Category: Technology

Ridding the World of Nuclear Weapons

W.J. Astore

A Seven-Point Plan to Reduce the Risk of Nuclear War

AUG 25, 2026

If Stephen Covey can make millions off the “7 habits of highly effective people,” surely I can make millions off a seven-point plan to reduce the risk of nuclear Armageddon.

Seriously, I recently came up with seven ideas to reduce the risk of nuclear war, and then I used the amazing power of ChatGPT to turn those seven ideas into a policy platform statement (see below). It did a fair job of it, though the prose is a bit boring.

I believe my seven-point plan would make the world a safer place. It would save America trillions of dollars through the cancellation of the Sentinel ICBM, the B-21 bomber, and the Golden Dome missile shield.

Here’s my simple seven-point plan of highly effective Americans:

1. A U.S. policy of no first use of nuclear weapons.

2. A commitment to global START talks to make major reductions to nuclear weapons arsenals, with the eventual goal (if possible) of total nuclear disarmament.

3. The end of Golden Dome and a revival of the ABM treaty.

4. Reconfiguration of the U.S. nuclear triad. Cancellation of the Sentinel ICBM and the B-21 Raider. Gradual retirement of Minuteman III ICBMs. U.S. nuclear deterrence to be centered on the most survivable leg of the triad: the Navy’s Ohio– and Columbia-class submarines.

5. Job loss associated with the cancellation of major nuclear weapons systems to be alleviated through investment in civilian infrastructure (roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, and the like).

6. Major educational efforts to alert the world to the dangers of nuclear winter, weapons, and war.

7. An end to the Russia-Ukraine War and the alleviation of tensions between the U.S./NATO and Russia. Similarly, a reduction in tensions around similar potential nuclear flashpoints (e.g. the U.S./Taiwan versus China).

This devastating scene from “Terminator 2” must always remain science fiction.

*****

And here’s the policy statement generated using ChatGPT to flesh out that plan.

The continued existence of nuclear weapons remains the gravest threat to the survival of modern civilization. Although the Cold War ended more than thirty years ago, approximately 12,000 nuclear warheads remain in the arsenals of the world’s nuclear powers, with the overwhelming majority held by the United States and Russia (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute [SIPRI], 2025). At the same time, deteriorating arms control agreements, renewed great-power competition, and regional conflicts have increased the risk that nuclear weapons could again become instruments of war. The objective of U.S. nuclear policy should therefore be clear: maintain strategic stability while steadily reducing the probability that nuclear weapons are ever used. This platform advances seven mutually reinforcing initiatives designed to move the United States and the international community toward a safer and more secure world.

The first pillar of this platform is the adoption of a No First Use policy. The United States should formally declare that it will never initiate the use of nuclear weapons and will employ them only in retaliation against a nuclear attack. Such a declaration would reduce the danger of miscalculation during international crises and lessen the incentives for adversaries to launch their own weapons out of fear of a preemptive American strike. A No First Use doctrine would also strengthen the long-standing principle that nuclear weapons exist solely to deter nuclear aggression rather than to serve as instruments of battlefield warfare or coercive diplomacy. By embracing this doctrine, the United States would signal that nuclear weapons are political weapons of last resort, not usable military tools. Such leadership could encourage reciprocal restraint by other nuclear powers and reinforce global norms against nuclear use.

Second, the United States should recommit itself to comprehensive strategic arms control negotiations. Building upon the achievements of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) process and the New START Treaty, Washington should seek substantial bilateral reductions with Russia while laying the groundwork for future multilateral negotiations involving China, France, the United Kingdom, and other nuclear-armed states. The long-term objective should remain the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons if rigorous verification mechanisms and international security conditions make that goal achievable. Although complete nuclear disarmament cannot occur overnight, history demonstrates that negotiated reductions are possible. Since the late 1980s, U.S. and Russian arsenals have declined dramatically through verified agreements without undermining either nation’s security (U.S. Department of State, 2024). Renewed arms control would reduce costs, increase transparency, and decrease the likelihood of nuclear confrontation.

Third, the United States should discontinue pursuit of the proposed Golden Dome missile defense system and instead seek negotiations leading to renewed limitations on nationwide strategic missile defenses comparable to those established under the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Strategic stability has historically depended upon the recognition that neither side can realistically expect to escape devastating retaliation following a nuclear attack. Large-scale missile defense systems risk undermining this stability by encouraging competitors to expand or modernize their offensive arsenals to overcome perceived defensive advantages. The result is an action-reaction cycle that fuels expensive arms races without improving long-term security. Reviving mutual constraints on strategic missile defenses would restore an important principle of Cold War arms control: that deterrence is strengthened when neither nation believes it can successfully fight and win a nuclear war.

Fourth, the United States should restructure its nuclear forces to emphasize the most survivable component of its deterrent. This platform therefore supports cancellation of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program and the B-21 Raider nuclear bomber while gradually retiring the aging Minuteman III ICBM force. America’s nuclear deterrent should instead rest primarily upon the Navy’s Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines and their Columbia-class successors. Because ballistic missile submarines are exceptionally difficult to detect and destroy, they provide a secure second-strike capability that guarantees retaliation against any nuclear aggressor. Maintaining a credible submarine-based deterrent would preserve strategic stability while eliminating the unique dangers posed by land-based missiles, which must remain on constant alert and may create pressure for rapid launch decisions during crises. A submarine-centered deterrent would continue to protect the United States while reducing the risks associated with hair-trigger nuclear postures.

