HERE IS THE US GOVERNMENT’S 2018 NUCLEAR WEAPONS POLICY and LANGUAGE ON USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS KNOWN AS THE “NUCLEAR POSTURE REVIEW”
US NUCLEAR WAR PLAN or “NUCLEAR POSTURE REVIEW” 2018
Bomb Tests and Bidding Wars Herald New (Unlawful) $1.5 Trillion Nuclear Weapons Complex
By John LaForge
While much of the world pursues the abolition of nuclear weapons — embraced by the adoption July 7 by 122 nations of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons — the militarized Trump White House is pursuing plans for a trillion-dollar rebuild of the entire US nuclear weapons complex. The enormous, extravagant program is designed to produce 80 new nuclear warheads every year, including three new warhead types, a new $20 billion nuclear-armed Long Range Standoff (LRSO) weapon, a new $12 billion B61 nuclear gravity bomb, a new fleet of nuclear-armed submarines, and a new $100 billion intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system.
As WallStreet.com online reported recently, “A review by the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan, nuclear weapons watchdog, [found] the total 30-year cost of the program could rise to $1.5 trillion” — $500 billion beyond what the Obama Administration first proposed in 2016. Beyond the colossal expense, the program appears to be a flagrant violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty.
The Trump administration must believe that urgent domestic and global humanitarian crises can be solved using guns since traditionally civilian White House Chief of Staff is Marine Corps General James Kelly, his National Security Advisor is Army General HR McMaster, and his Defense Secretary is Marine Corps General James “Mad Dog” Mattis.
On Aug. 8, the militarized Energy Dept. and US Air Force conducted two tests of the new “B61-12” gravity bomb at Nevada’s Tonopah Test Range. The unarmed bomb test — using an F-15E jet fighter, currently employed in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya — demonstrated the jet’s ability to wage nuclear war. The B61-12 program “is progressing on schedule,” said Phil Calbos, the Acting Deputy Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration. NNSA builds and maintains US nuclear warheads. Although NNSA is nominally a civilian agency, Mr. Calbos graduated from West Point and studied at the Pentagon’ National War College.
The B61-12 bomb test involved new “tailfin” hardware designed by Boeing Corp. NNSA wants the first B61-12s to be finished in 2022 and to ship 180 of them to five “nuclear sharing” NATO partners in Europe — replacing the ones already there. Critical German, Dutch, and Belgian politicians have called for the permanent removal of all US nuclear weapons, and the Air Force itself may soon remove its B61s from Turkey. Another 400 to 600 of the new B61s are set to be built to replace those now used on long-range Air Force B-52 and B-1 bombers.
The Air Force also granted $349 million in contracts to Boeing, and $329 to Northrop Grumman in August, and put the two giant weapons contractors into competition to replace today’s arsenal of 450 Minuteman III ICBMs. Popular Mechanics reports that “Northrop Grumman and Boeing each have been awarded just under $350 million to churn out Technology Maturation and Risk Reduction studies before the Air Force picks a single winner.” One of the two can expect to win the plum $100 billion contract to build the new ICBMs, dubbed Ground Based Strategic Deterrent.
This push for a replacement ICBM flies in the face of authoritative calls for their abolition. In January 2015, General/Secretary Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “You should ask, ‘Is it time to reduce the triad … removing the land-based missiles?’” Speaking Dec. 3, 2015, former Defense Secretary William Perry called for retiring land-based missiles altogether saying, “ICBMs aren’t necessary … they’re not needed. Any reasonable definition of deterrence will not require that third leg.” (Other “legs” are submarines and long-range bombers.) Sec. Perry’s commentaries in the New York Times and the Washington Post last year were titled respectively, “Why It’s Safe to Scrap America’s ICBMs,” and “Mr. President, kill the new Cruise missile” (the LRSO).
Additionally, a blue-ribbon commission chaired in 2012 by Gen. James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for eliminating the ICBM system, not replacing it. At a Senate hearing later in 2012, Gen. Cartwright testified that the ICBMs could be scrapped without leaving the US at risk. Cartwright’s commission report was signed by then Senator and soon-to-be Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, and recommended a US nuclear arsenal with none left on ICBMs.
Congressional pleas for austerity, fiscal responsibility, and budget cutting should be lampooned and rejected unless the $ trillion-plus nuclear weapons plan — prohibited now by the Non-Proliferation Treaty and soon by the Nuclear Weapon Treaty Ban — is zeroed out first.
Counting Carriers, or, When is an F-35B not an aircraft?
Summer Quarterly 2017
In the post-fact US Navy, the USS America, left, with up to 2,930 personnel and a compliment of 20 F-35B fighter jets, is not an aircraft carrier.
The Pentagon likes to say it has 10 aircraft carriers, the 10 Nimitz-class “super carriers” that displace 100,000 tons, and carry up to 6,000 people. But it actually has nineteen.
