{"id":254316,"date":"2024-02-12T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2024-02-12T12:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=254316"},"modified":"2024-02-10T07:10:17","modified_gmt":"2024-02-10T07:10:17","slug":"full-speed-ahead-on-the-global-titanic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/02\/full-speed-ahead-on-the-global-titanic\/","title":{"rendered":"Full Speed Ahead on the Global Titanic"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mark 5 Nuclear Bomb by Kelly Michals is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 \/ Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

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Going Along with the Utter Madness of Nuclear Weapons<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

8 Feb 2024<\/em> – Yes, the\u00a0Doomsday Clock<\/a>\u00a0keeps ticking \u2014 it\u2019s now at 90 seconds to midnight, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists<\/em> \u2014 but the ultimate time bomb never gets the attention that it deserves. Even as the possibility of nuclear annihilation looms, this century\u2019s many warning signs retain the status of Cassandras.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Anti-Ballistic Missile<\/a>,\u00a0Open Skies<\/a>,\u00a0and\u00a0Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces<\/a>\u00a0treaties. And despite promising otherwise, Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden did nothing to revive them.<\/p>\n

Under the buzzword \u201cmodernization,\u201d the American government, a thermonuclear colossus, spent\u00a0$51 billion<\/a>\u00a0last year alone updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that\u2019s set to continue for decades to come. \u201cModernizing and maintaining current nuclear warheads and infrastructure is estimated to cost $1.7 trillion through Fiscal Year 2046,\u201d the office of Senator Edward Markey (D-MA)\u00a0pointed out<\/a>, \u201cwhile the Congressional Budget Office anticipates that current nuclear modernization would cost $494 billion through Fiscal Year 2028.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/em>: $13.3 billion.<\/p>\n

Militarism\u2019s overall mega-thievery from humanity has long been extreme, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower\u00a0made clear<\/a>\u00a0in a 1953 speech:<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery 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\u2026 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Nuclear Complex and \u201cCrackpot Realism\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the case of budgets for nuclear arms, the huge price tags are \u2014 in the most absolute sense imaginable \u2014 markers for a sustained, systemic, headlong rush toward\u00a0omnicide<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Take, for instance, the recent news on cost overruns for the ballyhooed\u00a0Sentinel land-based missile system<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe U.S. Air Force\u2019s new intercontinental ballistic missile program is at risk of blowing past its initial $96 billion cost estimate by so much that the overruns may trigger a review on whether to terminate the project,\u201d Bloomberg News\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0in mid-December. Since then, the estimated overruns have only continued to soar. Last month, Northrop Grumman disclosed that the per-missile cost of the program had climbed by \u201cat least 37 percent,\u201d reaching $162 million \u2014 and, as Breaking Defense\u00a0noted<\/a>, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would need to \u201ccertify the program to stave off its cancellation.\u201d<\/p>\n

At one level, cancellation would vindicate the approach taken by disarmament-oriented groups a couple of years ago when they tried to stop the creation of the Sentinel by arguing that it would be a \u201cmoney pit missile<\/a>.\u201d But at a deeper level, the cost argument \u2014 while potentially a winner for blocking the Sentinel \u2014 is a loser when it comes to reducing the dangers of nuclear war, which ICBMs uniquely boost as the land-based part of this nation\u2019s nuclear triad.<\/p>\n

As Daniel Ellsberg and I\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0the Nation<\/em>\u00a0in 2021, \u201cIf reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority should be to remove the triad\u2019s ground-based leg \u2014 not modernize it.\u201d Eliminating ICBMs would be a crucial step when it comes to decreasing those dangers, because \u201cunlike the nuclear weapons on submarines or bombers, the land-based missiles are vulnerable to attack and could present the commander in chief with a sudden use-them-or-lose-them choice.\u201d That\u2019s why ICBMs are on hair-trigger alert and why defeating just the Sentinel would be a truly Pyrrhic victory if the purported need for such land-based missiles is reaffirmed in the process.<\/p>\n

In theory, blocking the Sentinel by decrying it as too expensive could be a step toward shutting down ICBMs entirely. In practice, unfortunately, the cost argument has routinely led to an insistence that the current Minuteman III ICBMs could simply be upgraded and continue to serve just as well \u2014 only reinforcing the assumption that ICBMs are needed in the first place.<\/p>\n

The author of the pathbreaking 2022 study \u201cThe Real Cost of ICBMs<\/a>,\u201d Emma Claire Foley, is now a colleague of mine at\u00a0RootsAction.org<\/a>, where she coordinates the\u00a0Defuse Nuclear War<\/a>\u00a0coalition\u2019s new\u00a0campaign to eliminate ICBMs<\/a>. \u201cNews of dramatic cost overruns on the Sentinel program is unsurprising, but I don\u2019t think that in itself should encourage disarmament advocates,\u201d she told me recently. \u201cCancellation of the Sentinel program does not equal a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons, or the risk of nuclear war. It will take an organized mass movement to make good on this opportunity to meaningfully reduce the risk of nuclear war.\u201d<\/p>\n

The re-emerging ICBM controversy is yet another high-stakes example of the kind of gauntlet that disarmament advocates regularly face in official Washington, where presenting an analysis grounded in sanity is almost certain to be viewed as \u201cnot realistic.\u201d On the other hand, when it comes to nuclear issues, accommodating to \u201ccrackpot realism<\/a>\u201d is a precondition for being taken seriously by the movers and shakers on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch.<\/p>\n

Such accommodation involves adjusting to a magnitude of systemic insanity almost beyond comprehension. Disarmament advocates are often confronted with a tacit choice between seeming unserious to the nuclear priesthood and its adherents or pushing for fairly minor adjustments in what Daniel Ellsberg, in the title of his final landmark book, dubbed all too accurately\u00a0The Doomsday Machine<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