Fifth, reductions in nuclear weapons programs should be accompanied by a robust economic transition strategy for affected workers and communities. Defense conversion should not leave engineers, skilled tradespeople, or manufacturing workers unemployed. Instead, federal investment should redirect this highly skilled workforce toward rebuilding America’s civilian infrastructure. Roads, bridges, water systems, electrical grids, schools, hospitals, public transportation, and renewable energy facilities all require substantial modernization. Redirecting resources from unnecessary nuclear modernization programs toward infrastructure would strengthen both national prosperity and national resilience while ensuring that communities dependent upon defense spending continue to enjoy stable employment opportunities. National security should be understood not only in military terms but also in terms of economic strength and public well-being.

Sixth, the United States should undertake a major educational initiative concerning the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war. During the Cold War, public awareness of nuclear dangers contributed significantly to support for arms control agreements. Today, however, much of that awareness has faded. Educational programs in schools, universities, museums, and public media should explain the immediate effects of nuclear explosions as well as the broader environmental consequences identified by contemporary scientific research. Studies indicate that even a limited regional nuclear conflict could inject sufficient soot into the upper atmosphere to reduce global temperatures, disrupt agriculture, and threaten food supplies for billions of people (Robock et al., 2007; Xia et al., 2022). Greater public understanding of these consequences would encourage informed democratic debate and reinforce international efforts to prevent nuclear war.

Finally, this platform recognizes that arms control cannot succeed without diplomacy. The United States should actively pursue negotiated settlements that reduce tensions among the world’s major nuclear powers. Ending the Russia-Ukraine War through diplomacy consistent with international law and the sovereignty of states would substantially reduce the risk of direct confrontation between NATO and Russia. Likewise, sustained dialogue with China should seek to reduce military tensions surrounding Taiwan and establish reliable crisis communication mechanisms that lessen the danger of accidental escalation. Military deterrence remains necessary, but deterrence alone cannot provide lasting peace. Stable diplomatic relationships, confidence-building measures, and regular communication among adversaries are indispensable components of nuclear risk reduction.

Taken together, these proposals offer a coherent strategy for reducing the likelihood of nuclear catastrophe while maintaining a credible national defense. They reject the assumption that greater security necessarily requires ever-expanding nuclear arsenals and instead affirm that diplomacy, strategic restraint, and international cooperation provide more durable foundations for peace. The nuclear age has demonstrated that humanity possesses the capacity to destroy itself. The challenge of the twenty-first century is to demonstrate that it also possesses the wisdom to prevent that outcome. This platform seeks to move the United States toward that safer future.

References

Robock, A., Oman, L., & Stenchikov, G. L. (2007). Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals. Journal of Geophysical Research, 112(D13).

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. (2025). SIPRI Yearbook 2025: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security.

U.S. Department of State. (2024). New START Treaty.

Xia, L., Robock, A., Scherrer, K., et al. (2022). Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection. Nature Food, 3, 586–596.

If you’ve read this far, thank you! Let’s help rid the world of nuclear weapons, or at least greatly reduce global nuclear arsenals.

Military Intelligence Is Increasingly Artificial Intelligence

Of General ChatGPT and Admiral Claude

BILL ASTORE

JUL 31, 2026

If you’ve been in or near the military, you’ve heard quips about military intelligence being the ultimate oxymoron or that it’s akin to military music, i.e. not very musical, unless you love pompous marches. But increasingly military intelligence isn’t even human anymore (some troops might argue it never was) as officers in particular look to AI programs like ChatGPT and Claude to do their “thinking” for them.

Reports indicate the Pentagon used Anthropic’s Claude AI to script the order for the attack on Venezuela, and apparently Claude was used again to plot attacks on Iran that led to the destruction of a girls school at Minab. (It’s unclear whether AI contributed to that disaster, though I’m guessing AI provides an illusion of certainty that could exacerbate targeting errors.) Americans in general place too much faith in technology, but AI modules aren’t immune from GIGO, or garbage in, garbage out. Or perhaps GIDO: garbage in, death out.

A colleague reports that military officers now routinely use AI to write orders and evaluations, with self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth pushing the wonders of AI. The military’s increasing use of AI, my colleague notes, “completely circumvents the use of human intelligence, emotion, and critical thought,” concluding that “When they’re in the trenches – they [officers] won’t have time to check Chat GPT when giving orders in this next war.”

AI, in short, is becoming a force unto itself in military circles, so much so that General ChatGPT and Admiral Claude may soon be the most influential “officers” within the flag ranks.

Flush with cash, the Pentagon also sees AI as an easy way to spend money while calling it an “investment,” as William Hartung notes here:

The task of getting Pentagon money has become less daunting as the department focuses on missions impossible like a leak proof missile defense system (Golden Dome), plus all manner of (potentially) AI-driven systems — from drones, to driverless military vehicles to uncrewed ships to targeting systems that facilitate dropping more bombs per minute (which is how Palantir’s systems were used to enable and accelerate Israel’s genocide in Gaza.)

They’re creating an AI “killer drone” system that makes one wonder how long it’ll be before Skynet takes over and starts killing all humans everywhere. Admittedly, that might be a “Terminator” fantasy, the real problem being mass surveillance and selective targeting by our human “leaders” directed against anyone with the temerity to resist them.

The AI industry, notes Caitlin Johnstone, “is a mix of military technology, mass surveillance technology, and people trying to become billionaires by turning human laziness and narcissism into a chatbot product.”

So much for an AI-driven utopia. They’re even destroying books now and feeding their contents to AI modules. Book shredding has replaced book burning with the goal of creating “smarter” AI modules.

