In Search Of An Arms Race

Will Murphy — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 13:00:12 +0000

President Trump proposes a $54 billion increase in the U.S. military budget, with sharp cuts in environmental protection, diplomacy, and aid to the poor in the U.S. and globally. The U.S. already spends more on the military than the next seven nations combined. One billion people live on $1.25 a day. 20 million are on the brink of famine. The United States spends less than one percent of the Federal budget on assistance to the global poor. Defense Secretary James Mattis said in 2013: “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.” Desperate people also become migrants.

Trump has not said how he plans to spend the $54 billion military increase, leading some analysts to call it “a budget in search of a strategy.” How would costly weapons help in Yemen, facing famine because U.S.-armed Saudi Arabia is blockading its port?

Mr. Trump welcomes a nuclear arms race and says he wants to be “top of the pack.” In conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he rejected Putin’s proposal to extend the START Treaty capping U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals at 1,500 nuclear weapons. Those already represent levels of destructiveness that would devastate both nations and endanger life on Earth. Russia might put its forces on launch-on-warning, increasing the risk of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation.

Trump’s proposal is as dangerous as it is cruel. Congress should reject it.

New Nuclear Risks

Yaël Ksander — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 13:45:56 +0000

Since the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world has escaped nuclear catastrophe only because leaders on all sides understood that nuclear weapons must never be used. Today, there are nine countries with nuclear weapons and more than 15,000 warheads combined. President Obama pledged to work for a nuclear weapons free world, a goal shared by many strategic thinkers as well as Pope Francis.

Yet the Pentagon has been testing a precision nuclear warhead that can be delivered by cruise missile.

Former Defense Secretary William J. Perry has warned that the cruise missile might sway a future president to contemplate “limited nuclear war.” Worse yet, because the missile comes in nuclear and non-nuclear varieties, a foe under attack might assume the worst and overreact, initiating nuclear war.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has decided to deploy heavy U.S. weapons in Eastern Europe. To do so would break a crucial pledge the United States made at the end of the Cold War that we would not expand NATO and would not place our weapons near the Russian border. Putting such weapons in nations such as Hungary – whose right wing government has fascist overtones – is morally debatable and strategically dangerous. Russia is sure to react asymmetrically, perhaps moving closer to nuclear launch-on-warning.

In the 21st century, which faces climate chaos and social and political turmoil, we must modernize our thinking, not our nuclear weapons.

Sources

https://www.globalzero.org/get-the-facts/FAQs#sthash.mIHjyUut.dpuf

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/science/as-us-modernizes-nuclear-weapons-smaller-leaves-some-uneasy.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/opinion/breaking-the-taboo-on-the-use-of-nuclear-arms.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/02/world/europe/us-fortifying-europes-east-to-deter-putin.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

nuclear war – Speak Your Mind

In Search Of An Arms Race

New Nuclear Risks

Sources