The Cost of Nuclear Weapons
Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting it to work.
The United States’ policy on nuclear weapons qualifies as insanity. In an interview that took place just a month after taking office, President Donald Trump said our country had “fallen behind on nuclear capability” and that he wanted to be at the “top of the pack” on nuclear weapons again. There’s one thing Trump failed to say – we’re already on the top of the pack on nuclear weapons!
The U.S. has 6,800 nuclear warheads with 4,000 in the active stockpile. Most experts say 300 is more than enough to deter any nation from attaching our country. In the same interview, Trump described President Obama’s New START nuclear arms reduction treaty as “just another bad deal the country made,” He has compared it to the multilateral agreement curbing Iran’s nuclear program, but Trump has clearly failed to display any knowledge of the “deal.”
New START reduces the number of U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads by one-third and it includes an inspection regime to make sure both sides live up to their end of the deal. The Iran deal has resulted in a 98 percent reduction in that country’s supply of highly enriched uranium. The current President’s stance on nuclear proliferation broke with the longstanding policy of previous Presidents. During his Presidential campaign, Trump called for the U.S. to pull out of Japan and for Japan to develop nuclear weapons. Trump’s predecessors understood that the more nuclear weapons there are in the world the more likely a nuclear war might break out. During his presidential campaign, Trump called for the U.S. to pull out of Japan and for Japan to develop nuclear weapons.
Mistaken policies on nuclear weapons didn’t start with the Trump Administration. President Obama agreed to a $1 trillion dollar, three decade upgrade to our nuclear arsenal in order to secure support for the Start Treaty. The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies issued a report on the “trillion dollar triad” — the plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, submarines, and missiles.
Included in the upgrade are new nuclear warhead facilities and new nuclear warheads at a cost of $350 billion, 12 new ballistic missile submarines at a cost of over $8 billion each, 100 B-21 bombers for up to $1 billion each, hundreds of new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) at a cost of up to $120 billion and a new nuclear-armed cruise missile at a cost of up to $20 billion for the whole program.
Who benefits from this spree of spending? A handful of companies are the main beneficiaries. Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor for the B-21 Bomber; the Pratt and Whitney division of United Technologies will build the engines; and BAE Systems, a global defense firm based primarily in the UK and the United States, is a major subcontractor. General Dynamics will be the prime contractor for the ballistic missile submarine with major assistance from Virginia-based Huntington Ingalls Shipbuilding. Contracts have not been awarded yet for the ICBM and nuclear-armed cruise missile, but bidders will include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and Raytheon. The biggest beneficiaries of spending on nuclear warheads are the contractors that run major facilities for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), including Honeywell, which runs the Sandia nuclear weapons engineering laboratory in New Mexico, and a consortium that includes the University of California and Becthel, which run the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratories.
What could we do with the modernization money? William Hartung’s wonderful story “Nuclear Weapons: Who Pays, Who Profits” makes some suggestions: 100 Million School lunches ($235 million), 10,000 high school science teachers for one year ($553 million), salvage and protect all superfund toxic waste sites for one year ($681 million), provide federal funding for Planned Parenthood for one year ($528 million), health insurance for 1 million families for one year ($16.8 billion), end homelessness for one year ($20 billion) and fix all deficient bridges ($71 billion). It’s high time the citizens of our democratic republic stand up and demand attention for citizens instead of contractors!
Sources: Arms Control Associaiton, William Hartung, “Nuclear Weapons: Who Pays, Who Profits.”