Save your books, everyone, before they’re fed into the maw of Claude and similar AI behemoths.

I remember from “Lost in Space” there was an android that intoned “crush, kill, destroy.” I guess it’s now “slice, scan, shred.” It doesn’t bode well.

Note: No AI programs were consulted in the construction of this rant.

Golden Dome as a Golden Boondoggle

And Perhaps a Golden Ticket to Nuclear War

BILL ASTORE

JUL 29, 2026

Golden Dome, President Trump’s ambitious dangerously escalatory missile defense shield, may cost Americans as much as $18 billion in the next fiscal year. According to my AI friends (perhaps soon to be running Golden Dome under the name of Skynet), here’s where the bulk of the money is slated to go:

  • Missile Warning and Tracking: $6.8 billion to develop Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellite constellations.
  • Space-Based Interceptors (SBIs): $3.2 billion for initial contracts with defense developers like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Anduril Industries.
  • Space Domain Awareness: $1.6 billion specifically to monitor and safeguard the dome’s own network from adversarial threats.
  • Personnel Expansion: Funding to hire 506 full-time civilian employees to accelerate homeland missile defense development. 

What scares me the most about Golden Dome is that it might eventually work — somewhat. Thus it could weaken deterrence and increase the chances of a nuclear exchange.

Allow me to explain. In theory, the U.S. could attack a weaker nuclear state with an incapacitating “first strike,” with Golden Dome being used to intercept the few missiles/warheads remaining to the adversary. This scenario, more than possible under leaders like Trump and Hegseth, might force a cornered adversary to launch everything they have in an all-out strike on the U.S., with the goal of overwhelming whatever system is fielded under the Golden Dome moniker.

Fear of scenarios such as this led to the ABM Treaty that greatly restricted the deployment of missile defense interceptors. The policy of MAD, or mutually assured destruction, was kept in place as a form of deterrence. It’s grotesque but it worked. What would happen if one side with nukes had to worry far less about a nuclear attack because they possessed a shield or dome of sorts?

We laugh to hide the tears …

It’s certainly possible Golden Dome will never prove that effective while wasting colossal sums of money. Indeed, that might be the “best case” scenario. It’s also possible it could prove moderately effective, emboldening a nuclear power in possession of the same to threaten others, even as other nuclear powers, China for example, expand their arsenals and plans for a large-scale first strike.

The sensible way ahead is to scrap this ultra-expensive “dome” and to work toward negotiated reductions in nuclear weapons globally. You don’t need to intercept missiles and warheads if they’re never built.

Nuclear Mass Death

Dyin’ Ain’t Much of a Living

BILL ASTORE

JUL 08, 2026

Mark Twain was right when he said history may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

Consider America’s approach to nuclear weapons. Under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, America’s strategic nuclear triad was modernized at immense cost. One hundred B-1 bombers were built. The stealthy B-2 bomber followed. MX “Peacekeeper” ICBMs were deployed. New Ohio-class nuclear subs armed with Trident missiles were launched. Pershing II and GLCMs (ground-launched cruise missiles) were fielded in Europe. And Reagan presented his idea of a missile defense shield, known as the strategic defense initiative (SDI) or informally as “Star Wars.” All this cost enormous sums of money.

Fortunately, the Pershing IIs and GLCMs were retired under talks that eliminated intermediate-range nuclear missiles. The Peacekeeper missiles are already gone. The B-1s are due to be retired over the next decade and no longer fly nuclear missions. And the Ohio-class submarine force, the most survivable leg of the nuclear triad, remains on station, with just one submarine capable of destroying much of the world.

Air Force B-2 bomber being refueled

The U.S. today possesses an enormous nuclear overkill capacity. The arsenal consists of roughly 5000 nuclear bombs and warheads. Again, just one submarine carries up to 20 Trident II D5 missiles with multiple nuclear warheads, each warhead being far more powerful than the bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. To borrow a line from Daniel Ellsberg, each submarine is capable of 100 Holocausts. They are genocidal weapons to a degree that is unimaginable. By the way, the U.S. has fourteen Ohio-class “boomer” submarines.

Here is where history rhymes. Under yet another tough-talking Republican president, the U.S. today is yet again “modernizing” its nuclear triad while imagining a missile defense shield (now known as “Golden Dome”). The Air Force wants a new nuclear bomber (the B-21 Raider) and ICBM (the Sentinel), and the Navy wants a new ballistic-missile-firing submarine, the Columbia-class.

None of this is really necessary. ICBMs are obsolete; they are static targets and destabilizing ones at that. Bombers are superfluous and besides, the Air Force still has B-52s and B-2s for nuclear missions. Missile shields like “Golden Dome” are easy to conceptualize but impossible to build. They can be fooled by decoys and overwhelmed by an enemy with sufficient warheads (Russia). 

But logic doesn’t matter here. Nor does morality. What matters is money, power, jobs, and the military-industrial-Congressional complex. That’s why history is rhyming here. The MICC will always fight for more ICBMs, more bombers, more submarines because that is its health, its wealth, its reason for being. To the MICC, the nuclear triad really is the holy trinity. It is something to be worshipped and preserved irrespective of cost and logic.

The U.S. should lead the world in reducing the deployment of nuclear weapons. Instead, the U.S. leads in nuclear escalation. And it does so always in the stated cause of “deterrence” when the real reason is the health and wealth of the MICC.

