Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
Let Them Eat
Weapons: Trump’s Bizarre Arms Race
Lawence
Wittner
June
14, 2020
History
News Network
In late May of
this year, President Donald Trump’s special envoy for arms control bragged
before a Washington think tank that the U.S. government was prepared to
outspend Russia and China to win a new nuclear arms race. “The
president has made clear that we have a tried and true practice here,” he
remarked. “We know how to win these races and we know how to spend
the adversary into oblivion.”
This comment was
not out of line for a Trump administration official. Indeed, back in
December 2016, shortly after his election, Trump himself
proclaimed that the United States would “greatly strengthen and expand”
the U.S. government’s nuclear weapons program, adding
provocatively: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch
them at every pass and outlast them all.” In a fresh challenge to
Russia and China, delivered in October 2018, Trump again extolled his
decision to win the nuclear arms race, explaining: “We have more money than
anybody else, by far.”
And, in fact, the
Trump administration has followed through on its promise to pour American tax
dollars into the arms race through a vast expansion of the U.S. military
budget. In 2019 alone (the last year for which worldwide spending
figures are available), federal spending on the U.S. military soared
to $732 billion. (Other military analysts, who included military-related
spending, put the figure at $1.25 trillion.) As a result,
the United States, with about 4 percent of the world’s population,
accounted for 38 percent of world military spending. Although it’s
certainly true that other nations engaged in military buildups as
well, China accounted for only 14 percent of global military spending that
year, while Russia accounted for only 3 percent. Indeed, the United
States spent more on its military than the next 10 countries combined.
The vast military
superiority enjoyed by the United States, however, was not nearly enough for
the Trump administration. In February 2020, the administration
introduced a 2021 fiscal year budget proposal that would devote 55
percent of the federal government’s $1.3 trillion discretionary spending to the
military. By 2030, the military proportion of the federal budget
would rise to 62 percent.
Today, about four
months later, this top priority for military spending might strike many
Americans as bizarre. After all, a disease pandemic continues to
plague the nation (with over 110,000 deaths thus far), a large
portion of the economy has collapsed, unemployment has reached the catastrophic
levels of the Great Depression, and American cities are torn by
strife. Wouldn’t this be an appropriate time to focus America’s
financial resources on public healthcare, educational opportunity, decent
housing, and a major jobs program―or, in the words of the U.S. constitution,
to “promote the general welfare”? But Republican officials
argue that these and other public assistance measures are “too expensive.”
What are not “too
expensive” are the administration’s big ticket weapons programs, which, even by
military standards, are of dubious value. Not
surprisingly, Trump continued pouring money into purchasing Lockheed
Martin’s F-35 combat aircraft, which, though an operational disaster, had
cost U.S. taxpayers $1.4 trillion by 2017. Another pet project,
quickly embraced by Trump, was the newest and costliest U.S. aircraft
carrier, delivered with fanfare to the Navy in late May 2017 for $13
billion. Its only problem was that it had difficulty launching
planes from its deck and facilitating their landing. Yet another
very expensive military project is U.S. missile
defense. Originally derided as “Star Wars” when Ronald Reagan began
promoting it in the 1980s, it has become an obsession with Republicans, who
have managed to secure more than $250 billion in U.S. government funding for it
thus far. Nevertheless, it continues to fail most of its tests
against intercontinental ballistic missiles, despite the fact that these tests
are heavily scripted.
One of the most
cutting-edged of the U.S. government’s current military weapons projects is
the hypersonic missile. Capable of travelling five times faster
than the speed of sound (3,800 mph), hypersonic missiles with nuclear warheads
are immensely appealing to the military establishments of Russia, China, and
the United States. In this case, too, however, there is a serious
problem: Given the missile’s incredible speed, it produces immense
heat while traveling through the atmosphere, thus diverting or destroying it
before it reaches its target. Even so, this weapons project should
produce yet another bonanza for Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest arms
manufacturer, which has already received $3.5 billion for preliminary work on
it.
Of course, the
Trump administration has not forgotten about an array of its high tech weapons
that do work. America’s 5,800 nuclear weapons,
capable of being launched from land, sea, and air, provide staggering
firepower―more than enough to destroy most life on earth. The
current nuclear arsenal, however, is viewed as insufficient by the Trump
administration, which is engaged in a vast “modernization” program to
rebuild the entire nuclear weapons complex, including new production
facilities, warheads, bombs, and delivery systems. The price tag for
this enormous nuclear buildup, which will occur over the next three decades,
has been estimated as at least $1.5 trillion.
Against a backdrop
of economic and social collapse, plus potential global destruction, the obvious
thing to do is to pull out of this immensely costly and bizarre arms race and,
instead, foster arms control and disarmament agreements with other
nations. But Trump seems determined to cast off whatever
progress in this direction his predecessors have made, scrapping the INF
Treaty, withdrawing from the Iran nuclear agreement, terminating the New START
Treaty, and scuttling the Open Skies Treaty. For a variety of
reasons—rewarding giant corporations, getting reelected,
and dominating the world―Trump remains fixated on “winning” the arms race.
When it comes to
increasingly desperate Americans, their lives and livelihoods spiraling
downward, his message seems to be: Let them eat weapons!
Donations can be sent
to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206,
Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at]
comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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