The 19 carriers are not for deterrence or defense, considering Russia, China, Brazil, India, France and Thailand each have exactly one. Italy and Spain have two each, but they’re NATO allies.
Not counted by the Pentagon are its Tarawa-class carriers with 2,800 people onboard. Three football fields long, and 20 stories high, the Tarawa ships “have the general profile of an aircraft carrier,” as the website GlobalSecurity.org notes. They carry 35 fighter aircraft, including Harrier fighter jets, Harrier jump jets, helicopters, reconnaissance aircraft and thousands of tons of langing vehicles for invasions.
The eight other giant carriers are 45,000-ton Wasp-class behemoths, known instead as “amphibious assault ships” that the Navy calls “the largest amphibious ships in the world.” They launch helicopters, jump jets, hovercraft, landing craft and assault vehicles, and carry up to 2000 Marines. Used for waging war “forward…from the sea,” and “assault by air,” each of the eight Wasps have a 600-bed hospital.
Two of the newest carriers—the $3.5 billion USS America and USS Tripoli—are “considerably larger than recent aircraft-carrying ships constructed for the Korean, Japanese, and Australian navies,” according to Robert Farley of the University of Kentucky’s Patterson School. The America-class will carry up to 20 Marine Corps F-35B fighter jets, plus Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, and helicopter gunships.
Not satisfied with a 19-to-one advantage, the Navy is sea testing the biggest carrier on Earth, the Gerald R. Ford, a 100,000-ton, $10 billion giant that has a crew of 4,300 and carries a fleet of 90 aircraft.
—Lockheed Martin; The Diplomat, April 17, 2014; GlobalSecurity.org, “World Wide Aircraft Carriers – 2014”
Another $125 Billion in Military Waste Alleged; Report Adds to Trillions Still Unaccounted For
Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2016-2017
The Washington Post reported December 5 that, “The Pentagon buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget.”
News of the $125 billion in Pentagon waste and allegations of its attempted cover-up should be welcomed by President elect Trump, who said he would pay for a $500 billion increase in military spending using a “full audit” at the Pentagon, cutting redundant bureaucracy and unwanted programs. Although Mr. Trump is now waffling on campaign promises to “lock her up,” “build a wall,” “get rid of ‘Obama care,’” and “bring back waterboarding and a hell of a lot worse,” he also promised to “eliminate waste and budget gimmicks” in the federal budget.
The Post’s report of waste and accounting fraud comes on the heels of a June 2016 military Inspector General’s report which said the Army made $2.8 billion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 billion for the year. “Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up,” Reuters reported. The Pentagon’s 2016 fiscal year budget was $573 billion—more than half of the total federal budget appropriated by Congress.
The Post notes that the newest investigation “identified ‘a clear path’ for the Department of Defense to save $125 billion over five years,” but was met with disdain by high-ranking officers. The Post reported, “Some Pentagon leaders said they fretted that by spotlighting so much waste, the study would undermine their repeated public assertions that years of budget austerity had left the armed forces starved of funds.”
Saving the $125 billion could be done, the Pentagon report’s authors said, without job losses, through attrition, early retirement, and by reigning in the most high-priced military contractors, like Lockheed Martin (with $29 billion in weapons deals), United Technologies ($6.6 billion), Boeing ($15 billion), Northrup Grumman ($9.5 billion), Raytheon ($12 billion), and General Dynamics ($12 billion).
Trump’s speeches about “US military decline” will help Congress keep these giant weapons dealers well funded, but should not fool the public. The 2017 military budget of $768 billion is four times China’s $190 billion, and 14 times Russia’s $53.02 billion; it is bigger than the nine next biggest military budgets combined.
In November 2013, a Reuters investigation found that since 1996, a staggering $8.5 trillion (with a ‘t’!) in Pentagon spending had never been accounted for. The report explained that the military regularly uses a budget gimmick of entering false and sometimes completely made-up numbers called “plugs” into ledgers in order to hide lost or missing data. In fiscal year 2012 alone, the military reported $9.22 billion in such faked “plugs.” This was up from $7.41 billion in 2011 fakery the president-elect promises to root out.
This Reuters’ report on waste, fraud and abuse in the Pentagon came after the little-remembered admission made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on September 10, 2001. In a shocking speech that was buried in the aftermath of 9/11, Rumsfeld said, “According to some estimates, we cannot track 2.3 trillion dollars in transactions.” He decried the accounting mess as “monumental” and “terrifying.”
Sadly, the billionaires and generals appointed by Trump to oversee the treasury and the military budget cannot be expected to tear into the Pentagon’s monumental, terrifying, and unaccountable transfer of federal taxes to the shareholders of the weapons contractors. After all, they themselves are major shareholders.
