Trump Quietly Promises Billions in New Nuke Contracts
This could trigger a new arms race with Russia and China.
By • September 1, 2017
“Baker Shot”, part of Operation Crossroads, a nuclear test by the United States at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Credit: U.S. Department of Defense/Public Domain.
“…America’s
collective nuclear amnesia has led to the lessons of the past having been
largely forgotten…
The Trump administration has just
announced that it is moving ahead with an Obama-era plan to modernize America’s
nuclear arsenal, sprucing up the nuclear Triad with a new fleet of
land-based missiles, missile-carrying submarines, and air-delivered nuclear
weapons that will cost the American taxpayer well over $1 trillion in the
coming years.
The ostensible purpose behind this modernization effort is to
maintain America’s nuclear deterrence capability for decades to come.
The harsh
reality, however, is that through this nuclear upgrade, America is simply
repeating the mistakes of the past, building weapons whose precision and speed
will trigger a new arms race with Russia and China as they seek to match this
new American capability with weapons designed to sustain their version of
nuclear deterrence.
Mutually
assured destruction (MAD), once relegated to the trash bin of history, has had
new life breathed into it.
This time there is no foundation of arms control in
place to limit the insanity—the ABM treaty is a thing of the past, and America
today hides behind the false promise of a missile-defense shield that has
questionable utility against a North Korean madman armed with a handful of
missiles, let alone a Russian or Chinese military armed with hundreds.
Disarmament talks with Russia—once a hallmark of the Trump foreign-policy
vision—are stillborn...
American
tanks patrol the Polish frontier opposite their Russian counterparts, while
U.S. and Russian warplanes share the skies over Syria, and play cat and mouse
over the Baltics.
Into this volatile mix, President Trump now wants to deploy a
new generation of nuclear weapons that any enemy possessing a modicum of
strategic insight would have no choice but to view as possessing genuine
first-strike capability.
Given the enhanced performance of these weapons, there
will be no “fail safe” mechanism to limit the scope and scale of inadvertent
use. There won’t be time for military officers to call home with a furtive
warning of impending doom…
Today Americans are unable or perhaps unwilling to
hold their elected leaders responsible as they play nuclear Russian roulette—a game
as avoidable as it is insane.
---
Scott Ritter is a former Marine
Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing
arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and
in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of Deal of the
Century: How Iran Blocked the West’s Road to War (Clarity Press, 2017).
READ the complete article:
READ the complete article:
No comments:
Post a Comment