may need to operate the Minuteman III for another 25 years, the result of yearslong delays and ballooning costs, according to the same report, which put the current price tag at $140 billion.
A good chunk of that money is flowing into Utah, with Roy and Promontory serving as crucial development and testing sites.
The utility of ICBMs is a matter of debate. Some experts argue they are an expensive and dangerous redundancy in the nation’s defense system.
“Because they are in fixed locations and easily identifiable from space, ICBMs are inherently vulnerable to enemy attack in a nuclear war,” said Xiaodon Liang, a senior analyst for the Arms Control Association.
Others counter that their ability to quickly shift to new targets, among other reasons, render them invaluable.
According to the Air Force, if and when the new missile is completed, “some Sentinel maintenance, training, storage, testing and support actions” will take place at northern Utah’s Hill Air Force Base and a region about 100 miles west of it, bordering Nevada. This would likely not include, however, the warheads themselves.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) The South Gate entrance at Hill Air Force Base near Layton in February 2025.
“The Sentinel program’s presence in Utah is a challenge to local religious communities whose leaders spoke out against the MX four decades ago,” signer Stan Holmes, a resident of Salt Lake City, wrote in a news release accompanying the announcement of the group’s letter. “It’s an especially brazen challenge to LDS Church leadership.”
‘A new generation of downwinders’
In the years since that fight and this one, Dickson has watched family members and former neighbors get sick and die from cancer and autoimmune disorders, both linked to radiation exposure from aboveground nuclear testing.
While current testing of Sentinel missiles in Utah remains limited to the delivery systems meant to carry the warheads and not nuclear material itself, she fears a scenario in which — particularly under the current president — that changes in the blink of an eye.
“I don’t,” she said, “want to see another generation of downwinders created.”
Short of that, she and her fellow signers still fear the impacts of the current project.
“The lethality of each Sentinel missile,” they write, “would dwarf that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs many times over.”
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