Barack
Obama has outlined a nuclear weapon expansion plan that beats Ronald
Reagan's 'Star Wars' debacle in both dollars and dangers.
The anti-nuclear movement spent much of the eighties resisting Ronald
Reagan’s new Cold War, and his new nuclear weapons of all shapes and
sizes. We pushed back against his giant ‘defense’ budgets and countered
his harrowing rhetoric. We knew Star Wars was a scam, and the MX missile
a danger. We grimaced at his appointments to key policy making
positions, and scoffed at his insincere arms control efforts.
In the end, the tireless work of professional activists, plowshares
heroes, and a handful of stalwart others who stayed in the anti-nuclear
weapons movement trenches deserve some credit for preventing planetary
incineration that seemed frighteningly close at the time (Gorbachev
deserves some too). Although nukes were not abolished with the end of
the Cold War, most of the rest of us nonetheless moved on to fight other
evils, and to work on one or more better world construction projects.
Two recent events should serve to re-awaken this movement and return
to this struggle. First is the situation in the Ukraine, where old Cold
War Hawks have been re-animated to again advise nuclear armed leaders,
East and West, to show 'strength' and beat their chests at one another.
The second call to action has received much less attention. President Obama released his
FY 2015 budget
on Tuesday, March 4. It asks for considerably more money (in constant
dollars) for nuclear weapons maintenance, design and production than
Reagan spent in 1985, the historical peak of spending on nukes: $8.608
billion dollars, not counting administrative costs (see graph below).
The
Los Alamos Study Group crunched the numbers for us.
Next year’s request tops this year’s by 7%. Should the President’s
new Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative (OGSI) be approved, yet
$504 million more would be available for warhead spending. The OGSI is
$56 billion over and above the spending agreed to in the December 2013
two-year budget (unlikely to pass given that it’s an election year,
would be paid for by increased taxes on the retirement funds of the
rich, and reduced spending in politically dicey areas like crop
insurance).
The US currently deploys some 4650 nuclear weapons. That these are
mere dangerous remnants of the Cold War, and of no use to counter
contemporary security threats, was confirmed by Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper’s
2014 Worldwide Threat Assessment which
said not a word about Russian nuclear weapons but instead focused on
cyber threats, mass atrocities, and the extreme weather events attendant
to climate change. (Yeah, Clapper is the guy who lied with impunity to
Congress about NSA bulk data gathering on Americans; he’s probably not
lying this time).
The Congressional Budget Office
reports that
current nuclear complex spending plans total $335 billion through
FY2023. Then, believe it or not, the Pentagon and Department of Energy
plan to begin
replacing current weapons systems by new ones.
There’s $100 billion to design and construct twelve new missile
submarines, $81 billion for new strategic bombers, tens of billions for a
new long-range cruise missile, a new ICBM, and revamped command and
control infrastructure. Add to this the National Nuclear Security
Administration’s plans for at least $60 billion to “extend the life” of
current weapons, and more than $11 billion for the Uranium Processing
Facility. None of these CBO figures factored in the usual cost overruns.
For the Administration to find record funds to invest in nuclear
weapons in budget under so much political and fiscal pressure reveals
how far Obama’s rhetoric has drifted from his actions.
Obama's Nuclear Contradiction
Increased lucre for the nuclear weapons complex maintains Obama’s
inconsistency on the Bomb. He wrote his senior thesis at Columbia on the
arms race and the nuclear freeze campaign. Two months after his first
inauguration, he uttered these words in Prague: “So today, I state
clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and
security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
The Pentagon’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review promised to avoid “new
military missions or... new military capabilities” for nuclear weapons
(don’t laugh, you’d be surprised how imaginative those guys can be).
2011 was even better: Obama signed the New START Treaty. It limits the
number of operationally deployed nuclear warheads to 1550, a 30%
decrease from the previous START Treaty, signed in 2002. New START also
lowered limits on the number of launch platforms — ICBMs, ballistic
missile launching subs, and nuke-equipped bombers.
At the same time, his State Department refuses—under first Hillary
Clinton and now John Kerry—to present the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
to the Senate for ratification out of timidity over expected resistance
(never mind that the U.S. has essentially figured out ways to circumvent
the Treaty’s spirit if not letter; the CTB was once the ‘holy grail’
for arms control and disarmament advocates).
That same State Department refrains—under both Hillary Clinton and
John Kerry—from getting tough with Pakistan over its years-long
obstruction of United Nations-sponsored negotiations over a global ban
on the stuff needed to make bombs. (Pakistan is the country building
them faster than any other; how about: ‘we’ll ground the killer drones
in exchange for a fissile material cut-off?’). And Obama now wants to
outspend Reagan on nuclear weapons maintenance, design and production.
Winding down nuclear weapons spending, and eventually abolishing the
things (for which no negotiations are underway) has been the right thing
to do since the first bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert in 1945.
State Department support for the coup in Ukraine and the resultant saber
rattling make it as urgent as ever.
~ Steve Breyman serves as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Ecology Branch of the Green Shadow Cabinet.
No comments:
Post a Comment