Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting it to work.<\/p>\n
The United States\u2019 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 \u201cfallen behind on nuclear capability\u201d and that he wanted to be at the \u201ctop of the pack\u201d on nuclear weapons again. There\u2019s one thing Trump failed to say \u2013 we\u2019re already on the top of the pack on nuclear weapons!<\/p>\n
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\u2019s New START nuclear arms reduction treaty as \u201cjust another bad deal the country made,\u201d He has compared it to the multilateral agreement curbing Iran\u2019s nuclear program, but Trump has clearly failed to display any knowledge of the \u201cdeal.\u201d<\/p>\n
New START\u00a0reduces 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\u2019s supply of highly enriched uranium. The current President\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Mistaken policies on nuclear weapons didn\u2019t 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 \u201ctrillion dollar triad\u201d \u2014 the plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, submarines, and missiles.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
What could we do with the modernization money? William Hartung\u2019s wonderful story \u201cNuclear Weapons: Who Pays, Who Profits\u201d 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\u2019s high time the citizens of our democratic republic stand up and demand attention for citizens instead of contractors!<\/p>\n
Sources: Arms Control Associaiton, William Hartung, \u201cNuclear Weapons: Who Pays, Who Profits.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting it to work. The United States\u2019 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 \u201cfallen behind on nuclear capability\u201d and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4368,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/mushroomcloud.jpg?fit=360%2C410&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5110,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5109\/revisions\/5110"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}