nuclear-news

But nuclear weapons are more than just a terrifying threat to every living thing on earth. For decades, they’ve been a terrific way to make money.

A new report from PAX, a Dutch peace organization, both illuminates how profitable it can be for multinational corporations to manufacture Armageddon and provides a roadmap for taking the money out of mass death.

The PAX report identifies a total of $116 billion in current contracts between governments and the private sector to design, build, and maintain the world’s nuclear arsenals. The actual amount may be significantly higher, since all nine nuclear powers maintain some degree of opacity about their nuclear programs. “We know what we can trace,” says Susi Snyder, the report’s principal author, “but there’s definitely more out there.”

Many powerful corporations therefore have incentives to push governments to expand their nuclear stockpiles. At a recent investor conference, a managing director of the investment bank Cowen Inc. questioned the CEO of Raytheon, one of the nuclear contractors listed by PAX. “We’re about to exit the INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty] with Russia,” the managing director said, and excitedly asked if this means that “we will really get a defense budget that will really benefit Raytheon.” (The planet may be destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time, they will have created a lot of value for shareholders.)

Snyder believes that President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the INF Treaty may be paying literal dividends for Raytheon already. She points out that over a period of three months after Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal last fall, Raytheon received an anomalous 44 separate missile contracts worth more than $500 million.

Moreover, corporate lobbying has already nudged the U.S. to commit to a nuclear “modernization” program — initiated under former President Barack Obama and expanded under Trump — that will cost an estimated $1.2 trillion over the next 30 years. And while modernization sounds good, what’s planned will actually make U.S. nukes much more deadly, something to which Russia is already planning to respond. The final result may be an extremely modern nuclear war.

PAX, however, does not counsel despair, but instead sees the intertwining of the private sector and nuclear weapons as a potential point of leverage.

The five largest known current beneficiaries of nuclear weapons spending are all U.S.-based multinationals: Huntington Ingalls Industries ($29.9 billion), Lockheed Martin ($25.2 billion), Honeywell International ($16.5 billion), General Dynamics ($5.8 billion), and Jacobs Engineering ($5.3 billion).

The report also identifies large nuclear contracts with companies elsewhere. Airbus, headquartered in the Netherlands, develops nuclear-armed missiles for France. A British company called Serco has a 25-year contract to help manage and operate the U.K. Atomic Weapons Establishment, the center of the United Kingdom’s nuclear program. Bharat Dynamics Limited in Hyderabad helps make two of India’s nuclear-capable missiles.

Among the hundreds of nuclear contracts are some gems of nuclear insanity. Boeing has received $16 million to develop a “Flight Termination Receiver” that would theoretically allow nuclear missiles to be destroyed after a mistaken launch.

This could change the U.S. nuclear calculus in an extremely dangerous way. There have been many false alarms in the past that Russian missiles were headed toward the U.S. We’re here now only because no president responded to the alarms, in part because they knew such a response would be irrevocable. If future presidents believe that they have an end of the world “take back,” they may be tempted to launch U.S. nuclear missiles in response to another false alarm. But of course, no technology is ever 100 percent effective — especially when it’s built by the company that brought us the 737 Max. And if just one missile failed to self-destruct, a full-out nuclear war would soon follow.

That’s the bad news. Here’s the qualified good news…………….https://theintercept.com/2019/05/04/nuclear-weapons-profits/