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Here's the strange thing: in the 1950s, when I was a kid, nuclear weapons were on all our minds. In school, we went through duck-and-cover drills where we leaped under our desks, hands over heads, to protect ourselves from a Russian nuclear cataclysm. Walking around New York City, where I lived, you couldn't miss the tens of thousands of signs indicating nuclear fallout shelters into which you could flee if the apocalypse were at hand. At the movies, there were nuclearized monsters galore, ranging from giant ants and spiders to a dinosaur awakened from its Arctic slumber by atomic tests. And yet, in those years, as we all prepared for an imminent nuclear attack, the Russians, it turned out, were incapable of nuclearizing New York City. As yet, they had no way to deliver such weaponry to our shores (though the U.S. had such a capacity in relation to both Russia and China and was already planning to annihilate our Cold War enemies).
Today, that's anything but the case. Russia, with the most nuclear weapons on earth, and China are both capable of turning this country into an apocalyptic wasteland (just as we're capable of doing to them). Even North Korea might soon be able to deliver an atomic weapon to our shores. And yet, whether in school, the movies, or anywhere else, you'd hardly know it. In fact, when the New York City Department of Emergency Management released a 90-second public service announcement last July, offering New Yorkers instructions on what to do in case of a nuclear attack, as the New York Times reported, it was almost instantly mocked, derided, and dismissed out of hand.
And keep in mind that we're now on a planet where it's become all too normal to talk about the war in Ukraine going "nuclear," thanks in part to Vladimir Putin's stock of tactical nuclear weapons. And let's not just talk about "them." As TomDispatch regular, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore points out today in his 100th piece for this site, America couldn't be deeper in the nuclear fray. After all, not only does it possess a vast land, sea, and airborne nuclear arsenal, but in the decades to come, its military is planning to spend more than two trillion taxpayer dollars to "modernize" that force. Just what this planet needs! Perhaps it's time to turn it over to those giant ants. Tom
Are the Best Years of My Country Behind Me?
Reflections on a Long-Ago Tour of Los Alamos and the Trinity Atomic Test Site
I turn 60 this year. My health is generally good, though I have aches and pains from a form of arthritis. I'm not optimistic enough to believe that the best years of my life are ahead of me, nor so pessimistic as to assume that the best years are behind me. But I do know this, however sad it may be to say: the best years of my country are behind me.
Indeed, there are all too many signs of America's decline, ranging from mass shootings to mass incarceration to mass hysteria about voter fraud and "stolen" elections to massive Pentagon and police budgets. But let me focus on just one sign of all-American madness that speaks to me in a particularly explosive fashion: this country's embrace of the "modernization" of its nuclear arsenal at a price tag of at least $2 trillion over the next 30 years or so -- and that staggering sum pales in comparison to the price the world would pay if those "modernized" weapons were ever used.
Just over 30 years ago in 1992, a younger, still somewhat na??ve version of Bill Astore visited Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico and the Trinity test site in Alamogordo where the first atomic device created at that lab, a plutonium "gadget," was detonated in July 1945. At the time I took that trip, I was a captain in the U.S. Air Force, co-teaching a course at the Air Force Academy on -- yes, would you believe it? -- the making and use of the atomic bombs that devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. At the time of that visit, the Soviet Union had only recently collapsed, inaugurating what some believed to be a "new world order." No longer would this country have to focus its energy on waging a costly, risky cold war against a dangerous nuclear-armed foe. Instead, we were clearly headed for an era in which the United States could both dominate the planet and become "a normal country in normal times."
I was struck, however, by the anything-but-celebratory mood at Los Alamos then, though I really shouldn't have been surprised. After all, budget cuts loomed. With the end of the Cold War, who needed LANL to design new nuclear weapons for an enemy that no longer existed? In addition, there was already an effective START treaty in place with Russia aimed at reducing strategic nuclear weapons instead of just limiting their growth.
At the time, it even seemed possible to imagine a gradual withering away of such great-power arsenals and the coming of a world liberated from apocalyptic nightmares. Bipartisan support for nuclear disarmament would, in fact, persist into the early 2000s, when then-presidential candidate Barack Obama joined old Cold War hawks like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Senator Sam Nunn in calling for nothing less than a nuclear-weapons-free world.
An Even More Infernal Holocaust
It was, of course, not to be and today we once again find ourselves on an increasingly apocalyptic planet. To quote Pink Floyd, the child is grown and the dream is gone. All too sadly, Americans have become comfortably numb to the looming threat of a nuclear Armageddon. And yet the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist's Doomsday Clock continues to tick ever closer to midnight precisely because we persist in building and deploying ever more nuclear weapons with no significant thought to either the cost or the consequences.
Over the coming decades, in fact, the U.S. military plans to deploy hundreds -- yes, hundreds! -- of new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in silos in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and elsewhere; a hundred or so nuclear-capable B-21 stealth bombers; and a brand new fleet of nuclear-missile-firing submarines, all, of course, built in the name of necessity, deterrence, and keeping up with the Russians and the Chinese. Never mind that this country already has thousands of nuclear warheads, enough to comfortably destroy more than one Earth. Never mind that just a few dozen of them could tip this world of ours into a "nuclear winter," starving to death most creatures on it, great and small. Nothing to worry about, of course, when this country must -- it goes without saying -- remain the number one possessor of the newest and shiniest of nuclear toys.
And so those grim times at Los Alamos when I was a "child" of 30 have once again become boom times as I turn 60. The LANL budget is slated to expand like a mushroom cloud from $3.9 billion in 2021 to $4.1 billion in 2022, $4.9 billion in 2023, and likely to well over $5 billion in 2024. That jump in funding enables "upgrades" to the plutonium infrastructure at LANL. Meanwhile, some of America's top physicists and engineers toil away there on new designs for nuclear warheads and bombs meant for one thing only: the genocidal slaughter of millions of their fellow human beings. (And that doesn't even include all the other life forms that would be caught in the blast radii and radiation fallout patterns of those "gadgets.")
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