{"id":72253,"date":"2016-04-18T12:00:01","date_gmt":"2016-04-18T11:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=72253"},"modified":"2016-04-17T17:11:22","modified_gmt":"2016-04-17T16:11:22","slug":"obamas-trillion-dollar-nuclear-arms-train-wreck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/04\/obamas-trillion-dollar-nuclear-arms-train-wreck\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama\u2019s Trillion-Dollar Nuclear-Arms Train Wreck"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Amy<\/a>15 Apr 2016 <\/em>\u2014\u201cNow I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.\u201d These were the words from the Hindu religious text, the Bhagavad-gita, which flashed through the mind of the man credited with creating the first atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, as the first nuclear explosion in history lit up the dark desert sky at the Trinity blast site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.<\/p>\n

Weeks after that, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and thrust the world into the atomic age. Since then, humanity has lived with the terrible prospect of nuclear war and mass annihilation. Conventional wisdom holds that the likelihood that these unconventional weapons will be used has decreased since the end of the so-called Cold War. That perception has been challenged lately, especially since President Barack Obama announced a 30-year, $1 trillion program to modernize the U.S. nuclear-weapon arsenal.<\/p>\n

Secretary of State John Kerry visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum on Monday, the first sitting U.S. secretary of state to visit the site. Kerry was in Japan for a meeting of the G-7 nations. In his public remarks at the memorial, Kerry offered no apology for the nuclear attacks. He did say, though, that the museum \u201cwas a reminder of the depth of obligation that every single one of us in public life carries\u2014in fact, every person in position of responsibility carries\u2014to work for peace … to create and pursue a world free from nuclear weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the lofty rhetoric, President Obama has launched what the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability calls the \u201cTrillion Dollar Trainwreck.\u201d That is the title of a new report on Obama\u2019s massive plan to modernize the U.S. nuclear-weapons arsenal, to be released next Monday. Marylia Kelley is one of the report\u2019s authors. She serves as executive director of Tri-Valley CAREs, or Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, a partner organization with the Alliance. Of Kerry\u2019s visit to Hiroshima, Kelley said, on the \u201cDemocracy Now!\u201d news hour, \u201cKerry went empty-handed. The United States needs to go with a concrete plan to roll back its own nuclear-weapons program. You cannot preach abstinence, in terms of nuclear weapons, from the biggest bar stool in the room.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe United States is initiating a new nuclear arms race, because the other nuclear-armed states, of course, when they look at our \u2018modernization program,\u2019 are now beginning their own,\u201d she told us. \u201cWe need this to be rolled back.\u201d Kelley lives in Livermore, California, home to one of the U.S. government\u2019s national laboratories dedicated to developing and manufacturing nuclear bombs.<\/p>\n

President Obama delivered his first address on the U.S. nuclear arsenal on April 5, 2009, in Prague: \u201cToday, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black-market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"nuclear<\/a><\/p>\n

As with his pledge to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, his pledge to move the U.S. toward nuclear disarmament seems to have been abandoned. Grass-roots groups in the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability would like to see Obama make an historic trip to Hiroshima, as the first sitting U.S. president to do so. \u201cIf Obama goes to Hiroshima,\u201d Marylia Kelley said, \u201che needs to use that as an opportunity, not to speak empty promises and rhetoric about an eventual world free of nuclear weapons, but to make concrete proposals about how the United States is going to take steps in that direction and how we\u2019re going to change course, because right now we\u2019re taking giant steps in the opposite direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

The U.S. nuclear arsenal, and all the expense, nuclear waste and immense danger it continuously poses, has received almost no attention in the U.S. presidential debates. The day after he launched his campaign in late May 2015, Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked about the trillion-dollar nuclear-arsenal upgrade at a town hall in New Hampshire. \u201cWhat all of this is about is our national priorities,\u201d he replied. \u201cWho are we as a people? Does Congress listen to the military-industrial complex, who has never seen a war that they didn\u2019t like? Or do we listen to the people of this country who are hurting?\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1946, the year after Trinity, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity gave birth to the atomic bomb, offered a warning to the world that remains starkly relevant today: \u201cThe unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.\u201d<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, recently released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cNow I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.\u201d These were the words from the Hindu religious text, the Bhagavad-gita, which flashed through the mind of the creator of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, as the first nuclear explosion lit up the dark desert sky in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weapons-of-mass-destruction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}