SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
military budget
Senator Strangelove and the Brink of Nuclear Armageddon
The former senator’s continuing prominence in debates over nuclear policy is a testament to our historical amnesia about the risks posed by nuclear weapons.
Jan 15, 2025
A primary responsibility of the government is, of course, to keep us safe. Given that obligation, you might think that the Washington establishment would be hard at work trying to prevent the ultimate catastrophe—a nuclear war. But you would be wrong.
A small, hardworking contingent of elected officials is indeed trying to roll back the nuclear arms race and make it harder for such world-ending weaponry ever to be used again, including stalwarts like Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), and other members of the Congressional Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group. But they face ever stiffer headwinds from a resurgent network of nuclear hawks who want to build more kinds of nuclear weapons and ever more of them. And mind you, that would all be in addition to the Pentagon’s current plans for spending up to $2 trillion over the next three decades to create a whole new generation of nuclear weapons, stoking a dangerous new nuclear arms race.
There are many drivers of this push for a larger, more dangerous arsenal—from the misguided notion that more nuclear weapons will make us safer to an entrenched network of companies, governmental institutions, members of Congress, and policy pundits who will profit (directly or indirectly) from an accelerated nuclear arms race. One indicator of the current state of affairs is the resurgence of former Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, who spent 18 years in Congress opposing even the most modest efforts to control nuclear weapons before he went on to work as a lobbyist and policy advocate for the nuclear weapons complex.
His continuing prominence in debates over nuclear policy—evidenced most recently by his position as vice chair of a congressionally appointed commission that sought to legitimize an across-the-board nuclear buildup—is a testament to our historical amnesia about the risks posed by nuclear weapons.
Senator Strangelove
Republican Jon Kyl was elected to the Senate from Arizona in 1995 and served in that body until 2013, plus a brief stint in late 2018 to fill out the term of the late Sen. John McCain.
One of Kyl’s signature accomplishments in his early years in office was his role in lobbying fellow Republican senators to vote against ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which went down to a 51 to 48 Senate defeat in October 1999. That treaty banned explosive nuclear testing and included monitoring and verification procedures meant to ensure that its members met their obligations. Had it been widely adopted, it might have slowed the spread of nuclear weapons, now possessed by nine countries, and prevented a return to the days when aboveground testing spread cancer-causing radiation to downwind communities.
The defeat of the CTBT marked the beginning of a decades-long process of dismantling the global nuclear arms control system, launched by the December 2001 withdrawal of President George W. Bush’s administration from the Nixon-era Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. That treaty was designed to prevent a “defense-offense” nuclear arms race in which one side’s pursuit of anti-missile defenses sparks the other side to build more—and ever more capable—nuclear-armed missiles. James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace called the withdrawal from the ABM Treaty an “epic mistake” that fueled a new nuclear arms race. Kyl argued otherwise, claiming the withdrawal removed “a straitjacket from our national security.”
The truly naive ones are the nuclear hawks who insist on clinging to the dubious notion that vast (and still spreading) stores of nuclear weaponry can be kept around indefinitely without ever being used again, by accident or design.
The end of the ABM treaty created the worst of both worlds—an incentive for adversaries to build up their nuclear arsenals coupled with an abject failure to develop weaponry that could actually defend the United States in the event of a real-world nuclear attack.
Then, in August 2019, during the first Trump administration, the U.S. withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which prohibited the deployment of medium-range missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. That treaty had been particularly important because it eliminated the danger of having missiles in Europe that could reach their targets in a very brief time frame, a situation that could shorten the trigger on a possible nuclear confrontation.
Then-Sen. Kyl also used the eventual pullout from the INF treaty as a reason to exit yet another nuclear agreement, the New START treaty, co-signing a letter with 24 of his colleagues urging the Trump administration to reject New START. He was basically suggesting that lifting one set of safeguards against a possible nuclear confrontation was somehow a reason to junk a separate treaty that had ensured some stability in the U.S.-Russian strategic nuclear balance.
Finally, in November 2023, NATO suspended its observance of a treaty that had limited the number of troops the Western alliance and Russia could deploy in Europe after the government of Vladimir Putin withdrew from the treaty earlier that year in the midst of his ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
The last U.S.-Russian arms control agreement, New START, caps the strategic nuclear warheads of the two countries at 1,550 each and has monitoring mechanisms to make sure each side is holding up its obligations. That treaty is currently hanging by a thread. It expires in 2026, and there is no indication that Russia is inclined to negotiate an extension in the context of its current state of relations with Washington.