No one really knows how much nuclear triad modernization and the “Golden Dome” will cost; estimates for both reach $3 trillion over the next thirty years. But it’s not just the cost in dollars that matters — it’s the cost to our collective existence. These weapons systems are making the U.S. and the world less safe, less stable, rather than more so. They are possibly the very worst examples of human folly, and that’s truly saying something.

I very much doubt the average American wants more nuclear bombs and missiles, but what we want doesn’t seem to matter. The MICC wants — and it gets what it wants. It does so by scaring us about Russia or China or Iran while selling these genocidal weapons as job-creators. It’s a living, they might say. But as the Outlaw Josey Wales once said, “Dyin’ ain’t much of a living,” especially when you’re talking about murdering most of humanity in a genocidal nuclear war.

We must put a stop to this madness while we still can.

Weapons Are Us

More Guns, Please, Never Mind the Reason

BILL ASTORE

JUN 30, 2026

Almost fifteen years ago, I wrote an article for TomDispatch with the title, “Weapons ‘R’ Us.” It was a play, of course, on Toys ‘R’ Us, echoing the old saw about the difference between men and boys being the price of their toys. Nowadays, I guess “real men” play with F-35s, Ford-class aircraft carriers, Sentinel ICBMs, and the like, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars each year. And if that’s not enough, Americans can always spend billions of dollars more on private weaponry like assault- and sniper rifles. Rather amazingly, there are more firearms than people in America, with the only amendment SCOTUS won’t dare abridge being the Second Amendment.

Back in 2012 I gave a Tomcast interview with Timothy MacBain about my own weapons “addiction”; it started the usual way with toy soldiers, GI Joes, and cap pistols and escalated from there. As a teenager, I built a lot of model military planes, tanks, warships, and the like. All gone now, though I kept and used a few when I was teaching a course on “technology and warfare.”

The military loves to speak of weapons as “investments,” but President Dwight D. Eisenhower was far more honest in calling them a form of theft from those who hunger, from those who need health care, from those who want a better education. Weapons, I think Ike would agree, have a very narrow band of winners, specifically those who profit from making and selling them. They are the real band of (gun-running) brothers, with a few sisters thrown in as well.

If wars were won purely by weapons, America would never lose, such is our commitment to winning through “superior firepower.” But they’re not, so losing has become an American habit.

Speaking of losing, I recently read a terrific article by Patrick Lawrence that argues it’s high time for America to embrace defeat and to learn from it. He’s right about that, but how to tell “winner” Trump that his war against Iran has been a big loser?

Thinking about that led me to make this comment in response to Lawrence’s article:

Yes, but this is America, where the worst insult is to be called a “loser,” and where to criticize even the stupidest war is to be labeled a “defeatist.”

Meanwhile, management gurus speak of “win-win” scenarios, because talk of losing must be avoided at all costs. Even compromise is suspect.

To modify an old expression, if not he who dies with most toys, wins, it seems we in America believe that he who dies with the most weapons, wins.

So, we’ll embrace our weapons–very tightly indeed–before we [ever] embrace defeat.

Bill Astore

4d

Yes, but this is America, where the worst insult is to be called a “loser,” and where to criticize even the stupidest war is to be labeled a “defeatist.”

Meanwhile, management gurus speak of “win-win” scenarios, because talk of losing must be avoided at all costs. Even compromise is suspect.

To modify an old expression, if not he who dies …52

So, no matter how poorly America’s wars go, the demand for weapons continues to rocket upwards. That old “arsenal of democracy” of World War II fame has for the last sixty years or so mutated into merely an arsenal, ever-growing in cost if not in effectiveness.

The F-35, often unavailable to fly, and still very expensive (USAF Photo)

Today’s big-ticket weapons like the F-35 are becoming so expensive, and often so unreliable, that America is almost disarming itself by accident. All the more reason, weapons proponents will say, for America to spend even more on weapons!

Abandon all logic, ye who wish to curb America’s “investment” in more weaponry.

The Iran Obsession

I Wonder If Oil Is Involved?

BILL ASTORE

MAY 27, 2026

I was reading an old Atlantic Monthly from November 2007 and came across this quote:

We’ve got to be patient and committed [in Iraq], but we’ve got to multitask … We’ve got to talk about Iran—Iran is more dangerous than Iraq—and we have got to get the job done in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

That was Rudolph Giuliani, speaking as a Republican presidential candidate in July 2007.

Back then, the saying was that everyone wants to go to Baghdad but that real men want to go to Tehran. Weirdly, neither Iran nor Iraq had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks in 2001. What those countries did have was oil—and lots of it.

The Iran obsession persists, of course, and it’s shared by both political parties. When she ran for president in 2024, Kamala Harris identified Iran as the greatest adversarythe United States faced in the world.

The truth is that neither Iran nor Iraq posed a direct or imminent threat to the USA. What each country possessed was an enormous amount of oil and political leaders who didn’t want to kowtow to U.S. economic imperatives.

A joke I learned circa 1975 involving calculators (fairly new back then) remains revealing of what drives the American obsession with the Middle East. It goes like this: 142 Israelis fight 154 Arabs over 69 oil wells for 5 years. Who wins? Punch 14215469 into your calculator, multiply by 5, then invert your calculator. 

The result, which was amusing when I was about twelve years old:

Shell Oil!

Of course, U.S. and British meddling in Iran dates back to 1953 with the overthrow of its democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh so that British oil interests wouldn’t be threatened by efforts to nationalize Iran’s huge oil reserves.

