Warheads, Human Heads, and Mixed Motives

The START ratification blackmail gets more blatant. In the NYT yesterday Senator Kyl was demanding first year nuclear “modernization” money, second year money, and long-range money.

Tennessee Senator Bob Corker wants an “appropriate and thoughtful modernization program.” (thoughtful - that’s sweet)

Administration officials, reported the Times, say they will pay the price,. 

The House of Representatives does not vote on ratification but appropriates money..  So Kyl and the rest want to control House votes.  Vice President Biden lobbied House members to produce the first year modernization money, only to see a House Subcommittee cut it back $99 million. 

The frantic rush for nuclear arms race billions, when the United States is leagues ahead of all the rest of the world, and when Republicans and Democrats are screaming deficit, deficit, has to be measured against two probable motives on the part of Kyl, Corker and the others:

    - to facilitate squeezing money for health, conservation, climate control, recreation, and education out of the budget, the tactic brazenly admitted by Reagan’s Budget Director David Stockman.

    - to keep weapons profits bubbling.

These two ever-present motives have disabled rational discourse on security for a half century.

In Britain a parallel weapons modernization battle is raging, at the moment over Trident missile submarines. Do they need modernization?  Might there be a cheaper deterrent?  And so on.

Just what do our supposedly moldering warheads (that an independent scientists’ group called JASON say have years of remaining shelf life), these rusty, musty derelicts of outmoded warfare point to, these Twentieth Century counterparts of spears, cross-bows, muskets, and cannon?  At you and me, of course.  Over a thousand around the world, on hair trigger alert, programmed for the downtowns, the malls and city halls, hospitals, and schools.

Anthropologists one day will ask why human evolution weakened our survival instinct just as humans invented  the ultimate killing machinery and needed a survival instinct as never before.

The answer, seems to me, is that evolution gave us more and more brain power to make up for our increasingly awkward inability to dodge and weave.  Question is, can democracy mobilize modern humans’ undoubted intelligence, or does our disuse of brainpower consign democracy and other hallmarks of progress to defeat?

The Price to Ratify START

The good news, the great news, is that with the new START Treaty the governments of the two nuclear superpowers have agreed on a seven year round of reducing strategic (but not tactical) nuclear warheads, launchers, and bombers. The bad news is the price that will be exacted by war system champions of the weapons industry, Congress, and the media.

Were the targeted cities geared up by their nuclear-fodder populations to join the fray, the new START could prove a much bigger plus. Instead of the massive political clout that cities could wield, the valiant efforts of President Obama and a few Congressional leaders will have to rely on the backing of NGOs and some limited media. This help is essential but weaker than the weapons industry that streams millions of jobs and billions of dollars to its employees and stockholders.

The weapons industry wants to sell missile defense systems to dozens of countries. It wants to sell more conventional weapons to overseas customers as proliferation expands and nuclear weapons increase elsewhere than in the U.S. and Russia, and more to the U.S. government with the justification that our nuclear arsenal is decreasing. It wants to design and build a new nuclear wahead, the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW).

Here is an example of what arms control advocates have to contend with, as described by William J. Broad in the NYT today. Two months ago Ohio Republican Representative Michael R. Turner asked the three nuclear weapons laboratories (Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia) to answer the report issued last year by an independent group of scientists and advisors (the JASON Report) that existing nuclear weapons could retain usability for years to come.

JASON had found, according to the Project on Government Oversight, that “life of the nation’s nuclear warheads, including plutonium pits and HEU (highly enriched uranium) secondaries can be extended safely and certifiably for decades without replacement.”

The three labs, which employ thousands and which anticipate receiving new buildings in which to design and build the RRW, answered that JASON was all wet and the RRW was essential to American security.

Turner held back releasing the three responses until three days ago, the day when Russia and the United States announced agreement on the new START Treaty. Thus, the price of dismantling some weapons will be a huge make-work project to replace remaining ones. This is just one of the conditions that the war system advocates will try to exact for ratification of the new START.