President Obama’s administration is planting the seed money for an across-the-board-modernization of nuclear weapons, delivery systems, and support systems that will cost at least a trillion dollars (more likely $2 trillion to $3 trillion, IMO) over the next 15-30 years.…
Given the highly evolved nature of the domestic politics driving defense spending (i.e., the domestic operations of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (I described this in “The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War”), history shows the golden cornucopia of this nuc “bow wave” or programs will quickly evolve into an unstoppable tsunami of front-loaded and politically engineered contracts and subcontracts that will grow over time to overwhelm and paralyze future Presidents and Congresses for the next 20-30 years.
This kind of budget time bomb has happened at least twice before in the non-nuclear part of the defense budget: The first began when the Nixon-Ford Administration planted the seeds of defense budget hysteria by starting a bow wave of new modernization programs, financed in the short term by readiness and force structure reductions in early-to-mid 1970s. These reductions led to budget pressures that exploded in the late 1970s and 1980s when President Jimmy Carter began growing the defense budget and President Ronald Reagan accelerated that growth.Get ready for huge budget deficits or cuts in domestic spending as the arms race accelerates, since the chances of raising taxes is low.Spinney doesn’t mention it, but there is also the thinking that while the US can afford this, Russia and China, who will be forced to respond, will not. This is as much as piece of economic warfare as it is about military preparedness.
Ironic or disingenuous coming from a president that has called for nuclear disarmament.
Consortium News
New Nukes for a New Cold War
Chuck Spinney
The Japanese Empire launched two brutal wars of aggression, China and the Pacific. They killed millions of Chinese, including raping tens of thousands of women and murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians in Nanjing in a two week orgy of violence. They starved, tortured and executed their POW's. They forced thousands of young women and girls into sex slavery. They conducted biological warfare experiments on civilians and POW's. And the Japanese people were all happy and supportive, willingly believing they were a 'master race'.
ReplyDeleteSo no apologies and no sympathy. When you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind...
leaving sentiments of retribution aside, it is very naive to dismiss the droppings of the atomic bombs as simply a war crime. terrible things, such as civilian casualties happen at war, whether you want them or not, they can not be avoided. the deaths from the a-bombs were not any more brutal or more numerous in particular and amount only to a fraction of ww2 casualties. neither can they be dismissed as unnecessary.
ReplyDeletenuclear proliferation isn't such a clear cut issue. all the progressive administrations engaged in it (most notably Kennedy's, which is probably more ironic).