Which brings me back to 1975 and one of my favorite movies, Three Days of the Condor, and a little honesty about what Americans expect from the CIA. I’ve always loved the speech near the end by CIA deputy director Higgins, played memorably by Cliff Robertson:

Higgins: It’s simple economics. Today it’s oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?

Joe Turner: Ask them?

Higgins: Not now – then! Ask ‘em when they’re running out. Ask ‘em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask ‘em when their engines stop. Ask ‘em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won’t want us to ask ‘em. They’ll just want us to get it for ‘em!

*****

And yet, despite what Higgins says, today the US government isn’t even that effective at stealing the oil, though it is true that Shell Oil and other fossil fuel conglomerates are making a killing as oil and gas prices soar.

Addendum: Shell Oil is now Shell plc or Shell Global. Judging by the Shell quarterly dividend report from the first quarter of this year, things are looking very bright indeed:

Shell delivered strong results enabled by our relentless focus on operational performance in a quarter marked by unprecedented disruption in global energy markets… Last week we announced the acquisition of ARC Resources, accelerating our strategy by adding complementary, high-quality, low-cost liquids and gas assets that we believe will deliver value for decades to come. Today, consistent with our value driven capital allocation philosophy, we are rebalancing our shareholder distributions, with a $3 billion share buyback programme for the next 3 months and a 5% increase in the dividend, in line with our existing 40-50% of CFFO distribution policy.

Excuse the snark, but the real green energy surge, “green” as in money, remains dirty fossil fuels.

AI as a Runaway Bullet Train

Bursting Through the Guardrails

BILL ASTORE

JAN 30, 2026

The AI hype train is here and is speeding ahead like the fastest Japanese bullet train. It’s a “revolution,” and AI is going to change everything and/or doom us all. Or maybe it’ll usher in a glorious utopia? New technologies always seem to mobilize both the doomsayers and the utopian dreamers.

Amazingly, ChatGPT is already recording 800 million weekly active users. Meanwhile, investment in AI races ahead—not without serious implications. Today, I noted these two stories at the New York Times:

Technology

How the A.I. Boom Could Push Up the Price of Your Next PC

A.I. companies are buying up memory chips, causing the prices of those components — which are also used in laptops and smartphones — to soar.

OpenAI in Talks to Raise as Much as $100 Billion

OpenAI’s discussions with Microsoft, Nvidia, Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds and others could value it at $750 billion or more.

So, the demand for chips may inflate the price of your next computer even as investors in AI continue to throw money at its promise.

Given the nature of the corporations and governments making decisions about AI and its future, I’m not optimistic for an AI-driven utopia. Count me among the (guarded) pessimists.

Why? Here’s one snippet I gleaned from the New York Times the other day:

28,000,000,000

— That’s how many liters of water Microsoft said it would use for its data centers in 2030, according a report obtained by The Times. The company had promised to cut its water use, but big tech companies are guzzling water during the A.I. frenzy.

That’s an enormous quantity of water when water scarcity is a major issue for our climate change-driven future.

Along with that, I saw where the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been to nuclear Armageddon. In their statement, the scientists cited the rise of AI and its application to weapons and war as one reason for the clock’s creep toward midnight.

So, what gives with this “AI frenzy”? My guess is that AI is being harnessed by the powerful for their purposes. They’re not investing big money to help the little people. This is not to say that every AI application is nefarious and evil. But I think the general trend will be AI-driven “efficiency,” meaning lots of people losing their jobs, along with AI-driven surveillance and control, in the name of greater “safety and security,” naturally.

One thing is certain: we shouldn’t blame the technology. Whatever AI is or becomes, it will be a manifestation of us—but, more worryingly, a manifestation of the agendas of the capitalists, the corporatists, and the warmongers among us, those who are always seeking dominance, even “full-spectrum” dominance, including AI and everything it’s capable of, “guardrails” be damned.

Readers, what do you make of all this?

Making Armageddon Great Again

A Mushroom Cloud, A Smoking Gun

BILL ASTORE

JAN 15, 2026

Recently, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists featured a fiction contest: “Write Before Midnight.” I sent in an entry, which, sad to say, didn’t win. (The winners can be found here.) But that’s OK: I enjoyed writing something other than my usual essays. My “losing” entry to the contest follows. (Re-reading it, it’s perhaps too much like a memoir rather than fiction.)

*****

Making Armageddon Great Again

And so the missiles are finally here. Long ago, I thought I’d put nuclear war in the rearview mirror. I never expected to see a mushroom cloud through my windshield, rising in the near distance.

I’d seen something like it before—Russian nuclear missiles flying over the North Pole on their way to America—but that was fifty years ago. I was a young lieutenant then, working in the Missile Warning Center deep inside Cheyenne Mountain. Those missile tracks weren’t real; they were part of a war game, fed into our computers on magnetic tape. The exercise ended with a simulated Armageddon, soundless, screamless.

Even so, when the tracks terminated at U.S. cities, we all went quiet. Sitting two thousand feet under granite, staring at monochrome monitors, we imagined those cities vaporized in an instant. Millions dead, incinerated in a heartbeat. The thought chilled us.

I was 24 then, serving my country against the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, near the tail end of the Cold War. The first Cold War, I should add—as opposed to the “new” one we’ve been trapped in for the past two decades. Well, it’s plenty hot now. Thermonuclear hot.

I was far enough from my city’s ground zero to survive the initial blast and heat. But at 74, I know these are my last days. Fallout will finish me—unless I take care of it myself first.

I now know for certain that, after an unimaginably destructive nuclear exchange (a nice euphemism, isn’t it?), the living will envy the dead. For now, I’m one of the living, caught in a land of the dead.