This country\u2019s anti-nuclear and disarmament groups have scant presence in the mainstream media. And the more forthright they are in directly challenging the government\u2019s nonstop nuclear recklessness \u2014 with results that could include billions of deaths from \u201cnuclear winter<\/a>\u201d \u2014 the less media access they\u2019re apt to get. When President Biden\u00a0reneged<\/a>\u00a0on his 2020 campaign pledge to adopt a no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons, for instance, critical blowback in the media was meager and fleeting. Little news coverage occurred when a small number of members of Congress went out of their way to object.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately,\u201d Markey\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0in a speech on the Senate floor two years ago, \u201cour American democracy and Russia\u2019s autocracy do share one major thing in common: Both our systems give the United States and Russian presidents the godlike powers known as sole authority to end life on the planet as we know it by ordering a nuclear first strike.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nuclear Madness and Psychic Numbing<\/strong><\/p>\n

Any nuclear first strike would likely lead to a full-scale nuclear war. And the science is clear that a \u201cnuclear winter<\/a>\u201d would indeed follow \u2014 in Ellsberg\u2019s\u00a0words<\/a>, \u201ckilling harvests worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on earth. It probably wouldn\u2019t cause extinction. We\u2019re so adaptable. Maybe 1% of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98% or 99% would not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such a steep plunge in planetary temperatures would exceed the worst prognoses for the effects of climate change, even if in the other direction, temperature-wise. But leaders of the climate movement rarely even mention the capacity of nuclear arsenals to destroy the planet\u2019s climate in a different way from global warming. That omission reflects the ongoing triumph of nuclear madness and the \u201cpsychic numbing<\/a>\u201d that accompanies it.<\/p>\n

During the more than three-quarters of a century since August 1945, when the U.S. government dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear genie has escaped from the bottle to eight other countries \u2014 Russia, France, the United Kingdom, China, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea \u2014 all now brandishing their own ultimate weapons of mass destruction. And the biggest nuclear powers have continuously undermined the\u00a0Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Key dynamics have scarcely changed since, in 2006, the Centre for International Governance Innovation published a cogent analysis that\u00a0concluded<\/a>: \u201cEurope and North America are busy championing nuclear weapons as the ultimate security trump card and the preeminent emblem of political gravitas, thereby building a political\/security context that is increasingly hostile to non-proliferation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Barack Obama before him, Joe Biden promised some much-needed changes in nuclear policies during his successful quest to win the White House, but once in office \u2014\u00a0as with Obama\u2019s pledges<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 those encouraging vows turned out to be so much smoke. The administration\u2019s long-awaited\u00a0Nuclear Posture Review<\/a> (NPR), issued in October 2022, was largely the usual dose of nuclear madness. \u201cAlthough Joe Biden during his presidential election campaign spoke strongly in favor of adopting no-first-use and sole-purpose policies, the NPR explicitly rejects both for now,\u201d the Federation of American Scientists\u00a0lamented<\/a>. \u201cFrom an arms control and risk reduction perspective, the NPR is a disappointment. Previous efforts to reduce nuclear arsenals and the role that nuclear weapons play have been subdued by renewed strategic competition abroad and opposition from defense hawks at home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stymied by the Biden administration and Congress, many organizations and activists working on nuclear-weapons issues were heartened by the blockbuster movie\u00a0Oppenheimer<\/em>,\u00a0promoted<\/a>\u00a0from the outset as an epic thriller about \u201cJ. Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.\u201d For several months before the film\u2019s release last July, activists prepared to use it as a springboard for wider public discussion of nuclear weapons. The film did indeed make a big splash and sparked more public discussion of nukes in the United States than had occurred in perhaps decades. The movie had notably stunning production values. Unfortunately, its human values were less impressive, especially since people on the receiving end of the scientific brilliance at Los Alamos in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and even downwinders in New Mexico<\/a>) remained off-screen.<\/p>\n

Watching the movie, I thought of my visit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory about 60 years after the triumphant Trinity atomic test. During an interview, one of the public relations specialists there explained that the legal entity managing the Los Alamos lab was \u201ca limited liability corporation.\u201d That seemed to sum up our government\u2019s brazen lack of accountability for the nuclearization of our planet.<\/p>\n

Six months after\u00a0Oppenheimer<\/em>\u00a0arrived at multiplexes, its political impact appears to be close to zero. The film\u2019s disturbing aspects plowed the ground, but \u2014 in the absence of a strong disarmament movement or effective leadership among officials in Washington on nuclear weapons issues \u2014 little seeding has taken place.<\/p>\n

At the end of January, supporters marked the first anniversary of\u00a0H. Res. 77<\/a>, a bill sponsored by Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and cosponsored by 42 other members of the House, \u201cembracing the goals and provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.\u201d The nonbinding measure aptly summarizes the world\u2019s nuclear peril and offers valuable recommendations, beginning with a call for the United States to actively pursue and conclude \u201cnegotiations on a new, bilateral nuclear arms control and disarmament framework agreement with the Russian Federation\u201d as well as purposeful talks \u201cwith China and other nuclear-armed states.\u201d<\/p>\n

Specific recommendations in the bill include: \u201crenouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first; ending the President\u2019s sole authority to launch a nuclear attack; taking the nuclear weapons of the United States off hair-trigger alert; and canceling the plan to replace the nuclear arsenal of the United States with modernized, enhanced weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fact that only 10% of House members have even chosen to sponsor the resolution shows just how far we have to go to begin putting the brakes on a nuclear arms race that threatens to destroy \u2014 all too literally \u2014 everything.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include <\/em>War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and most recently <\/em>War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine<\/a> (The New Press). He lives in the San Francisco area.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2024 Norman Solomon<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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