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
nuclear war
Tax Day Realities: Nuclear Weapons and Our Dangerous, Misguided Priorities
An average American family of four will spend $1,606 dollars on nuclear weapons programs this year, and as a nation we are spending $261,092 every minute on weapons that cannot and must not ever be used without threatening all of humanity.
Apr 15, 2026
Each spring our nation funds our national budget on tax day, April 15. Just as the season itself is a time of renewal, this is a time to reflect on our priorities and who we are as a nation. Each of us can identify funding priorities in our collective daily experience and must ask ourselves if these are being addressed. From childcare and education to healthcare, national defense, and even nuclear weapons, we must set our priorities. With finite dollars and a myriad of national and international needs, we must be informed as to how these funds are being allocated.
Promises of affordability, reduced cost of living, and avoidance of costly wars have not coincided with reality.
Our planet continues to warm with progressive climate change, the last decade being the hottest decade in recorded history, causing increasing scarcity of natural resources further promoting conflict around the planet. Coupled with the potential for future global pandemics, this is a time when global cooperation and collaboration is more important than ever.
Unfortunately, we are pursuing policies of increased isolationism, feigning international cooperation with disdain for the international rule of law. We are pursuing wars, interventions and conflicts of choice, while walking away from international treaties, such as New START and the previous Iran nuclear deal, while bullying nations, thus empowering other nations to follow suit as international law and norms are shunned. We have seen 5 of the 9 nuclear-armed nations at war this past year with China increasing rhetorical threats against Taiwan. The twin interconnected existential threats of climate change and nuclear war seem ever closer. Recognizing this threat, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved their symbolic Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight this past January, the closest it has been in its 79 year existence. This is a grim reminder of our increased reliance on luck to prevent a nuclear catastrophe, either by intent, miscalculation, or disruptive technology.
These expenditures rob our communities of precious resources that could be redirected to the actual needs of our citizens providing true security in meeting basic human needs and providing opportunity.
The very existence of nuclear weapons threatens all of us, and everything we hold near and dear, every moment of every day. These are weapons that can never be used. With a perverse logic, as if in a trance to the end, we have chosen as a nation to increase our nuclear weapons program expenditures year over year, further proving the fallacy of deterrence as each of our adversaries do likewise so as not to be outdone.
According to the US Nuclear Weapons Community Cost Project, now in its 37th year, this Fiscal Year 2026 finds the US spending over $137 billion dollars on all nuclear weapons programs. That equates to an average of $401.51 for every man, woman, and child based on an average income of $44,673. These costs affect every community across our nation, from New York City, our richest city, spending over $3.95 Billion; to Flint Michigan, our poorest city, spending over $15.565 million; to the Navajo Nation spending over $28.491 Million. An average American family of four will spend $1,606 dollars on nuclear weapons programs this year, and as a nation we are spending $261,092 every minute on weapons that cannot and must not ever be used without threatening all of humanity.
Where does this fit into your priorities as you think about your family and the future you envision? These expenditures rob our communities of precious resources that could be redirected to the actual needs of our citizens providing true security in meeting basic human needs and providing opportunity.
This is a situation that does not have to be, but one that will not change without public support and outcry. There is a growing national grassroots campaign called Back From the Brink bringing communities together to prevent nuclear war. The movement calls for the US to take a leadership role as follows:
- Actively pursuing a verifiable agreement among nuclear-armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals;
- Renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first;
- Ending the sole, unchecked authority of any US president to launch a nuclear attack;
- Taking US nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert; and
- Cancelling the plan to replace the entire US nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons.
With over 504 national organizations, 78 municipalities and counties, eight state legislative bodies, 592 municipal and state official, and 68 members of Congress endorsing, support is growing. Each of us can endorse the campaign, join a local hub, and call on our elected officials to add their name to the growing list of local and federal officials who endorse and support this effort.
We all have a role to play in pursuing a future for our children and future generations. That role is unique to us and not necessarily a large role or a small role, it is our role. If our luck holds out, when our children’s children ask, what did you do when the planet was threatened, how will you respond? Working together we can make nuclear weapons a threat of the past.
Keep ReadingShow Less
To Stop US Wars, Saying No Is Not Enough
The US left needs a foreign policy platform that projects a positive global role for the US and can gain enough popular support to catalyze a deeper resistance to Trump 2.0 and then shape the policy of a post-MAGA government.
Apr 09, 2026
The US-Israeli attack on Iran put an exclamation point on the Gaza genocide. It sent a message to the world from the regimes in Washington and Tel Aviv: We will do anything that our military strength allows us to do. There are no rules or international laws we are bound to respect.
Most European governments, many regimes elsewhere, and major sections of the Democratic Party leadership offer only a few “process objections” to this level of ruthlessness but go with the flow.
This is a road to global catastrophe. Despite the fragile (and welcome) ceasefire, It is accelerating a process that was already underway where every government in the world is deciding that their overriding priority must be increasing their military strength. And that security requires cracking down on opposition movements within their own countries as well.
