Right now, the US has about 6,800<\/a> total nuclear weapons\u2014roughly 1,400 strategic weapons deployed in ground-, air-, and sea-based missiles, and the rest stockpiled or retired. (The Russians\u2019 arsenal is approximately the same in total.)\u00a0 From any rational point of view, these weapons are far more than are necessary to deter an adversary.\u00a0 Submarine-launched ballistic missiles alone\u2014920 of which are fixed on 230 invulnerable submarines, each missile having destructive power equivalent to\u00a0many<\/em>\u00a0Hiroshimas\u2014are sufficient to destroy<\/a> an entire country and bring on nuclear winter.\u00a0 There simply is no legitimate basis for believing that the nuclear arsenal needs to be larger, more invulnerable, or more accurate and reliable.<\/p>\n Yet as Americans learned long ago, for the nuclear lobby\u2014the pro-nuclear members of Congress, the military industries that test and produce the weapons and the means of their delivery, and the various Pentagon advisory boards, laboratories, and nuclear planners\u2014enough is never enough.\u00a0 These folks can always be counted on to argue that the nuclear stockpile must be periodically revitalized to ensure readiness.\u00a0 And all it takes is a supposed nuclear threat\u2014today meaning North Korea\u2014to bolster the nuclear lobby\u2019s case for upgrading.<\/p>\n The arguments against<\/a> further investment in nuclear weapons are just as compelling now as they were years ago.\u00a0 As the US invests more in them, so will the Russians and the Chinese, reviving a nuclear arms race.\u00a0 Continued reliance on nukes supports pro-nuclear thinking in Pakistan, India, Israel, North Korea, and elsewhere, contributing to the potential for war by accident or design.\u00a0 These weapons, moreover, which have no purpose other than to deter their use by others, can be inherently destabilizing\u2014as is the case now with a new Cruise missile (price tag: $25 billion), whose accuracy and stealth raise the possibility of a disastrous miscalculation by adversaries.\u00a0 At the same time, such a weapon\u00a0should<\/em>, but won\u2019t, eliminate the need for ground-based ICBMs.\u00a0 No, say the weapons proponents: the ground-air-sea nuclear triad will remain, adding billions to the military budget.<\/p>\n The nuclear weapons lobby is surely delighted with Trump\u2019s decision. The lobby was downcast when it seemed that President Obama was headed toward bringing nuclear weapons numbers down to some minimum figure.\u00a0 But he reversed course late in his second administration and agreed to new investments in them, apparently in order to ensure Senate approval of the \u201cNew Start\u201d agreement with Russia in 2010.\u00a0 Now, the weapons manufacturers that will be responsible for Trump\u2019s program\u2014Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman\u2014are assured of many more years of multibillion dollar activity.<\/p>\n Present Choices<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n When we think about national security in the human interest, two considerations are uppermost: the quality of life for our people and a peaceful future for the planet.\u00a0 As to the first, we might evaluate the cost of another nuclear-weapon modernization when matched against the urgent need to start thinking about paying for rebuilding Houston after Hurricane Harvey.\u00a0 The\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>reports (August 28) that \u201cHurricane Katrina, in 2005, caused $160 billion in damage and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 caused around $70 billion in damage, according to inflation-adjusted figures provided by the federal government.\u201d \u201cHarvey\u201d may well cost more\u2014even more than the full cost of Trump\u2019s nuclear modernization program, which will easily top $125 billion. FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) reportedly has only $3.8 billion on hand; the rest of the rescue money must come from elsewhere in the federal budget. But, Texans and Louisianans, don\u2019t count on Trump to divert a dime from the military to bail you out. \u00a0(Come to think of it, abandoning the Mexico wall project would also be a welcome response to Houston’s calamity.)<\/p>\n The other consideration is global security while nuclear weapons are under the command of Donald Trump.\u00a0 In the May-June 2017 issue of\u00a0Foreign Affairs<\/em>, Philip Gordon offers three crisis scenarios\u2014with China, Iran, and North Korea\u2014that Trump might well mishandle and involve the US in war.\u00a0 Each potential crisis might lead a president known for recklessness, unpreparedness, and predilection for making threats to consider use of nuclear weapons. So the issue here is squarely about national security for us and for all.<\/p>\n _____________________________________________<\/p>\n Thirty years ago Americans endured an absurd expansion of the US nuclear-weapon force under President Reagan. The announced weapons modernization program was accompanied by a crazy talk from his advisers about the potential to fight and win a nuclear war. So here we are evidently back to the future as the Trump administration forges ahead with nuclear \u201cmodernization,\u201d without a set strategy for the weapons but with billions of dollars to burn.<\/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-98133","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\/98133","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=98133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/mel-Gurtov2017-e1504522758778.jpg\")
<\/a>Mel Gurtov<\/em><\/a>, syndicated by <\/em>PeaceVoice<\/em><\/a>, is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"