As early as December 2020, Kyl was angling to get the government to abandon any plans to extend New START, coauthoring an op-ed on the subject for the Fox News website. He naturally ignored the benefits of an agreement aimed at reducing the chance of an accidental nuclear conflict, even as he made misleading statements about it being unbalanced in favor of Russia.
Back in 2010, when New START was first under consideration in the Senate, Kyl played a key role in extracting a pledge from the Obama administration to throw an extra $80 billion at the nuclear warhead complex in exchange for Republican support of the treaty. Even after that concession was made, Kyl continued to work tirelessly to build opposition to the treaty. If, in the end, he failed to block its Senate ratification, he did help steer billions in additional funding to the nuclear weapons complex.
Our Man from Northrop Grumman
In 2017, between stints in the Senate, Kyl worked as a lobbyist with the law firm Covington and Burling, where one of his clients was Northrop Grumman, the largest beneficiary of the Pentagon’s nuclear weapons spending binge. That company is the lead contractor on both the future B-21 nuclear bomber and Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The Sentinel program drew widespread attention recently when it was revealed that, in just a few years, its estimated cost had jumped by an astonishing 81%, pushing the price for building those future missiles to more than $140 billion (with tens of billions more needed to operate them in their years of “service” to come).
That stunning cost spike for the Sentinel triggered a Pentagon review that could have led to a cancellation or major restructuring of the program. Instead, the Pentagon opted to stay the course despite the enormous price tag, asserting that the missile is “essential to U.S. national security and is the best option to meet the needs of our warfighters.”
Independent experts disagree. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry, for instance, has pointed out that such ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons we have” because a president, warned of a possible nuclear attack by an enemy power, would have only minutes to decide whether to launch them, greatly increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war triggered by a false alarm. Perry is hardly alone. In July 2024, 716 scientists, including 10 Nobel laureates and 23 members of the National Academies, called for the Sentinel to be canceled, describing the system as “expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary.”
Meanwhile, as vice chair of a congressionally mandated commission on the future of U.S. nuclear weapons policy, Kyl has been pushing a worst-case scenario regarding the current nuclear balance that could set the stage for producing even larger numbers of (Northrop Grumman-built) nuclear bombers, putting multiple warheads on (Northrop Grumman-built) Sentinel missiles, expanding the size of the nuclear warhead complex, and emplacing yet more tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. His is a call, in other words, to return to the days of the Cold War nuclear arms race at a moment when the lack of regular communication between Washington and Moscow can only increase the risk of a nuclear confrontation.
Kyl does seem to truly believe that building yet more nuclear weapons will indeed bolster this country’s security, and he’s hardly alone when it comes to Congress or, for that matter, the next Trump administration. Consider that a clear sign that reining in the nuclear arms race will involve not only making the construction of nuclear weapons far less lucrative, but also confronting the distinctly outmoded and unbearably dangerous arguments about their alleged strategic value.
The Advocate
In October 2023, when the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on a report from the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, it had an opportunity for a serious discussion of nuclear strategy and spending, and how best to prevent a nuclear war. Given the stakes for all of us should a nuclear war between the United States and Russia break out—up to an estimated 90 million of us dead within the first few days of such a conflict and up to five billion lives lost once radiation sickness and reduced food production from the resulting planetary “nuclear winter” kick in—you might have hoped for a wide-ranging debate on the implications of the commission’s proposals.
Unfortunately, much of the discussion during the hearing involved senators touting weapons systems or facilities producing them located in their states, with little or no analysis of what would best protect Americans and our allies. For example, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) stressed the importance of Raytheon’s SM-6 missile—produced in Arizona, of course—and commended the commission for proposing to spend more on that program. Sen. Jackie Rosen (R-Nev.) praised the role of the Nevada National Security Site, formerly known as the Nevada Test Site, for making sure such warheads were reliable and would explode as intended in a nuclear conflict. You undoubtedly won’t be shocked to learn that she then called for more funding to address what she described as “significant delays” in upgrading that Nevada facility. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) proudly pointed to the billions in military work being done in his state: “In Alabama we build submarines, ships, airplanes, missiles. You name it, we build it.” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) requested that witnesses confirm how absolutely essential the Kansas City Plant, which makes non-nuclear parts for nuclear weapons, remains for American security.
The next few years will be crucial in determining whether ever growing numbers of nuclear weapons remain entrenched in this country’s budgets and its global strategy for decades to come or whether common sense can carry the day and spark the reduction and eventual elimination of such instruments of mass devastation.
