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Question:

Why didn't they decommission the Minutemans instead of Peacekeepers?

The peacekeepers, introduced in 1986, are much more modern than minutemans in 1970. Why did they decommission them instead of the minutemans?

Answer:

because the peacekeepers have a better chance of invoking a first strike from another state. Because, if a country shoots a nuke to take down a peackeeper a hit will take out multiple war heads. Think about it, a country shoots a nuke it hits a peackeeper then we lose 20 nukes. With minutemen it will take at a minimum one missile to destroy one missile. Minutemen= stability and no first strikes.
The Peacekeeper was an expensive program. They were never silo based like the Minuteman. Carter authorized a racetrack system which would provide multiple underground shelters. Reagan, the always formidable enemy of the military, said it was a Rube Goldberg and wanted to place them in dense pack silos. The problem was if you hit one they would all be destroyed so congress rejected the plan. Finally, the cost of the program and the failure of the Soviet Union caused the collapse of the Peacekeeper program. Some of the warheads have been used on Minuteman missiles and some of the rockets have been used to launch satellites.

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