An Interconnected World
To halt and reverse this course, it is essential but not sufficient to build mass opposition to the war on Iran and all the other evils perpetrated by Washington, The US left also needs a foreign policy platform that projects a positive global role for the US and can gain enough popular support to catalyze a deeper resistance to Trump 2.0 and then shape the policy of a post-MAGA government.
In today’s world, there will be security for no one unless there is security for all.
That vision starts with the reality of an interconnected world where humanity’s very survival is in doubt. Viruses and the fallout from nuclear explosions know no borders. An interruption of supply chains in the Middle East threatens food security across the globe. Destruction in the Amazon Basin wreaks havoc on the climate worldwide.
In today’s world, there will be security for no one unless there is security for all. Weaving the fight for human survival together with peoples’ struggles for self-determination and against all forms of oppression, and with the fight for working class power, workers fighting for their rights, is a complex task. Yet in a world where diplomacy and inter-state cooperation predominate, movements for democracy and social justice have more favorable conditions to achieve their goals.
Without softening our critique of the US-dominated world order that is passing away, developing a forward-looking platform entails assessing the heightened dangers faced under Trump 2.0. It means breaking down the largely artificial division between domestic and foreign policies. When militarism, racism, and misogyny is practiced abroad, these pathologies inevitably come home.
Competing Visions as the Old Order Collapses
Today this quote from Antonio Gramsci is popular throughout the Left: “The old order is dying, and the new one is struggling to be born.” The different factions of the oligarchy are rushing into this “interregnum” to shape what comes next.
MAGA-Trump 2.0 argues that considering values like democracy or human rights when formulating policy is naïve if not treasonous, and that multilateral institutions are simply shackles on US power. It sees staying No. 1 in global “lethality” as the road to safety and prosperity for the “heritage Americans” who will dominate the country after removing or subordinating the various “others” who now live here.
The anti-MAGA wing of the US elite insists that the “rules-based” world order of the last 80 years produced a great American way of life. A few “mistakes” (Vietnam, Iraq) just need to be corrected to get back on the right track. Their program is to preserve NATO and other Cold War-era alliances; keep China at bay; and use “soft power,” sanctions, and “smart wars” to remain the world’s dominant power.
The left has trenchant critiques of the racism and exploitation inherent in both variants of Washington’s imperial project. But we won’t win popular support if we don’t go beyond critique to offer a positive vision of what the world can look like if we are shaping US policy.
Global Cooperation vs. American Exceptionalism
That vision has to address the hopes, fears, and pressing needs of the majority of US people. It has to be compelling enough to counter the American exceptionalist ideology that permeates US culture. Resting on the longstanding position of the US as the hegemonic global power and promoted unceasingly by the political class and mainstream media, the idea that the US is an inherently virtuous nation which always acts as the world’s “good guy” has long defined US “common sense.”
Anti-war and solidarity movements targeting Washington’s role in Vietnam, South Africa, Central America, Iraq, and Palestine have spotlighted the destructive role the US has played in each case. At times, energetic social movements have built mass support for arms control agreements and aggressive steps to fight climate change. But we have yet to win a durable majority to a structural critique of imperial behavior and support for an alternative world order where all countries are on equal footing, conflicts are resolved via diplomacy, and a transition away from fossil fuels is a worldwide priority.
The left has always stressed the common interest of the global majority in fighting imperial exploitation. But in a period when the most dangerous threats to human life—climate change, nuclear war, global pandemics, obscene degrees of inequality—can only be addressed by joint action by all countries, the arguments against American exceptionalism and the way it makes US national sovereignty absolute become stronger and more urgent.
This is a framework that draws on the insight of Albert Einstein at the beginning of the nuclear age (“Everything has changed except our thinking”). It embraces the outlook of the United Nations Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which expressed the most advanced thinking in the coalition that defeated fascism in World War II.
Amid a continuing genocide in Gaza and seeing the disaster of the war on Iran, the numbers of people saying “stop” to the guardians of empire is growing by the day. Fanning those flames of opposition and offering these millions a vision to fight for is the combination needed to accumulate the political power to transform the US role in the world.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Can Prospects for Nuclear War Get Any Worse? Sure, We Can Put AI in Charge
How quickly is the Pentagon moving toward handing the nuclear keys over to AI systems and Big Tech? No one really knows.
Apr 05, 2026
Can we possibly get away from AI’s ubiquitous presence in our lives? But as long as AI is now in our faces 24/7, it’s time to seriously start pushing back about its outsized and overwhelming influence. Troubling stories tumble out of the media daily. Employees in a major fast-food chain must now wear AI headsets that tell them how friendly they’re being to customers and coaching them on their work. (AI is now posing as our servant, but in the years ahead will the dynamic be reversed?)
