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USA and Russia in the grip of useless nuclear weapons industry

…led Reagan to embrace nuclear abolition, but not even he could break the transcendent combine of industry-Congress-Pentagon. Those three define the sides of the iron triangle within which America still finds itself imprisoned.

US nuclear arsenal a dangerous remnant The Boston Globe, James Carroll, January 11, 2010 AT MORE than a dozen “missile alert facilities’’ in caverns below the exquisite landscape of the northern Rockies, teams of young men and women spend 24-hour shifts in steel-and-concrete bunkers. They are highly disciplined military officers, but they are also prisoners to the past, condemned to carry out an earth-shattering mission that makes absolutely no sense in the 21st century.
They are missile launch crews, standing ready to send up to 450 ICBMs at targets in Russia, where, in equivalent bunkers, young Russians stand ready to do the same thing to targets here………….

no one imagines that those missile officers in Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming will be released from their decades-old routines any time soon. They have their fingers on the hair trigger, and, whether it makes sense or not, they will, when ordered to do so, pull. Never mind that the country whose cities will be obliterated is not remotely an enemy any more. Never mind that civilization as we know it could end. The only reason Russian and American missile crews stand poised to kill millions of people and to rain radioactive poison down on the globe is, well, because they do………….

The political requirement for national leaders to appear tough, the pressures of defense contractors that draw billions of dollars from this status quo, the callowness of politicians who refuse to cut weapons budgets because of constituents’ jobs and industry campaign contributions, the turf protection of military services – such are the broad factors than have kept the demonic structures of the Cold War in place across the two decades since the Cold War ended………….
The insane accumulation of tens of thousands of nuclear bombs and warheads was never really about fighting a war. It was the unlikely Ronald Reagan who finally put the truth into words; “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.’’ That logic led Reagan to embrace nuclear abolition, but not even he could break the transcendent combine of industry-Congress-Pentagon. Those three define the sides of the iron triangle within which America still finds itself imprisoned.

US nuclear arsenal a dangerous remnant – The Boston Globe

January 11, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs, nuclear secrecy, nuclear wastes, nuclear weapons