Tag: ICBM

Earth Day and Nukes

W.J. Astore

Stop the Madness and Save the Planet

Today is Earth Day: a good day to commit ourselves to saving the earth from the ravages of nuclear war. Global warming may get us in the long term, but nothing will kill the planet quicker than a nuclear war.

I’ve written a lot about the folly, the greed, the absurdity, of yet another round of “investment” in nuclear weapons.  There’s no need for an updated nuclear triad when the present triad is more than enough to destroy the earth and probably several other planets as well.

America’s nuclear triad currently consists of land-based ICBMs (Minuteman III), bombers like the B-1 and B-2, and submarines that carry nuclear-tipped missiles.  The Pentagon plans to “modernize” all these “legs” of the triad at a possible total cost of $2 trillion over the next 30 years.

First off, land-based ICBMs and nuclear bombers are no longer needed. The ICBMs are especially vulnerable to attack, putting pressure on DC decisionmakers to launch them quickly in case of a warning (perhaps false) of a nuclear attack against their silos.

All the U.S. truly needs for deterrence is the current Ohio-class sub force with its Trident II missiles. That force can be modernized without an entirely new class of sub being built, which is perhaps why we’re seeing ads about building new submarines as “job-creators.”

In the USA, more nukes are “justified” most often by threat inflation (or even threat creation) and military Keynesianism—morally dubious claims that jobs are created by building genocidal weapons and doomsday machines.

Speaking of America’s submarines and their missiles: Each Trident II D5 missile has up to 8 warheads, with up to 20 missiles per submarine.  One submarine could conceivably destroy 160 targets, with each of those warheads having a “yield” of somewhere between 5 and 25 Hiroshima bombs.  That arsenal, if launched, could very well tip the world into nuclear winter while killing tens of millions of people outright. A nuclear winter would kill billions. From one sub! And the Navy has 14 of them!

Senator George McGovern in 1963 complained about the absurd nuclear “overkill” the U.S. possesses.  Just over 60 years ago, some members of Congress vowed to do something to stop the madness.  And then came Vietnam … and so many other wars and rumors of war.

We Americans are so easily distracted by war and propagandized into believing that safety comes from swinging the biggest nuclear club.

Anyone who thinks about nuclear weapons and war games in the abstract should watch this scene from “Terminator II.”  It’s perhaps the best, most visceral, image of what one nuclear bomb would produce.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/SuTmLvPzkmQ?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

“There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.”  The more nuclear weapons we build, the darker our fate becomes, and the closer we come to terminating ourselves and our planet.

On this Earth Day, the U.S. should commit itself to a “no first use” policy with respect to using nuclear weapons and to total nuclear disarmament, to be achieved over the next 20-30 years.

Something like a JFK-like vow is needed here: Before the decade is out, America should commit itself to halving its nuclear forces, working with other countries on the goal of nuclear disarmament.

Only the future of humanity, as well as that of the earth and all living things, is at stake here.

Nuclear Firecrackers for the Fourth of July

W.J. Astore

Did you know the U.S. is developing a new land-based ICBM? That’s intercontinental ballistic missile, and back in the 1980s we pretty much considered them obsolete in the Air Force. That’s because they’re the least survivable “leg” of the nuclear triad, which consists of ICBMs, nuclear bombers like the B-2 stealth, and submarines like the current Ohio-class ones armed with Trident missiles.

But never mind all that. When I visited Los Alamos National Laboratory (home of the Manhattan Project) as an Air Force captain in the spring of 1992, the mood there was glum. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Los Alamos was facing major cuts in funding, since back then we naively believed there was going to be a “peace dividend” and the U.S. would return to being a normal country in normal times. We wouldn’t have to “invest,” as our military likes to say, in more nukes. We had plenty already; indeed, more than enough to end life on earth.

But that was then and this is now and the Biden administration, joining the previous Trump and Obama administrations, is “investing” up to $1.7 trillion over the next thirty years in more nuclear weapons to destroy the earth. It’s a job-creator, don’t you know. And rural areas with nuclear missile bases, like Wyoming and North Dakota, don’t want to lose jobs or the billions in federal dollars that flow to their states in the stated cause of nuclear deterrence. Deterring who or what is uncertain.

Americans love things that blow up while lighting up the sky and causing the heavens to glow. We witness it every year at this time. Let’s just hope the nuclear firecrackers stay stashed away. Some firecrackers are too dangerous to contemplate.

I remember back in 1992 walking around the desert at Alamogordo, New Mexico, site of the first atomic blast that preceded Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There’s not much left of the tower where the bomb sat: just the concrete base and some twisted metal. Walking around the area, you can still find sand that’s been fused into glass by the heat of the atomic blast. I didn’t take any home with me as it’s still radioactive. People were walking around with masks before masks became a thing with Covid. It was an eerie experience.