And so it went until Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked what the nuclear buildup recommended by the commission would cost. She suggested that, if past history is any guide, much of the funding proposed by the commission would be wasted: “I’m willing to spend what it takes to keep America safe, but I’m certainly not comfortable with a blank check for programs that already have a history of gross mismanagement.”
The answer from Kyl and his co-chair Marilyn Creedon was that the commission had not even bothered to estimate the costs of any of what it was suggesting and that its recommendations should be considered regardless of the price. This, of course, was good news for nuclear weapons contractors like Northrop Grumman, but bad news for taxpayers.
The Brink of Armageddon?
Nuclear hardliners frequently suggest that anyone advocating the reduction or elimination of nuclear arsenals is outrageously naive and thoroughly out of touch with the realities of great power politics. As it happens though, the truly naive ones are the nuclear hawks who insist on clinging to the dubious notion that vast (and still spreading) stores of nuclear weaponry can be kept around indefinitely without ever being used again, by accident or design.
There is another way. Even as Washington, Moscow, and Beijing continue the production of a new generation of nuclear weapons—such weaponry is also possessed by France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom—a growing number of nations have gone on record against any further nuclear arms race and in favor of eliminating such weapons altogether. In fact, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has now been ratified by 73 countries.
As Beatrice Fihn, former director of the Nobel-prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, pointed out in a recent essay in The New York Times, there are numerous examples of how collective action has transformed “seemingly impossible situations.” She cited the impact of the antinuclear movement of the 1980s in reversing a superpower nuclear arms race and setting the stage for sharp reductions in the numbers of such weapons, as well as a successful international effort to bring the nuclear ban treaty into existence. She noted that a crucial first step in bringing the potentially catastrophic nuclear arms race under control would involve changing the way we talk about such weapons, especially debunking the myth that they are somehow “magical tools” that make us all more secure. She also emphasized the importance of driving home that this planet’s growing nuclear arsenals are evidence that all too many of those in power are acquiescing in a reckless strategy “based on threatening to commit global collective suicide.”
The next few years will be crucial in determining whether ever growing numbers of nuclear weapons remain entrenched in this country’s budgets and its global strategy for decades to come or whether common sense can carry the day and spark the reduction and eventual elimination of such instruments of mass devastation. A vigorous public debate on the risks of an accelerated nuclear arms race would be a necessary first step toward pulling the world back from the brink of Armageddon.
Keep ReadingShow Less
New Year, Same Old Wars
War is humanity’s cancer. Its seeming inevitability is ensconced in the global military budget. Can we ever stop waging it?
Jan 03, 2025
I welcome in the new year with a sense of abstract helplessness, as the headlines continue to bring us dead children, bombed hospitals, torture, rape and, of course, ever more “self-defense” (sometimes known as genocide).
From my safe, secure office space I absorb the daily news—from Gaza, from all across the planet–with a whiplash of guilt and naivete. What the hell do I know what it feels like to have my house, or my tent, bombed, to see my children die, to have no access to water, let alone healthcare? Is it enough to comfortably empathize with the collateral damage of this world at war?
No, no, no, it’s not.
This is just the way things are. It’s OK to kill—you just have to do so within certain rules.
But I empathize nonetheless, and shake to my depths with an incredulity that never goes away: “As if the relentless bombing and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza were not enough, the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe in fact became a death trap.”
The words are those of Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, quoted in a recent U.N. report about Israel’s ongoing devastation of Palestinian hospitals and its virtually total destruction of the occupied territory’s healthcare system, including the arrest—the abduction—of hundreds of doctors and other medical professionals, who often wind up being tortured and sometimes murdered.
The U.N. report was released “just days after the last functioning major healthcare facility in northern Gaza, Kama Adwan Hospital, was taken out of service after a raid by Israeli military forces, leaving the population of North Gaza with almost no access to adequate health care,” according to U.N. News:
Staff and patients were forced to flee or were taken into custody, with many reports of torture and ill-treatment. The director of the hospital was taken into custody, and his fate and whereabouts are unknown.
During the period covered by the report, there were at least 136 strikes on at least 27 hospitals and 12 other medical facilities, claiming significant casualties among doctors, nurses, medics, and other civilians, and causing significant damage, if not complete destruction of civilian infrastructure.
It’s virtually impossible to absorb news like this without first reducing it to an abstraction. This is something that’s happening “over there” somewhere, to people I don’t know. And soon enough the world itself—the world in which we all live—is mostly an abstraction... an entity separated by borders. I can read about terrible things going on in distant places, but my sense of actual connection to them is missing.
