The business of nuclear weapons is booming in the U.S., as Part II of a documentary on the military-industrial complex reveals. It’s well worth a few minutes of your time:
The documentary is especially strong in its focus on the Sentinel ICBM program, the least survivable leg of the nuclear triad. I didn’t know, for example, that Northrop Grumman has already spent $220 million lobbying for the Sentinel.
Meanwhile, the projected cost of the Sentinel system, the documentary points out, has mushroomed from $78 billion to $140 billion. And I see estimates today have risen to $160 billion. All this for a system that’s not needed. Land-based ICBMs should be retired, not replaced.
Because land-based ICBMs represent a fixed target (unlike bombers and submarines, the other two legs of the triad), they are likely to be attacked first in a nuclear war, contributing to a “launch on warning (of attack)” mentality. But with warnings of nuclear attacks being both uncertain (false alarms have occurred in the past) and “time-sensitive,” i.e. urgent and pressure-packed, it’s likely a U.S. president, faced with a crisis, would only have 5-10 minutes to decide whether to launch ICBMs.
As the U.S. prepares to spend as much as $1.7 trillion on upgrading the triad, more money is also being dedicated to low-yield nuclear weapons, lowering the threshold for going nuclear. An escalatory spiral could follow from any use of nuclear weapons, but that concern doesn’t seem to trouble advocates for so-called tactical nukes.
Even as President Trump in the past has bragged about the size of his nuclear button, he does appear to view nuclear weapons as awful things, which they are. They are genocidal weapons. In essence, America is “investing” $1.7 trillion in weapons that are genocidal, indeed ecocidal, for any “general exchange” of nuclear weapons in a future war would destroy most life on earth (blast and heat, followed by radiation and nuclear winter).
As the Outlaw Josey Wales once mused, “Dyin’ ain’t much of a living.” The same applies to mass dying.
Meanwhile, the projected cost of the Sentinel system, the documentary points out, has mushroomed from $78 billion to $140 billion. And I see estimates today have risen to $160 billion. All this for a system that’s not needed. Land-based ICBMs should be retired, not replaced.
Because land-based ICBMs represent a fixed target (unlike bombers and submarines, the other two legs of the triad), they are likely to be attacked first in a nuclear war, contributing to a “launch on warning (of attack)” mentality. But with warnings of nuclear attacks being both uncertain (false alarms have occurred in the past) and “time-sensitive,” i.e. urgent and pressure-packed, it’s likely a U.S. president, faced with a crisis, would only have 5-10 minutes to decide whether to launch ICBMs.
As the U.S. prepares to spend as much as $1.7 trillion on upgrading the triad, more money is also being dedicated to low-yield nuclear weapons, lowering the threshold for going nuclear. An escalatory spiral could follow from any use of nuclear weapons, but that concern doesn’t seem to trouble advocates for so-called tactical nukes.
Even as President Trump in the past has bragged about the size of his nuclear button, he does appear to view nuclear weapons as awful things, which they are. They are genocidal weapons. In essence, America is “investing” $1.7 trillion in weapons that are genocidal, indeed ecocidal, for any “general exchange” of nuclear weapons in a future war would destroy most life on earth (blast and heat, followed by radiation and nuclear winter).
As the Outlaw Josey Wales once mused, “Dyin’ ain’t much of a living.” The same applies to mass dying.