We don’t spend much time, if any, on July 4th thinking about all our weapons that are designed with great care and ingenuity to blow up and kill, whether it’s one person or millions (or perhaps even the planet itself). But I urge you to set aside a few minutes to read Tom Engelhardt’s latest article at TomDispatch.com. He writes about his own eerie and disturbing experience visiting Japan and Hiroshima and thinking about the unthinkable.

Here’s the link: https://tomdispatch.com/an-all-american-horror-story/

Isn’t it high time we finally ended our distinctly American nuclear horror story?

Please — no nuclear firecrackers

How Do You Justify A $750 Billion Budget?

missiles
Missile Envy

W.J. Astore

I grew up on a steady diet of threat inflation.  Before I was born, bomber and missile “gaps” had been falsely touted as showing the Soviet Union was ahead of the U.S. in developing nuclear-capable weaponry (the reverse was true).  But those lies, which vastly exaggerated Soviet capabilities, perfectly served the needs of the military-industrial complex (hereafter, the Complex) in the USA.  Another example of threat inflation, common when I was a kid, was the Domino Theory, the idea that, if South Vietnam fell to communism, the entire region of Southeast Asia would fall as well, including Thailand and perhaps even countries like the Philippines.  Inflating the danger of communism was always a surefire method to promote U.S. defense spending and the interests of the Pentagon.

When I was in college, one book that opened my eyes was Andrew Cockburn’s “The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine.”  James Fallows’s “National Defense” was another book I read in those days, together with Helen Caldicott’s “Missile Envy.”  Early in the Reagan years, I recall those old charts that displayed Soviet ICBMs as being bigger than American ICBMs, as if missile size was everything.  The message was clear: the Soviets have more missiles, and they’re bigger!  Yet what really mattered was the accuracy and reliability of those missiles, areas where the U.S. had a decisive edge.  U.S. nuclear forces were also far more survivable than their Soviet counterparts, but such details were lost on most Americans.

Throughout my life, the U.S. “defense” establishment has consistently inflated the dangers presented by foreign powers, which brings me to the current Pentagon budget for 2020, which may reach $750 billion.  How to justify such an immense sum?  A large dollop of threat inflation might help…

With the Islamic State allegedly defeated in Syria and other terrorist forces more nuisances than existential threats, with the Afghan War apparently winding down (only 14,000 U.S. troops are deployed there) and with Trump professing a “love” fest with Kim Jong-un, where are today’s (and tomorrow’s) big threats?  Iran isn’t enough.  The only threats that seem big enough to justify colossal military spending are Russia and China.  Hence the new “cold war” we keep hearing about, which drives a “requirement” for big spending on lucrative weapons systems like new aircraft carriers, new fighters and bombers, newer and better nuclear warheads and missiles, and so forth.

Which brings me to the alleged Russian collusion story involving Trump.  As we now know, the Mueller Report found no collusion, but was that really the main point of the investigation and all the media hysteria?  The latter succeeded in painting Vladimir Putin and the Russians as enemies in pursuit of the death of American democracy.  Meanwhile Trump, who’d campaigned with some idea of a rapprochement with Russia, was driven by the investigation to take harsher stances against Russia, if only to prove he wasn’t a “Putin puppet.”  The result: most Americans today see Russia as a serious threat, even though the Russians spend far less on wars and weaponry than the U.S. does.

Threat inflation is nothing new, of course.  Dwight D. Eisenhower recognized it and did his best to control it in the 1950s, but even Ike had only limited success.  Other presidents, lacking Ike’s military experience and gravitas, have most frequently surrendered to the Complex.  The last president who tried with some consistency to control the Complex was Jimmy Carter, but the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian hostage crisis, and his own political fortunes drove him to launch a major military buildup, which was then accelerated by Reagan until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the early 1990s, I briefly heard about a peace dividend and America returning to being a normal country (i.e. anti-imperial) in normal times, but ambition and greed reared their ugly heads, and U.S. leaders became enamored with military power.  Rather than receding, America’s global empire grew, with no peace dividends forthcoming.  The attacks on 9/11 led the Bush/Cheney administration to double down on military action in its “global war on terror,” leading to disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that further served to engorge the Complex with money and power.

Today, faced with a debilitating national debt of $22 trillion and infrastructure that’s aptly described as “crumbling,” you’d think U.S. leaders would finally seek a peace dividend to lower our debt and rebuild our roads, bridges, dams, and related infrastructure.  But the Complex (including Congress, of course) is addicted to war and weapons spending, aided as ever by threat inflation and its close cousin, fearmongering about invading aliens at the border.

And there you have it: a $750 billion military budget sucking up more than sixty percent of discretionary spending by the federal government.  As Ike said, this is no way to live humanely, but it is a way for humanity to hang from a cross of iron.