—JL
Follow the Money: Obama’s $1 Trillion Arms Race
Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2016-2017
In 2009, President Obama promised to pursue a “world without nuclear weapons”—but that was then. By 2014, the administration had announced plans for a decade-long, $355 billion nuclear weapons production program to last 30 years and ultimately cost a cool $1 trillion.1 The eye-popping expenditure has since been generally adopted by the House and Senate in military authorization bills.
One of three new weapons production sites has already opened—the $700 million non-nuclear parts complex run by Honeywell in Kansas City, Missouri. The other two include a uranium fabrication complex at the Y-12 site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and a plutonium processing works at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico. The latter two programs have run up such enormous cost increases that even the White House has blinked.
Plans for LANL’s plutonium “pit” factory—originally expected to cost $660 million—expanded into a $5.8 billion complex. The project was suspended in 2012 and engineers went to work at cost cutting. At Oak Ridge, the cost of the uranium processing “canyon” rocketed from a $6.5 billion to $19 billion. The White House halted the scheme in 2014 and the lab is reworking its plans.
New H-bomb production is advertised as “revitalization,” “modernization,” “refurbishment” and “improvement.” The terms are used by major arms contractors and their congressional representatives who speak of the “40-year-old submarine warhead” (known as the W-76), or who voice concern over factory “fires, explosions and workplace injuries” at existing facilities that are “deplorable” because the equipment “breaks down on a daily basis,” the New York Times reported.
Rebuild proponents neglect to mention that 15,000 plutonium warheads are currently maintained at Pantex, Texas, and are good for 50 years, according to a report in The Guardian.2 The $1 trillion proposal is said to re-establish enough H-bomb building infrastructure to produce up to 80 new warheads every year by 2030.
The military currently deploys almost 5,000 nuclear warheads—on submarines, land-based missiles, and heavy bombers (the Guardian reported exactly 4,804)—even though former Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel signed a 2012 report that concluded that no more than 900 nuclear warheads were “necessary.” The report recommended abolishing 3,500 warheads now in ready reserve, saying warhead numbers are much larger than required.
Independent observers, watchdogs and think tanks have argued for decades that the arsenal can be drastically reduced and made less dangerous: a) by not replacing retired warheads; b) by taking deployed warheads off “alert” status; and c) by separating warheads from missiles and bombs. This separation would lengthen warning-to-launch times, ease international tensions and reduce the likelihood of accidental or unauthorized launches.
Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group, which watchdogs the LANL, told The Guardian the reason that new H-bomb production is even being considered is simply “private greed.” Ever since they were privatized in 2006, for-profit corporations now run all the government’s nuclear weapons labs. Mello said, “The nuclear weapons labs are sized for the Cold War, and they need a Cold War to keep that size.”
Additionally, in a report leaked in 2013, the Navy itself questioned the need for producing new warheads. (The Navy controls at least 1,152 warheads spread across its 14 Trident ballistic missile submarines.) And James Doyle, a 17-year veteran scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (who was fired in July 2014 for independently publishing a scholarly article defending nuclear disarmament), told The Guardian, “I’ve never seen the justification articulated for the 50-to-80 pits per year by 2030.”
The $1 trillion estimate does not include a few hundred billion dollars more for new nuclear war-fighting machinery, often called “delivery systems” or “platforms,” such as:
- The $80 billion cost of building 12 new ballistic missile submarines to replace the Navy’s Trident fleet. Sen. Richard Blumenthall, D-CT, told New London’s The Day Sept. 23, “The essence here is this boat will be the strongest, stealthiest, most sustainable of any in the history of the world.”3
- The Air Force’s $81 billion plans for a new nuclear bomber called the Long-Range Strike Bomber Program. The Air Force reportedly wants 80-100 of them at roughly $550 million apiece. The chilling rationale for these bombers was provided by Lt. Gen. Stephen Wilson, chief of Global Strike Command, who said Sept. 16, 2014, “It will be essential as we move forward to have a bomber force that can penetrate any place on the globe and hold any target on the planet at risk.”4
- A planned replacement of 450 Minuteman III ICBMs known as the “Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent” that a Feb. 4, 2014 study by RAND said would cost between $84 and $219 billion5—set to be deployed in existing silos after 2030.
________
1 William Broad and David Sanger, “US Ramping Up Major Renewal In Nuclear Arms,” New York Times, Sept. 21, 2014
2 Caty Enders, “Congress pushes nuclear expansion despite accidents at weapons lab,” Guardian, Sept. 29, 2014
3 Scott Ritter, “Blumenthal, Courtney tout program for Trident sub successor,” The Day, Sept. 23, 2014
4 Joseph Raatz, “Air Force leaders discuss nuclear enterprise,” Air Force Global Strike Command Public Affairs, Sept, 16, 2014
5 Stephen Young, “The End of the New ICBM,” DefenseOne.com, Feb. 18, 2014; & Joseph Raatz, “Modernization of US nuclear forces not optional,” Global Strike Command Public Affairs, Sept. 19, 2014
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