Mr President, Building Up the Nuclear Weapons Complex Is NOT Nuclear Disarmament

I
have been a hearty supporter of President Obama's vision of ending the
Damocles terror of nuclear weapons, but with his 2011 budget for
nuclear weapons he has backtracked on that vision. In his call for
rebuilding America's capacity to build new nuclear weapons he has caved
in to the nuclear defense industries and the Republican Party beholden
to them.

Where is the promise to the rest
of the world that the United States will lead in dismantling these
weapons of terror? Remember, one single W-88 warhead from our local
Trident submarine fleet on Hood Canal can incinerate an entire city the
size of Seattle.

All the reviews of the
safety and reliability of our current nuclear weapons conclude that
they are safe enough and reliable enough to provide the deterrence of
terror the doctrine on nuclear deterrence requires. Our adversaries
know that even a fractionally reliable retaliation will be the end of
them.

Our greatest threats come from
Russia with whom we are in active negotiations for a new Strategic Arms
Reduction Treaty (START II) and China, whose nuclear forces are driven
by our US arsenal and that of our allies in India and Japan.[i]
The world's greatest threats may well come from India and Pakistan, who
have followed the example of the US and USSR in their local cold war,
and put the entire Asian subcontinent at risk for millions of deaths in
the event of a nuclear exchange.[ii]

In
his recent article in the Wall Street Journal Vice-President Joe Biden
on behalf of President Obama tried to convince us that we must have new
nuclear weapons and a rebuilt system of weapons development
laboratories to assure our safety. This flies in the face of the
obligation in Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and
resembles all the justifications the US has used since 1945 for
escalating the nuclear arms race. The new budget calls for a 22 percent
increase in funds for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where a new
facility for manufacturing plutonium pits for nuclear weapons will be
sited.

Joseph Cirincione of the
Ploughshares Fund commented on the tightrope President Obama is walking
in an effort to win Republican votes, "There is no question that some
counties, friends and foes, will see the increased spending as a sign
of U.S. hypocrisy."

President Obama's
inspired promises to eliminate nuclear weapons, "the greatest threat to
America," for now at least are giving way to the vestigial Cold War
doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, that is, the notion that
threatening to annihilate someone else somehow keeps us safe.

This
alleged "need" to build up our nuclear weapons capabilities (which is a
huge financial boon to some) is the same argument used by every other
administration to justify increasing our commitment to nuclear terror
as our means of global control. We have over 700
military bases within the territorial Unites States and more than 700
bases scattered around the world. That's how we become the source for
over 40 percent of the world's annual military expenditures. And
because so much of our foreign aid is military aid for other countries
to buy US weaponry, our fraction of global military expenditures is
even greater.

In 2008 the total world expenditures on
military was $1464 billion ($1.465 trillion). Of that the US spent $607
billion (41.5%). Next highest expenditure was by China at just under
$90 billion (less than 6% of world expenditures). France, the United
Kingdom and Russia followed.[iii]

The Obama administration's military budget for fiscal year 2011 is $733 billion[iv]
at a time when one in ten employable Americans can't find work, jobs
are being outsourced, a record number of homes are being foreclosed,
our state budget is seriously unfunded, and our core educational
investments are all being short-changed. This transfer of wealth away
from investments in our human capacity to work creatively and
productively corrodes the very fabric of our society's ability to
remain strong economically in competition with China, the European
Union, and the rest of Asia. At last count China was
graduating six times as many PhDs in science as was the United States,
and holds $800 billion of our national debt.

These
military increases are particularly disturbing when viewed next to our
still much too meager investments in global climate recovery and
education for future generations.

We have become a national security state that professes democracy and funds institutions of threat and coercion. This
is not CHANGE, Mr. President. And this is certainly not HOPE. This is
our American corporate-run empire calling the shots. Sadly, this may
well be the best you can do right now.

***

[i] Japan does not currently manufacture nuclear weapons, but could do so within six months, if they choose to do so.

[ii] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=local-nuclear-war

[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_federations_by_military_expenditures

[iv] https://www.armscontrolcenter.org/assets/pdfs/FY_2011_Briefing_Book_Final.pdf