Nuclear Arms Race

Those words used to strike fear into my young mind growing up in the fifties and sixties. But after becoming an adult and taking up the task of marriage, children, work, house, cars and all the other intricacies of modern living, I sorta forgot there was a problem. Now those words have come back to haunt me in my old age. In all honesty, the nuclear arms race never ended, it is still there, nearly 80 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and throughout the cold war up to the nineties and beyond. It has always promised to never go away. In fact there is now an expensive modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, particularly since the beginning of the Ukraine war and Russian and Chinese aggression. Other current conflicts such as the Palestinian/Israeli war and rising threats from Iran and its terrorist proxies have kept the nuclear pot boiling.

Last year alone, the U.S. government spent $51 billion in updating its nuclear weapons. The budget office estimates that the current nuclear modernization will cost $494 billion through FY 2028 and $1.7 trillion through FY 2046. Yes, 1.7 trillion dollars. The entire 40 year period, (1948 to 1989) of the Cold War cost 7 to 8 trillion dollars. In an age where a new aircraft carrier can cost $13.3 billion and a single new stealth bomber can run $750 million, such nuclear extravagance seems almost trivial. This enormous theft of our national treasure is a crippling strain on our country. A small part of the money we throw at defense spending could solve a myriad of other problems like child care, medical expenses, social security, education, environmental concerns, energy, and housing. All the enormous amounts of money spent on weapons that will be rendered obsolete in 10 to 20 years is forever gone.

Instead of spending vast amounts of money to upgrade our land based missiles, (The Sentinel program, all of those 400 underground missiles, ballooning up to $162 million each), why not simply upgrade the existing Minuteman III ICBMs. Land-based missiles, (as opposed to bomber and submarine-based missiles), are highly vulnerable in their fixed positions. In a conflict, they are likely to be used first to avoid their destruction and as such, are on extreme alert, and subject to possible error in their use.

We have not educated our modern population on what the use of nuclear weapons would do to civilization and most notably the environment already stressed by climate change. The utter insanity of even thinking about attacking or defending against attack is psychotic. Best estimates are that perhaps 1% of the world’s population of 8 billion might survive a full nuclear exchange. Despite all the movies and TV series to the contrary, it is a world that is in no way livable. Perhaps distant islands or remote lands might avoid deadly radiation and crippling climate adjustments, but it is not any kind of world that I would like. I enjoy hot showers every morning, reclining easy chairs and home-delivery pizza way too much.

(The utter glee in the development and testing of these weapons of mass destruction since World War II has astonished me from birth. At least we don’t test them openly as we did in the fifties and sixties.)