How did it come to this? We always ask that, don’t we? How did I let a 50-year-old nightmare scenario on magnetic tape become real? Couldn’t I have done something—anything—to stop it?

Even now, I like to think I could have. There was nothing inevitable about the “new” Cold War or its culmination in MAD—mutual assured destruction. I just wasn’t mad enough to resist it with the ferocity required. I gave my quiet consent to the warmongers, the death-wishers, the ones who talk tough about “big-boy pants,” the ones haunted by missile envy and mindless fear. The ones who blow hardest just before they decide to blow up the world.

I saw it coming. So did many others. I wrote against the “new” Cold War. I denounced so-called investments in new nuclear weapons. I warned about militarizing space, how our early warning satellites and sensors could be blinded. I cautioned that President Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile shield might make nuclear war more likely. None of it mattered. Money spoke louder than I ever could—talk of jobs and the promise of profits outweighed any argument I could muster.

And so here I am, facing darkness—smoke, ash, soot blotting out the sun. I’ve stocked enough supplies to last a couple of weeks, but what’s the point? I have no desire to navigate a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

Once upon a time, I was an Air Force historian, a captain, teaching cadets about the making and use of the atomic bomb. That was 1992—45 years ago. Where does the time go? We even took the cadets to Los Alamos, the birthplace of the bomb, and then on to the Trinity test site.

Back then I was oddly optimistic. The Soviet Union had collapsed. Politicians were talking about peace dividends. Some even hinted that America might become a normal country in normal times. Normalcy! Imagine that today.

I remember a somewhat glum spokesman at Los Alamos talking about reinventing the lab—shifting to peaceful purposes, maybe consumer electronics like VCRs and CD players, competing with Japan. I was skeptical. Nuclear physicists designing camcorders and video games? A longshot—but better than cranking out new warheads and bombs.

At Trinity, what struck me most was the absence of the tower from which the “gadget” had been suspended. Vaporized instantly. Only twisted rebar remained at the base. And that had been a baby nuke—mere kilotons compared to the megatons in our arsenal. I tried to impress this on the cadets, some of whom might someday be ordered to launch such weapons. But who can really picture megatons of destruction, repeated again and again and again?

A sharp-eyed cadet found a sliver of trinitite. For some reason, I had to touch it, briefly, radioactivity be damned. This tiny fragment, this ghost of Trinity, made it all seem real. As a few atomic tourists walked around the scrub desert in masks, fearful still of breathing in radioactive particles, I thought of Oppenheimer’s god of death, the destroyer of worlds. That god has finally come for us—bringing mass death just as Oppie knew he would.

Now, back in the present, at least I’ve filled both bathtubs with water. A small reserve. At Cheyenne Mountain, there was a pond underground, a kind of giant bathtub, complete with a rowboat, so I was told. Maybe Charon did the rowing. We used to joke that boat and reservoir was the Navy’s presence in our Air Force-run bunker. I never saw that boat or pond. I wish I had.

There’s a lot I wish I’d seen. I thought there’d be more time. Next month, next year, next life.

Next life. That’s what I cling to now. I fought the good fight. I tried to argue for disarmament as the only sane option—for America, for humanity, for the entire living breathing beautiful planet of ours. But others thought differently. Some were simply making too much money, making Armageddon great again.

So don’t judge me for thinking about the unthinkable. I know suicide is a mortal sin for us Catholics. But my Ruger 9mm sits by my side. Twelve rounds in the magazine—but I’ll only need the one in the chamber.

Yes, I’ve seen the mushroom cloud. And soon, quite soon, there’ll be a smoking gun.

Copyright 2026 William J. Astore.

Apocalypse Soon?

Returning a Final Time to Cheyenne Mountain

BILL ASTORE

DEC 02, 2025

Hello Everyone: In 2007, I was fed up with the lies of the Bush/Cheney administration and the way civilian leadership was using the bemedaled chest of David Petraeus to deflect blame for that disastrous war. I knew then the “success” of the surge was an illusion, or, as Petraeus put it back then, “fragile” and “reversible” (and so it proved to be). I wrote an op-ed about how we the people had to save the military from itself and its own self-serving illusions. No one was interested in what I had to say; no one, that is, except Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch. And so that led to my first “tomgram.”

Eighteen years later, I’ve reached the unlikely number of 115 essays for TomDispatch, something neither Tom nor I ever expected. And just about all those essays have been introduced by a mini-essay by Tom himself. It’s been a remarkable partnership—it’s what got my career as a writer and essayist (rather than a traditional historian) started.

This piece, my 115th, returns again to Cheyenne Mountain and nuclear war. I first wrote about my time “in the mountain” in 2008; seventeen years later, I’m even more dismayed at (and disgusted by) my country’s newfound enthusiasm for nuclear weapons and their “recapitalization.” Read on!

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It’s been 20 years since I retired from the Air Force and 40 years since I first entered Cheyenne Mountain, America’s nuclear redoubt at the southern end of the Front Range that includes Pikes Peak in Colorado. So it was with some nostalgia that I read a recent memo from General Kenneth Wilsbach, the new Chief of Staff of the Air Force (CSAF). Along with the usual warrior talk, the CSAF vowed to “relentlessly advocate” for the new Sentinel ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) and the B-21 Raider stealth bomber. While the Air Force often speaks of “investing” in new nukes, this time the CSAF opted for “recapitalization,” a remarkably bloodless term for the creation of a whole new generation of genocidal thermonuclear weapons and their delivery systems.

