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Be depressed, very depressed.
When you read today's piece by TomDispatch regular William Hartung and Hekmat Aboukhater, you'll be reminded that, in the Biden years, the U.S. military has continued to focus on what's all too strangely called the "modernization" of the American nuclear arsenal. Mind you, that program -- in a world where the present unmodernized arsenal could already end all life as we know it on this and undoubtedly several other planets -- is now estimated to cost the American taxpayer a mere $2 trillion dollars or so in the coming decades.
And that, by the way, is the good news. That's what's likely to happen if Donald Trump doesn't win the 2024 election. Should he indeed reenter the Oval Office, given what his backers at the Heritage Foundation and elsewhere are already proposing, you ain't seen nuthin' yet. A wounded ear? No, we're talking about the possibility of this whole planet going up in flames and smoke. His backers have, for instance, already made it clear that a new Trump administration would restart underground nuclear testing, ending a decades-old moratorium honored by the planet's major nuclear powers. In addition, under an "America first" banner, it would undoubtedly relaunch a global nuclear arms face-off that's long been in abeyance. And that's just to begin down a potential list of horrors. As The Donald reportedly said in 2016 when he was president, "Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass." Then, he asked "a foreign policy advisor three times why, if the U.S. government possessed nuclear weapons, it should be reluctant to use them." Why, indeed? He also assured the governor of Puerto Rico, "If nuclear war happens, we won't be second in line pressing the button."
And of course, it was his administration that pulled out of both the INF nuclear treaty and the Open Skies arms control agreement with Russia, as well as the Iran nuclear agreement, while launching the present staggering "modernization" program. So, while you read today's striking piece by Hartung and Aboukhater about part of the present nuclear build-up, just imagine for a moment that Donald Trump does indeed make it back into the White House. One thing that's already all too clear from the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 (put together by a host of former Trump officials) is that the present version of nuclear "modernization" will be dwarfed by the Trumpian one the next time around and the new Cold War that could follow globally might prove all too horrifically hot. Tom
World-Ending Maneuvers?
Inside the Nuclear-Weapons Lobby Today
By Hekmat Aboukhater and William D. Hartung
The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. And they will do everything in their power to keep that money flowing.
This January, a review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program under the Nunn-McCurdy Act -- a congressional provision designed to rein in cost overruns of Pentagon weapons programs -- found that the missile, the crown jewel of the nuclear overhaul plan involving 450 missile-holding silos spread across five states, is already 81% over its original budget. It is now estimated that it will cost a total of nearly $141 billion to develop and purchase, a figure only likely to rise in the future.
That Pentagon review had the option of canceling the Sentinel program because of such a staggering cost increase. Instead, it doubled down on the program, asserting that it would be an essential element of any future nuclear deterrent and must continue, even if the funding for other defense programs has to be cut to make way for it. In justifying the decision, Deputy Defense Secretary William LaPlante stated: "We are fully aware of the costs, but we are also aware of the risks of not modernizing our nuclear forces and not addressing the very real threats we confront."
Cost is indeed one significant issue, but the biggest risk to the rest of us comes from continuing to build and deploy ICBMs, rather than delaying or shelving the Sentinel program. As former Secretary of Defense William Perry has noted, ICBMs are "some of the most dangerous weapons in the world" because they "could trigger an accidental nuclear war." As he explained, a president warned (accurately or not) of an enemy nuclear attack would have only minutes to decide whether to launch such ICBMs and conceivably devastate the planet.
Possessing such potentially world-ending systems only increases the possibility of an unintended nuclear conflict prompted by a false alarm. And as Norman Solomon and the late Daniel Ellsberg once wrote, "If reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority should be to remove the triad's ground-based leg -- not modernize it."
This is no small matter. It is believed that a large-scale nuclear exchange could result in more than five billion of us humans dying, once the possibility of a "nuclear winter" and the potential destruction of agriculture across much of the planet is taken into account, according to an analysis by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
In short, the need to reduce nuclear risks by eliminating such ICBMs could not be more urgent. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' "Doomsday Clock" -- an estimate of how close the world may be at any moment to a nuclear conflict -- is now set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it's been since that tracker was first created in 1947. And just this June, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a mutual defense agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, a potential first step toward a drive by Moscow to help Pyongyang expand its nuclear arsenal further. And of the nine countries now possessing nuclear weapons, it's hardly the only one other than the U.S. in an expansionist phase.
Considering the rising tide of nuclear escalation globally, is it really the right time for this country to invest a fortune of taxpayer dollars in a new generation of devastating "use them or lose them" weapons? The American public has long said no, according to a 2020 poll by the University of Maryland's Program for Public Consultation, which showed that 61% of us actually support phasing out ICBM systems like the Sentinel.
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