And then there is the looming data center controversy, with Big Tech companies rapidly taking over huge swaths of land across the US to build massive and environmentally unfriendly data centers. Fortunately, this trend is now emerging as a campaign issue given early and cascading effects on electricity prices. In general, AI is having a tough year in the court of public opinion. Witness this cover story in a recent issue of Time magazine: “The People vs AI.” The article noted that “a growing cross section of the public—from MAGA loyalists to Democratic socialists, pastors to policymakers, nurses to filmmakers—agree on at least one thing: AI is moving too fast…. A 2025 Pew poll found… the public thinks AI will worsen our ability to think creatively, form meaningful relationships, and make difficult decisions.” Along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement-related pushback, a spontaneous wellspring of grassroots activism appears to be bubbling up against the AI juggernaut and the patently undemocratic backdoor power grab by technocrats and the companies behind them.
One of the greatest concerns in the public sphere is AI’s rapid incorporation into present and future military campaigns. This is actively being encouraged by the Trump administration’s decision to give AI companies free reign to develop their products with minimal regulation and oversight. This is an existential train wreck waiting to happen, and it came into striking focus in the monthslong dispute between AI company Anthropic and the Pentagon. Although it was already using the Claude platform, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was unhappy with the company’s refusal to use it to remove human decision-making from military operations and support accelerated mass surveillance of US citizens.
Anthropic’s move was that rarity in Big Tech circles, a strong and principled ethical stand against an administration that doesn’t seem to know what that is. Happy warrior Hegseth then branded the company as a “supply chain risk,” effectively banning further use by the Pentagon and punishing the company’s overall viability in the non-defense marketplace as well. Ever the opportunist, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, then jumped in to offer his AI platform to do what Anthropic wouldn’t. The matter is now in the courts.
Handing AI the “Nuclear Football”
Using AI to create what are called autonomous systems represents a quantum leap in the rapidly advancing business of modern weaponry. Paradoxically, weapons technology is being simultaneously downsized through the use of drones and smaller and sophisticated high-tech devices (such as mine sniffers) and upsized with the use of the AI systems designed to manage and control them.
This raises the very troubling picture of wars being conducted without much human oversight. It’s probably one reason even high- profile AI influencers and Big Tech CEOs have admitted (sometimes a little too casually) that the technology could destroy humanity given the right set of circumstances. While autonomous systems can apply to stand-alone weapons such as killer robots, the most worrying concern relates to the Pentagon’s desire to build and deploy command-and-control systems that remove military officers from the split-second decisions that need to be made in warfare. And yes, that includes nuclear weapons.
If AI is truly as superintelligent (and sentient) as its Big Tech proponents claim it is, then these systems should also be smart enough to refuse to participate in any projects that could degrade or destroy life on the planet.
How quickly is the Pentagon moving toward handing the nuclear keys over to AI systems and Big Tech? No one really knows. When questioned by a reporter on the matter, one senior official in the Trump administration weakly demurred, “The administration supports the need to maintain human control over nuclear weapons.”
AI experts and strategic thinkers say that a big driver of this process is that America’s top nuclear adversaries—Russia and China—are already using AI in their command-and-control systems. These developments are happening at lightning speed and are being further propelled by Epic Fury, the first AI-fueled war in US history. And let’s not be too laudatory about Anthropic. Its Claude system has been integrated with Palantir’s Maven to identify military targets. The Pentagon is still investigating whether Maven played any part in the horrific event when a US Tomahawk missile struck a girls’ elementary school killing more than 165.
Sleepwalking Into Armageddon?
What madness is this? By what shallow calculus can a handful of powerful individuals or shadowy organizations decide or even risk the fate of humanity? How do we put all of this dangerous thinking at the highest levels of our government into some kind of perspective that correlates with common sense and basic human decency? In our trajectory toward what some have called techno-feudalism, we have this apparent plunge into barbarity coupled with a powerful array of tools to accelerate it. When nuclear activist Helen Caldicott warned that Western civilization is “sleepwalking into Armageddon,” it was perhaps this particular kind of blindness that she had in mind. And the brilliant socio-biologist E.O. Wilson’s profound observation also springs to mind: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous.”
The rush to deploy AI as large-scale weaponry with every bit as much destructive potential as our existing nuclear arsenal is a tip off to the deeper motivations behind its development. In the meantime, some obvious questions need to be asked. Why aren’t government and academic institutions eager to apply these advanced AI tools to the many intractable problems that characterize world polycrisis such as global climate change or better distribution of scarce resources including food and water? Where are the urgent calls from those who serve in Congress to do so? Or why don’t we see headlines like “Harvard Inaugurates $100 Million AI Project to Address Climate Change”?
It seems pretty clear that AI justifications coming from the both the administration and Congress (not to mention that the establishment commentariat that serves them) invariably gravitate to enhancing corporate productivity or military use. And it’s equally clear that AI will also serve as yet another powerful mechanism of wealth transfer to the 1% and either knowingly or unknowingly act as a chaos agent in an increasingly unstable multipolar geopolitical world. If AI is truly as superintelligent (and sentient) as its Big Tech proponents claim it is, then these systems should also be smart enough to refuse to participate in any projects that could degrade or destroy life on the planet. I don’t see any evidence of this. Sadly, it looks like we may have to once again learn the hard way that information, knowledge, and wisdom all are very different things. And that while knowledge can be appropriated by powerful computers, wisdom will never be.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular