Nuclear Mass Death

Dyin' Ain't Much of a Living

Mark Twain was right when he said history may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

Consider America’s approach to nuclear weapons. Under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, America’s strategic nuclear triad was modernized at immense cost. One hundred B-1 bombers were built. The stealthy B-2 bomber followed. MX “Peacekeeper” ICBMs were deployed. New Ohio-class nuclear subs armed with Trident missiles were launched. Pershing II and GLCMs (ground-launched cruise missiles) were fielded in Europe. And Reagan presented his idea of a missile defense shield, known as the strategic defense initiative (SDI) or informally as “Star Wars.” All this cost enormous sums of money.

Fortunately, the Pershing IIs and GLCMs were retired under talks that eliminated intermediate-range nuclear missiles. The Peacekeeper missiles are already gone. The B-1s are due to be retired over the next decade and no longer fly nuclear missions. And the Ohio-class submarine force, the most survivable leg of the nuclear triad, remains on station, with just one submarine capable of destroying much of the world.

Air Force B-2 bomber being refueled

The U.S. today possesses an enormous nuclear overkill capacity. The arsenal consists of roughly 5000 nuclear bombs and warheads. Again, just one submarine carries up to 20 Trident II D5 missiles with multiple nuclear warheads, each warhead being far more powerful than the bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. To borrow a line from Daniel Ellsberg, each submarine is capable of 100 Holocausts. They are genocidal weapons to a degree that is unimaginable. By the way, the U.S. has fourteen Ohio-class “boomer” submarines.

Here is where history rhymes. Under yet another tough-talking Republican president, the U.S. today is yet again “modernizing” its nuclear triad while imagining a missile defense shield (now known as “Golden Dome”). The Air Force wants a new nuclear bomber (the B-21 Raider) and ICBM (the Sentinel), and the Navy wants a new ballistic-missile-firing submarine, the Columbia-class.

None of this is really necessary. ICBMs are obsolete; they are static targets and destabilizing ones at that. Bombers are superfluous and besides, the Air Force still has B-52s and B-2s for nuclear missions. Missile shields like “Golden Dome” are easy to conceptualize but impossible to build. They can be fooled by decoys and overwhelmed by an enemy with sufficient warheads (Russia).

But logic doesn’t matter here. Nor does morality. What matters is money, power, jobs, and the military-industrial-Congressional complex. That’s why history is rhyming here. The MICC will always fight for more ICBMs, more bombers, more submarines because that is its health, its wealth, its reason for being. To the MICC, the nuclear triad really is the holy trinity. It is something to be worshipped and preserved irrespective of cost and logic.

The U.S. should lead the world in reducing the deployment of nuclear weapons. Instead, the U.S. leads in nuclear escalation. And it does so always in the stated cause of “deterrence” when the real reason is the health and wealth of the MICC.

No one really knows how much nuclear triad modernization and the “Golden Dome” will cost; estimates for both reach $3 trillion over the next thirty years. But it’s not just the cost in dollars that matters — it’s the cost to our collective existence. These weapons systems are making the U.S. and the world less safe, less stable, rather than more so. They are possibly the very worst examples of human folly, and that’s truly saying something.

I very much doubt the average American wants more nuclear bombs and missiles, but what we want doesn’t seem to matter. The MICC wants — and it gets what it wants. It does so by scaring us about Russia or China or Iran while selling these genocidal weapons as job-creators. It’s a living, they might say. But as the Outlaw Josey Wales once said, “Dyin’ ain’t much of a living,” especially when you’re talking about murdering most of humanity in a genocidal nuclear war.

We must put a stop to this madness while we still can.