{"id":44757,"date":"2023-11-16T15:02:40","date_gmt":"2023-11-16T23:02:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=44757"},"modified":"2023-11-16T15:06:16","modified_gmt":"2023-11-16T23:06:16","slug":"the-unfathomable-risks-of-the-new-us-nuclear-build-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/16\/the-unfathomable-risks-of-the-new-us-nuclear-build-up\/","title":{"rendered":"The ‘Unfathomable Risks’ of the New US Nuclear Build-up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell\u2019s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood<\/a>.<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Just a quick, vital, scary, news flash, thanks to the new special issue, \u201cThe New Nuclear Age,\u201d from venerable Scientific American<\/em>, dated December 1 but just posted online<\/a>. The heading at the top of the site warns: \u201cThe U.S. is beginning an ambitious, controversial reinvention of its nuclear arsenal. The project comes with incalculable costs and unfathomable risks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rather than summarize the separate articles, I will merely excerpt from their editorial<\/a>, which hits the hot spots. Note: My award-winning PBS film Atomic Cover-up<\/em> is now available for watching at their site for free<\/a>, 27 minutes. And companion book here<\/a>. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for free.<\/p>\n

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From the Scientific American editorial.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The U.S. is planning to modernize its unwanted, unneeded and unsafe nuclear triad<\/a> of land-, sea- and air-based weapons. Perfectly poised to refight the cold war, these overhauled bombs will waste $1.5 trillion<\/a> and threaten life on Earth for the century to come. We should rethink this miserable folly rather than once again squandering our wealth while driving a new arms race\u2026.<\/em><\/p>\n

Although the Biden administration canceled proposed Trump-era sea-launched missiles<\/a>, the U.S. nuclear arsenal still bristles with some 3,700 weapons<\/a>, around 1,700 of them deployed for military use and the rest in storage overseen by the Department of Energy. This quantity is more than enough to threaten the destruction of humanity and Earth’s biosphere<\/a>\u2014and it is only a fraction of the world’s total, leaving out Russia’s similarly large stockpile<\/a> and smaller ones in China and other nations. Lowering the numbers and thus the risks of these weapons is a responsibility the U.S. and the Soviet Union first recognized at the end of the 1960s<\/a>, and this goal should drive military and political decision-making now.<\/em><\/p>\n

We aimed this Damoclean sword at ourselves during the cold war when we produced 70,000 of the plutonium \u201cpits\u201d<\/a> that trigger thermonuclear warhead explosions. Weapons tests of these blasts have left every part of Earth’s surface contaminated<\/a> with plutonium, with hotspots such as the Rocky Flats in Colorado and the Hanford sites in Washington State still requiring tens of billions of dollars for cleanup. Faltering efforts<\/a> to restart pit production for the nuclear-modernization effort have cost $18 billion to $24 billion, much of it wasted, and, by the admission of weapons officials<\/a> at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, they don’t even seem to be immediately necessary.<\/em><\/p>\n

Why are we risking so much when the lessons of the 20th century are so clear? In the words of the 1991 START Treaty that capped the cold war, \u201cnuclear war would have devastating consequences for all humanity … it cannot be won and must never be fought<\/a>.\u201d Disregarding Russia’s inability to turn its nuclear arsenal to military advantage while being bombarded by Ukrainian drones, our political class has fumbled away hard-won wisdom about the deadly futility of the arms race. We are recapitulating the dangers the world turned away from decades ago.<\/em><\/p>\n

Who today benefits from disinterring the arms race? Only defense-industry shareholders and military contractors near silos in North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska. This, in a nation where we have just doubled child poverty<\/a> out of a refusal<\/a> to help lower-income families. Surely it would be cheaper, safer and smarter to build factories or universities or research labs in these places, construct low-cost housing next to new engineering or biomedical campuses there, and watch them boom, in a good way, for the next century at a fraction of the silo-overhaul price tag. The 900 nuclear missiles onboard U.S. submarines<\/a> will meanwhile deter the feared nuclear first strike the obsolescent land missiles were meant to discourage at the dawn of the cold war.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cA worrisome new arms race is brewing,\u201d<\/a> United Nations secretary-general Ant\u00f3nio Guterres said in September. \u201cThis is madness. We must reverse course.\u201d We agree. The only real way to use nuclear weapons is never. They should exist only in numbers large enough to deter their use by others, which they already abundantly do, with not one warhead more.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Thanks for reading Oppenheimer and the Legacy of His Bomb ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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