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Consider this strange: Seventy-eight years after the first and only nuclear weapons were used on Planet Earth, anyone with half a brain knows that a nuclear war would be an incomparable disaster for this planet and everyone living on it. So, remind me, why the endless nuclear pantomime?
Why, as last year wound down, for instance, did the U.S. decide to station some weapons from its nuclear arsenal in England -- ones three times as powerful as the two atomic bombs it dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II -- after an absence of 15 years? (If you didn't even know this was happening, that's because it's barely been mentioned in the American media, though Russia's Tass angrily denounced it and threatened an escalatory response.) This was undoubtedly passed off as a move to protect the United Kingdom and other European countries from a post-Ukraine attempt by Vladimir Putin to conquer the rest of Europe, nuclear attacks included, right? Now, mind you, even if you assume Putin is truly a madman and would launch nuclear strikes against Europe, what use would American nukes be in England when Washington could reach Russia with its vast nuclear arsenal from the U.S. or its nuclear subs patrolling the planet? No need to put them in Britain anyway, since that country already has nukes. It was the third nuclear power ever and still has a "nuclear deterrent" fitted out on submarines, at least one of which is at sea at any moment.
So why is Washington upping the ante in such an obviously symbolic, yet all too real way? And why up that particular ante when even a relatively "modest" nuclear exchange could easily lead to the destruction of life as we've known it on Planet Earth? In that grim context, let TomDispatch regular Norman Solomon, author most recently of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, explain just what it means to "modernize" your nuclear arsenal. Of course, given weaponry that could rob us of any future, the very act of modernization is undoubtedly also one of all too human madness. Tom
Full Speed Ahead on the Global Titanic
Going Along with the Utter Madness of Nuclear Weapons
Yes, the Doomsday Clock keeps ticking -- it's now at 90 seconds to midnight, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists -- but the ultimate time bomb never gets the attention that it deserves. Even as the possibility of nuclear annihilation looms, this century's many warning signs retain the status of Cassandras.
Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump withdrew the United States from vital pacts between the U.S. and Russia, the two nuclear superpowers, shutting down the Anti-Ballistic Missile, Open Skies, and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaties. And despite promising otherwise, Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden did nothing to revive them.
Under the buzzword "modernization," the American government, a thermonuclear colossus, spent $51 billion last year alone updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that's set to continue for decades to come. "Modernizing and maintaining current nuclear warheads and infrastructure is estimated to cost $1.7 trillion through Fiscal Year 2046," the office of Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) pointed out, "while the Congressional Budget Office anticipates that current nuclear modernization would cost $494 billion through Fiscal Year 2028."
Such bloated sums might prove a good argument against specific weapons systems, but Uncle Sam has incredibly deep pockets for nuclear weaponry and a vast array of other military boondoggles. In fact, compared to the costs of deploying large numbers of troops, nuclear weapons can seem almost frugal. And consider the staggering price of a single aircraft carrier that went into service in 2017, the Gerald R. Ford: $13.3 billion.
Militarism's overall mega-thievery from humanity has long been extreme, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower made clear in a 1953 speech:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children" This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
The Nuclear Complex and "Crackpot Realism"
In the case of budgets for nuclear arms, the huge price tags are -- in the most absolute sense imaginable -- markers for a sustained, systemic, headlong rush toward omnicide, the destruction of the human species. Meanwhile, what passes for debate on Capitol Hill is routinely an exercise in green-eyeshade discourse, assessing the most cost-effective outlays to facilitate Armageddon, rather than debating the wisdom of maintaining and escalating the nuclear arms race in the first place.
Take, for instance, the recent news on cost overruns for the ballyhooed Sentinel land-based missile system, on the drawing boards to replace the existing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in 400 underground silos located in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Northrop Grumman has already pocketed a $13.3 billion contract to begin moving the project forward. But the costs have been zooming upward so fast as to set off alarm bells in Congress, forcing a reassessment.
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