(Take a moment to think about that word, “creation,” applied to weapons of mass destruction. Raised Catholic, I learned that God created the universe out of nothing. By comparison, nuclear creators aren’t gods, they’re devils, for their “creation” may end with the destruction of everything. Small wonder J. Robert Oppenheimer musedthat he’d become death, the destroyer of worlds, after the first successful atomic blast in 1945.)

In my Cheyenne Mountain days, circa 1985, the new “must have” bomber was the B-1 Lancer and the new “must have” ICBM was the MX Peacekeeper. If you go back 20 to 30 years earlier than that, it was the B-52 and the Minuteman. And mind you, my old service “owns” two legs of America’s nuclear triad. (The Navy has the third with its nuclear submarines armed with Trident II missiles.) And count on one thing: it will never willingly give them up. It will always “relentlessly advocate” for the latest ICBM and nuclear-capable bomber, irrespective of need, price, strategy, or above all else their murderous, indeed apocalyptic, capabilities.

At this moment, Donald Trump’s America has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads and bombs of various sorts, while Vladimir Putin’s Russia has roughly 5,500 of the same. Together, they represent overkill of an enormity that should be considered essentially unfathomable. Any sane person would minimally argue for serious reductions in nuclear weaponry on this planet. The literal salvation of humanity may depend on it. But don’t tell that to the generals and admirals, or to the weapons-producing corporations that get rich building such weaponry, or to members of Congress who have factories producing such weaponry and bases housing them in their districts.

So, here we are in a world in which the Pentagon plans to spend another $1.7 trillion(and no, that is not a typo!) “recapitalizing” its nuclear triad, and so in a world that is guaranteed to remain haunted forever by a possible future doomsday, the specter of nuclear mushroom clouds, and a true “end-times” catastrophe.

I Join AF Space Command Only to Find Myself Under 2,000 Feet of Granite

My first military assignment in 1985 was at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado with Air Force Space Command. That put me in America’s nuclear command post during the last few years of the Cold War. I also worked in the Space Surveillance Center and on a battle staff that brought me into the Missile Warning Center. So, I was exposed, in a relatively modest way (if anything having to do with nuclear weapons can ever be considered “modest”), to what nuclear war would actually be like and forced to think about it in a way most Americans don’t.

Each time I journeyed into Cheyenne Mountain, I walked or rode through a long tunnel carved out of granite. The buildings inside were mounted on gigantic springs (yes, springs!) that were supposed to absorb the shock of any nearby hydrogen bomb blast in a future war with the Soviet Union. Massive blast doors that looked like they belonged on the largest bank vault in the universe were supposed to keep us safe, though in a nuclear war they might only have ensured our entombment. They were mostly kept open, but every now and then they were closed for a military exercise.

The author (right) with Tom Engelhardt

I was a “space systems test analyst.” The Space Surveillance Center ran on a certain software program that needed periodic testing and evaluation and I helped test the computer software that kept track of all objects orbiting the Earth. Back then, there were just over 5,000 of them. (Now, that number’s more like 45,000 and space is a lot more crowded — perhaps too crowded.)

Anyhow, what I remember most vividly were military exercises where we’d run through different potentially world-ending scenarios. (Think of the movie War Gameswith Matthew Broderick.) One exercise simulated a nuclear attack on the United States. No, it wasn’t like some Hollywood production. We just had monochrome computer displays with primitive graphics, but you could certainly see missile tracks emerging from the Soviet Union, crossing the North Pole, and ending at American cities.

Even though there were no fancy (fake) explosions and no other special effects, simply realizing what was possible and how we would visualize it if it were actually to happen was, as I’m sure you can imagine, a distinctly sobering experience and not one I’ve ever forgotten.

That “war game” should have shaken me up more than it did, however. At the time, we had a certain amount of fatalism about the possibility of nuclear war, something captured in the posters of the era that told you what to do in case of a nuclear attack. The final step was basically to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. That was indeed my attitude.

Rather than obsess about Armageddon, I submerged myself in routine. There was a certain job to be done, procedures to be carried out, discipline to adhere to. Remember, of course, that this was also the era of the rise of the nuclear freeze protest movement that was demanding the U.S. and the Soviet Union reach an agreement to halt further testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons. (If only, of course!) In addition, this was the time of the hit film The Day After, which tried to portray the aftermath of a nuclear war in the United States. In fact, on a midnight shift in Cheyenne Mountain, I even read Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, which envisioned the Cold War gone hot, a Third World War gone nuclear.

Of course, if we had thought about nuclear war every minute of every day, we might indeed have been cowering under our sheets. Unfortunately, as a society, except in rare moments like the nuclear freeze movement one, we neither considered nor generally grasped what nuclear war was all about (even though nine countries now possess such weaponry and the likelihood of such a war only grows). Unfortunately, that lack of comprehension (and so protest) is one big reason why nuclear war remains so chillingly possible.

If anything, such a war has been eerily normalized in our collective consciousness and we’ve become remarkably numb to and fatalistic about it. One characteristic of that reality was the anesthetizing language that we used then (and still use) when it came to nuclear matters. We in the military spoke in acronyms or jargon about “flexible response,” “deterrence,” and what was then known as “mutually assured destruction” (or the wiping out of everything). In fact, we had a whole vocabulary of different words and euphemisms we could use so as not to think too deeply about the unthinkable or our possible role in making it happen.