The U.N. News story proceeded to point out, “The protection of hospitals during warfare is paramount and must be respected by all sides, at all times.”
And here’s where my internal alarm went off. I have no disagreement with the point of the above sentence, but there’s something missing. Something crucial. Its basic point is this: When you’re waging war, hey, you still have to obey certain rules, e.g., don’t bomb hospitals without a really, really good reason. If you do, you’ve done something bad. You’ve committed a war crime.
It’s not simply that acts of war are wrapped snugly in legalese, but that war itself—in the context that births the term “war crime”—is not questioned or morally challenged. War simply exists. It’s a transcultural moral certainty. It’s part and parcel of civilization itself. Various social entities across the planet are bound to disagree or get annoyed with one another from time to time, and when they do—what choice do they have?—they go to war. This is just the way things are. It’s OK to kill—you just have to do so within certain rules. And mostly those rules apply to the loser, not the winner. Certainly this is true in retrospect.
And suddenly the sense of abstraction I was feeling begins to shatter. The concept of war instantly turns life itself into an abstraction. No matter that religions (see Genesis 1:27) all seem to acknowledge the preciousness of human life... of life itself. Most religions are also the first to send their troops—or, nowadays, their tanks and bombers—into battle.
A year ago I wrote:
We—by which I mean most of humanity—are still playing with the so-called ‘just war theory,’ the intellectual justification for war dating back to St. Augustine and the early centuries of the Common Era.
You know, violence is morally neutral—and thus, when the cause is just and sacred, go for it! Kill the non-believers... The neutrality of violence can be used by anyone in a position of power.
And, oh yeah, before you open fire, before you start killing, you have to take a spiritual step directly into the process: You have to define, and then dehumanize, the enemy. Once that happens, let her rip! The only thing stopping you now are the so-called rules of war, which allegedly protect innocent civilians and keep the whole thing reasonable. What a joke. Violence is poisonously addictive and easily expands—anywhere and everywhere.
War, as I have noted, is humanity’s cancer. Its seeming inevitability is ensconced in the global military budget. We have a few thousand nukes ready to go (“if necessary”) and thus the power to destroy all life on Planet Earth, aka, ourselves. Isn’t it time to start rethinking this potential Armageddon?
We are capable of creating peace! Most of us want it, at least for ourselves, our loved ones, our community, and country. We just don’t know what it is—and no, it’s not some cliché of perfect harmony. But it begins with the only rule of war that is necessary: It must never be waged again.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Should 100% Take Jimmy Carter's Advice
Trump’s first term was four years of Christmas Days for billionaires and corporate interests, starting with the military-industrial complex. A repeat of that must not be tolerated.
Dec 30, 2024
With President Jimmy Carter’s passing and Donald Trump about to return to the White House, it’s a good time to recall a phone conversation that Carter had with Trump during his first term. Carter’s advice would serve Trump well if he really wants to fulfill his campaign promise to Put America First–something he failed to do in his first term.
In April 2019, Jimmy Carter told his church congregation in Georgia that President Trump had called him for advice about China. Carter said he told Trump that China was economically overtaking the United States as the world’s largest and most dynamic economy because the United States had spent decades wasting trillions of dollars to fight endless wars, while China had instead focused on economic development and lifted hundreds of millions of its people out of extreme poverty. “China has not wasted a single penny on war,” Carter said, “and that’s why they’re ahead of us, in almost every way.”
The next day, the White House confirmed that the two presidents “had a very good telephone conversation about President Trump’s stance on trade with China and numerous other topics.”
Some of Trump’s statements during the election campaign suggest that he hasn’t forgotten Carter’s advice. At the very least, he got the message that peace would be good for America, and that a lot of Americans understand that. Majorities of Americans have long supported a ceasefire in Gaza, and a plurality now support a negotiated peace in Ukraine, too. Trump promised to deliver on both. He even said that he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, based on his good relations with leaders in Russia and Ukraine.
Maybe now Trump can understand that normalizing war crimes only leads to more war crimes, not to peace or stability.
Americans may be more worried about problems closer to home than the Middle East or Ukraine, but President Carter connected the dots between U.S. war-making and our quality of life in America.
“And I think the difference is, if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure, you’d probably have $2 trillion leftover,” Carter explained to his congregation. “We’d have high-speed railroad. We’d have bridges that aren’t collapsing, we’d have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of say South Korea or Hong Kong.”
