What if I were to tell you that the US government could
save hundreds of billions of dollars and make us and the rest of the world a
lot safer at the same time, you might think I’d been hit on the head with, well,
an ICBM. That’s an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, in case you aren’t
familiar with our stockpile of nuclear weapons delivery systems.
The US currently has 400 of them, all sitting in silos in
the Midwest. They are armed with multiple warheads, which means they could
literally wipe out thousands of targets (which sounds innocuous until you
realize that those “targets” are mostly cities with millions of human beings
living in them) around the world in a couple of hours and probably usher in a “nuclear
winter”. I have to wonder if that’s the solution the Pentagon has for the
problem of global warming.
If that isn’t crazy enough, they are all on hair-trigger
alert. Because of their vulnerability, if there is any indication that the US might
be under nuclear attack by a foreign power, the President would have
approximately 30 minutes to decide whether to “use them or lose them”. The
problem is that once launched, they cannot be called back. This scenario has almost
played out on more than one occasion over the past 50 years. So far, the
trigger has not been pulled, but in essence, we’ve been playing nuclear Russian
roulette for all these years.
It should be clear that these weapons pose a grave threat
of an “accidental” nuclear holocaust. But what is also true is that they are
totally unnecessary as a deterrent to nuclear attack from Russia or China (or
anyone else, for that matter). That’s because the US also has huge stockpiles
of nuclear weapons aboard bombers and submarines. Because these weapons are
mobile, they are not vulnerable to a first strike attack by an enemy and
therefore do not have to be launched on warning. Thus, eliminating all
land-based ICBMs, would still leave the US with a massive nuclear deterrent.
While this still means depending on the strategy of Mutually Assured
Destruction to prevent nuclear holocaust (with the appropriate acronym MAD), it
at least takes the finger off the trigger.
According to Gen. James E Cartwright, former vice chair
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff “By scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile
force, any need for launching on warning disappears.” And the world becomes a
lot safer place for our children and grandchildren, here and around the world.
What about the billions of $$$ in savings? It turns out that
the military wants to modernize the ground-based nukes with a new generation of
ICBMs named the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, or GBSD. The cost? An estimated
$364 billion on top of the spending to maintain the current stock of ICBMs during
the transition. Northrop Grumman has already been awarded $13.3 billion for “engineering
and manufacturing development”. (Note: Northrop Grumman stock is up almost 20%
over the last year.)
Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg. For
more detail, check out Andrew Cockburn’s new book, “The Spoils of War”. In the
book Cockburn aptly quotes one Pentagon weapons designer in the 1960s telling
new hires that they would be making “weapons that don’t work to meet threats
that don’t exist.” This, at the height of the Cold War! It’s bad enough to
waste our tax money on things that don’t work (try another Northrop boondoggle,
the B-2 stealth bomber, which cost over $2 billion each in 1990 dollars for the
21 actually produced and which wasn’t “stealth” at all). But to see society’s
wealth squandered on weapons that make us LESS safe is the height of insanity.
We would be better served if they just poured the money
down the drain. Or they could use it to offset some of the costs of Build Back
Better, hopefully mollifying Senators Manchin and Sinema.
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