My Date With Trinity

After leaving Cheyenne Mountain and getting a master’s degree, I co-taught a course on the making and use of the atomic bomb at the Air Force Academy. That was in 1992, and we actually took the cadets on a field trip to Los Alamos where the first nuclear weapon had largely been developed. Then we went on to the Trinity test sitein Alamogordo, New Mexico, where, of course, that first atomic device was tested and that, believe me, was an unforgettable experience. We walked around and saw what was left of the tower where Robert Oppenheimer and crew suspended the “gadget” (nice euphemism!) for testing that bomb on July 16, 1945, less than a month before two atomic bombs would be dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroying both of them and killing perhaps 200,000 people. Basically (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn), nothing’s left of that tower except for its concrete base and a couple of twisted pieces of metal. It certainly does make you reflect on the sheer power of such weaponry. It was then and remains a distinctly haunted landscape and walking around it a truly sobering experience.

And when I toured the Los Alamos lab right after the collapse of the other great superpower of that moment, the Soviet Union, it was curious how glum the people I met there were. The mood of the scientists was like: hey, maybe I’m going to have to find another job because we’re not going to be building all these nuclear weapons anymore, not with the Soviet Union gone. It was so obviously time for America to cash in its “peace dividends” and the scientists’ mood reflected that.

Now, just imagine that 33 years after I took those cadets there, Los Alamos is once again going gangbusters, as our nation plans to “invest” another $1.7 trillion in a “modernized” nuclear triad (imagine what that means in terms of ultimate destruction!) that we (and the rest of the world) absolutely don’t need. To be blunt, today that outrages me. It angers me that all of us, whether those like me who served in uniform or your average American taxpayer, have sacrificed so much to create genocidal weaponry and a distinctly world-ending arsenal. Worse yet, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we didn’t even try to change course. And now the message is: Let’s spend staggering amounts of our tax dollars on even more apocalyptic weaponry. It’s insanity and, no question about it, it’s also morally obscene.

The Glitter of Nuclear Weapons

That ongoing obsession with total destruction, ultimate annihilation, reflects the fact that the United States is led by moral midgets. During the Vietnam War years, the infamous phrase of the time was that the U.S. military had to “destroy the town to save it” (from communism, of course). And for 70 years now, America’s leaders have tacitly threatened to order the destruction of the world to save it from a rival power like Russia or China. Indeed, nuclear war plans in the early 1960s already envisioned a massive strike against Russia and China, with estimates of the dead put at 600 million, or “100 Holocausts,” as Daniel Ellsberg of Vietnam War fame so memorably put it.

Take it from this retired officer: you simply can’t trust the U.S. military with that sort of destructive power. Indeed, you can’t trust anyone with that much power at their fingertips. Consider nuclear weapons akin to the One Ring of Power in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Anyone who puts that ring on is inevitably twisted and corrupted.

Freeman Dyson, a physicist of considerable probity, put it well to documentarian Jon Else in his film The Day After Trinity. Dyson confessed to his own “ring of power” moment:

“I felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

I’ve felt something akin to that as well. When I wore a military uniform, I was in some sense a captive to power. The military both captures and captivates. There’s an allure of power in the military, since you have a lot of destructive power at your disposal.

Of course, I wasn’t a B-1 bomber pilot or a missile-launch officer for ICBMs, but even so, when you’re part of something that’s so immensely, even world-destructively powerful, believe me, it does have an allure to it. And I don’t think we’re usually fully aware of how captivating that can be and how much you can want to be a part of that.

Even after their service, many veterans still want to go up in a warplane again or take a tour of a submarine, a battleship, or an aircraft carrier for nostalgic reasons, of course, but also because you want to regain that captivating feeling of being so close to immense — even world-ending — power.

The saying that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” may never be truer than when it comes to nuclear war. We even have expressions like “use them or lose them” to express how ICBMs should be “launched on warning” of a nuclear attack before they can be destroyed by an incoming enemy strike. So many years later, in other words, the world remains on even more of a nuclear hair-trigger, the pistol loaded and cocked to our collective heads, just waiting for news that will push us over the edge, that will make those trigger fingers of ours too itchy to resist the urge to put too much pressure on that nuclear trigger.

No matter how many bunkers we build, no matter that the world’s biggest bunker tunneled out of a mountain, the one I was once in, still exists, nothing will save us if we allow the glitter of nuclear weapons to flash into preternatural thermonuclear brightness.

Copyright 2025 William J. Astore

Nuclear Force “Recapitalization”

An Abomination of the English Language

BILL ASTORE

NOV 12, 2025

Just when you thought the assault on the English language couldn’t be more severe, I came across a new abomination in a recent memo (11/3/25) signed by the Chief of Staff of the Air Force (CSAF).

The CSAF expressed his commitment to nuclear force “recapitalization,” meaning that he fully supports the B-21 Raider and the Sentinel ICBM, which will cost more than $500 billion over the next two decades. He vowed he’d “relentlessly advocate” for them.

“Recapitalization”: What a word to describe more genocidal nuclear weapons! 

Typically, the Air Force refers to “modernization” or “investment” when it comes to new nukes. This latest euphemism is an even more extreme example of bureaucratese and business-speak. 

We’re just “recapitalizing” our nuclear forces, folks. Nothing to see here, move along.

One thing is certain. The new CSAF, with his talk of “recapitalization,” will make the smoothest of transitions to industry once he retires from the military.

It’s time for recapitalization! (Red sky in morning, America take warning.)

Above is an idealized illustration of a Sentinel ICBM soon after launch. Don’t think about the aftermath of thermonuclear war. As NBC Pitchman Brian Williams once said, it’s important to be guided by the beauty of our weapons.