What Carter described to Trump is the classic choice between “guns and butter” that faces every society. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the United States was a rising economic power, like China today. Europe’s imperial powers destroyed each other in the First World War, leaving even the victors, Britain and France, with multibillion dollar debts to J.P. Morgan and the U.S. Treasury. The United States’ economic success made it the world’s banker and industrial leader and gave it a decisive role in the history of the 20th century.
Today, it is the United States that has an unprecedented national debt of $36 trillion, and our military budget consumes 56% of federal discretionary spending, putting the squeeze on all our other needs. But we can still enjoy shared prosperity and a brighter future if Trump can do as Carter advised him and wean our government off its addiction to war.
So why are we not reassured by Trump’s promises to make peace and put America first? There are three things that worry us: his first-term track record; his second-term cabinet picks; and his aggressive rhetoric since the election (as opposed to what he said on the campaign trail).
Let’s start with his track record. Despite loud promises to tackle the entrenched interests of the “Deep State” and to “Drain the Swamp,” Trump’s first term was four years of Christmas Days for billionaires and corporate interests, starting with the military-industrial complex. In FY2025 inflation-adjusted dollars, Trump spent an average of $292 billion per year on Pentagon “investment” accounts, or payments to weapons makers and other military suppliers. That was a 24% increase over Obama’s second term.
Trump’s record tax giveaway to his billionaire buddies was not balanced by any cuts in military spending, which was as much of a sacred cow to him as to Bush, Obama, and Biden. This toxic combination blew up the national debt, leaving nothing in the kitty for improving education, healthcare, public transportation or any of our society’s other critical needs. That tax cut will expire in a year’s time, but Trump has made it clear that he intends to give even greater tax breaks to his billionaire buddies.
Trump deserves credit for not starting any new wars during his first term, but his escalations of Bush’s and Obama’s wars made his first year in office in 2017 the heaviest year of U.S. and allied bombing since the First Gulf War in 1991, dropping more than 60,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia.
As Jimmy Carter told Trump, by making peace and renouncing war and militarism he can actually put America First, save trillions of dollars and invest in America.
Many Americans remember Trump’s shocking statement that “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.” What the U.S. corporate media swept under the rug was that the Iraqi forces who captured the bombed out ruins of Islamic State’s stronghold in Mosul’s Old City took Trump at his word and killed all the survivors, including women and children, just as Israel is doing in parts of Gaza today. Maybe now Trump can understand that normalizing war crimes only leads to more war crimes, not to peace or stability.
When it comes to Trump’s new cabinet picks, he might have jettisoned some of the worst hawks in his last coterie, such as John Bolton, but some of his nominees for top foreign policy jobs are awful, including Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor nominee Mike Waltz and Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth.
Tulsi Gabbard is a more encouraging choice as National Intelligence Director, but as a House member, she voted for two thirds of Obama’s and Trump’s military spending bills, and was always a pushover for expensive new weapon systems. As we asked when she ran for president in 2020, which Tulsi Gabbard will we see in her new job? The one who opposes regime change wars and the new Cold War with Russia, or the one who couldn’t say no to nuclear-armed cruise missiles in 2014, 2015 or 2016? And who will Trump listen to? Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance, who is more non-interventionist, or warmongers Rubio and Waltz?
We don’t want to place too much stock in Trump’s often contradictory public statements, but he has sounded very hawkish lately. If you believe everything Trump says, he wants to buy Greenland, invade Mexico to fight immigrants and drug gangs, annex Canada as the 51st state, put 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and seize the Panama Canal and close it to China. In Trump’s last term he badgered NATO countries to increase their military spending to 2 percent of GDP, but now he is calling on them to spend a staggering 5 percent, far more than the 3.1 percent of GDP that the U.S. spent in 2024.
This is a test for the American people. Do we want a showman, tough guy president, playing ringmaster of the corporate media circus? Do we want a leader who threatens to invade Canada, Mexico, Panama (again) and Greenland, like an American Netanyahu dreaming of a Western Greater Israel? Or should we demand a president who really puts America First? A president who makes peace in Ukraine and the Middle East? A president who finally starts bringing our troops home from those 800 foreign military bases all over the world? A president who can look at a map and see that Guantanamo is in Cuba and the Golan Heights are in Syria?
As Jimmy Carter told Trump, by making peace and renouncing war and militarism he can actually put America First, save trillions of dollars and invest in America. The Democrats have had their chances to do right by the American people and they’ve blown it so many times we’ve lost count. So the ball’s in Trump’s court. Will he follow Carter’s sage advice?
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular