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Profiteering from the pandemic, the Pentagon and nuclear industry exploit the situation

Beware the Pentagon’s Pandemic Profiteers, Hasn’t the Military-Industrial Complex Taken

enough of Our Money?  POGO,  BY MANDY SMITHBERGER | FILED UNDER ANALYSIS | MAY 04, 2020    This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

At this moment of unprecedented crisis, you might think that those not overcome by the economic and mortal consequences of the coronavirus would be asking, “What can we do to help?” A few companies have indeed pivoted to making masks and ventilators for an overwhelmed medical establishment. Unfortunately, when it comes to the top officials of the Pentagon and the CEOs running a large part of the arms industry, examples abound of them asking what they can do to help themselves.

It’s important to grasp just how staggeringly well the defense industry has done in these last nearly 19 years since 9/11. Its companies (filled with ex-military and defense officials) have received trillions of dollars in government contracts, which they’ve largely used to feather their own nests. Data compiled by the New York Times showed that the chief executive officers of the top five military-industrial contractors received nearly $90 million in compensation in 2017. An investigation that same year by the Providence Journal discovered that, from 2005 to the first half of 2017, the top five defense contractors spent more than $114 billion repurchasing their own company stocks and so boosting their value at the expense of new investment.

To put this in perspective in the midst of a pandemic, the co-directors of the Costs of War Project at Brown University recently pointed out that allocations for the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health for 2020 amounted to less than 1% of what the U.S. government has spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone since 9/11. While just about every imaginable government agency and industry has been impacted by the still-spreading coronavirus, the role of the defense industry and the military in responding to it has, in truth, been limited indeed. The highly publicized use of military hospital ships in New York City and Los Angeles, for example, not only had relatively little impact on the crises in those cities but came to serve as a symbol of just how dysfunctional the military response has truly been.

Bailing Out the Military-Industrial Complex in the COVID-19 Moment

Demands to use the Defense Production Act to direct firms to produce equipment needed to combat COVID-19 have sputtered, provoking strong resistance from industries worried first and foremost about their own profits. Even conservative Washington Post columnist Max Boot, a longtime supporter of increased Pentagon spending, has recently recanted, noting how just such budget priorities have weakened the ability of the United States to keep Americans safe from the virus. “It never made any sense, as Trump’s 2021 budget had initially proposed, to increase spending on nuclear weapons by $7 billion while cutting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding by $1.2 billion,” he wrote. “Or to create an unnecessary Space Force out of the U.S. Air Force while eliminating the vitally important directorate of global health by folding it into another office within the National Security Council.”

In fact, continuing to prioritize the U.S. military will only further weaken the country’s public health system. ……..

How Not to Deal With COVID-19

Along with those military-industrial bailouts came the fleecing of American taxpayers. While many Americans were anxiously awaiting their $1,200 payments from that congressional aid and relief package, the Department of Defense was expediting contract payments to the arms industry. Shay Assad, a former senior Pentagon official, accurately called it a “taxpayer rip-off” that industries with so many resources, not to speak of the ability to borrow money at incredibly low interest rates, were being so richly and quickly rewarded in tough times. Giving defense giants such funding at this moment was like giving a housing contractor 90% of upfront costs for renovations when it was unclear whether you could even afford your next mortgage payment.

Right now, the defense industry is having similar success in persuading the Pentagon that basic accountability should be tossed out the window. ……..

Unfortunately, as COVID-19 spread on the aircraft carrier the USS Theodore Roosevelt, that ship became emblematic of how ill-prepared the current Pentagon leadership proved to be in combatting the virus. Despite at least 100 cases being reported on board—955 crewmembers would, in the end, test positive for the disease and Chief Petty Officer Charles Robert Thacker Jr. would die of it—senior Navy leaders were slow to respond. Instead, they kept those sailors at close quarters and in an untenable situation of increasing risk. When an emailed letter expressing the concerns of the ship’s commander, Captain Brett Crozier, was leaked to the press he was quickly removed from command. But while his bosses may not have appreciated his efforts for his crew, his sailors did. He left the ship to a hero’s farewell. ……… https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2020/05/beware-the-pentagons-pandemic-profiteers/

May 16, 2020 Posted by | business and costs, politics, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA, weapons and war | 2 Comments

Raising dangerously radioactive Russian submarines from the bottom of Arctic oceans

Russia plans to raise radioactive wrecks in the Arctic    https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2020-05-russia-plans-to-raise-radioactive-wrecks-in-the-arctic

By 2030, the Russian government will raise seven pieces of radioactive debris – including two nuclear submarines – from the bottom of Arctic oceans, where they were intentionally scuttled during the Soviet era, documents received by Bellona confirm.  May 12, 2020 by Charles Digges

By 2030, the Russian government will raise seven pieces of radioactive debris – including two nuclear submarines – from the bottom of Arctic oceans, where they were intentionally scuttled during the Soviet era, documents received by Bellona confirm.

The documents identify this debris as the most dangerous of the items the Soviet Union discarded in polar waters, and say that six of them contain more than 90 percent of the radioactivity to be found on the Arctic seabed.

Of particular importance, the documents say, are the K-159 and K-27 nuclear submarines, the nuclear reactors of which were still full of nuclear fuel when they went down.

Both submarines, say experts, are in a precarious state. In the case of the K-27, which was scuttled intentionally in 1982, the sub’s reactor was sealed with furfural, before it was sunk. But experts say this seal is eroding. The K-159, which sank while it was being towed to decommissioning in 2003, poses similar threats. Some 800 kilograms of spent nuclear fuel remained in its reactor when it went down in some of the most fertile fishing grounds in the Kara Sea.

In both cases, experts fear that a nuclear chain reaction could occur should water leak into the submarines’ reactor compartments.

Russian scientists have kept a close eye on the K-159, launching regular expeditions to monitor for potential radiation leaks. According to their data, should the submarine depressurize, radionuclides could spread over hundreds of kilometers, heavily impacting the local fishing industry.

Anatoly Grigoriev, who heads up the international programs department of Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation, says that raising the wrecks will cost some €123 million.

“Should the K-159 depressurize, it could cause €120 million of damage per month,” Grigoriev told Bellona at an earlier meeting.

Both submarines, say experts, are in a precarious state. In the case of the K-27, which was scuttled intentionally in 1982, the sub’s reactor was sealed with furfural, before it was sunk. But experts say this seal is eroding. The K-159, which sank while it was being towed to decommissioning in 2003, poses similar threats. Some 800 kilograms of spent nuclear fuel remained in its reactor when it went down in some of the most fertile fishing grounds in the Kara Sea.

In both cases, experts fear that a nuclear chain reaction could occur should water leak into the submarines’ reactor compartments.

Russian scientists have kept a close eye on the K-159, launching regular expeditions to monitor for potential radiation leaks. According to their data, should the submarine depressurize, radionuclides could spread over hundreds of kilometers, heavily impacting the local fishing industry.

Anatoly Grigoriev, who heads up the international programs department of Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation, says that raising the wrecks will cost some €123 million.

“Should the K-159 depressurize, it could cause €120 million of damage per month,” Grigoriev told Bellona at an earlier meeting.

The majority of this debris was left in the eastern bays of the Kara Sea near the Novaya Zemlya Archipelago. Still, the exact location of some of these sunken objects is still unknown. The whereabouts of the reactor compartment from the K-140 nuclear submarine remains unaccounted for.

And there are other radiation hazards that are farther afield. The K-278, or Komsomolets, nuclear submarine lies at the bottom of the Norwegian Sea.

“A quarter of all the radioactive waste that has been sunk in the oceans belongs to us,” says Sergei Antipov, director of strategic planning and project management at the Nuclear Safety Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Since the early 2000s, massive projects to decommission Soviet-era nuclear submarines have been ongoing with the assistance of numerous western partners. Moscow has shared information about these radioactive hazards with nations of the G-7 and has worked with the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development and other donors.

This international cooperation has brought significant results. Military bases have been cleared of most radioactive contamination and nearly 200 rusted-out nuclear submarines have been safely dismantled, as a review of the last 25 years of Bellona’s work clearly shows.

Russia, moreover, has the necessary infrastructure to deal with whatever discarded radiation hazards are brought to the surface of Arctic waters. And while Russia lacks the necessary vessels for such undersea rescues, the international partners it has developed while cleaning up other pieces of the Soviet nuclear legacy certainly do.

Next year, Russia assumes the rotating chairmanship of the Arctic Council, and we hope that Moscow will be able to announce upon the first meeting that these projects are underway. Bellona, which is already involved in discussing this important work, has high hopes.

May 16, 2020 Posted by | ARCTIC, Russia, wastes, weapons and war | Leave a comment

$73 billion world spent in 2019 on nuclear weapons, half of it by USA

World nuclear arms spending hit $73bn last year – half of it by US  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/nuclear-weapons-world-record-spending

    • Spending by nine nuclear-armed states rose 10%
    • Trump boosted nuclear funding but cut pandemic prevention  Julian Borger in Washington
      • The world’s nuclear-armed nations spent a record $73bn on their weapons last year, with the US spending almost as much as the eight other states combined, according to a

    new report

      • .

The new spending figures, reflecting the highest expenditure on nuclear arms since the height of the cold war, have been estimated by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican), which argues that the coronavirus pandemic underlines the wastefulness of the nuclear arms race.

The nine nuclear weapons states spent a total of $72.9bn in 2019, a 10% increase on the year before. Of that, $35.4bn was spent by the Trump administration, which accelerated the modernisation of the US arsenal in its first three years while cutting expenditure on pandemic prevention.

“It’s clear now more than ever that nuclear weapons do not provide security for the world in the midst of a global pandemic, and not even for the nine countries that have nuclear weapons, particularly when there are documented deficits of healthcare supplies and exhausted medical professionals,” Alicia Sanders-Zakre, the lead author of the report, said.

The report comes at a time when arms control is at a low ebb, with the last major treaty limiting US and Russian strategic nuclear weapons, New Start, due to expire in nine months with no agreement so far to extend it.

Russia, which has announced the development of an array of new weapons – including nuclear-powered, long-distance cruise missiles, underwater long-distance nuclear torpedoes and a new heavy intercontinental ballistic missile – spent $8.5bn on its arsenal in 2019, according to Ican’s estimates. China, which has a much smaller nuclear force than the US and Russia but is seeking to expand, spent $10.4bn.

Those expenditures were far overshadowed by the US nuclear weapons budget, which is part of a major upgrade also involving new weapons, including a low-yield submarine-launched missile, which has already been deployed.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of the US programme over the coming decade will be $500bn, an increase of nearly $100bn, about 23%, over projections from the end of the Obama administration.

Congressional Democrats failed in an attempt to curb the administration’s nuclear ambitions, but Kingston Reif, the director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, said budgetary constraints in a coronavirus-induced recession, could succeed where political opposition failed.

“There’s going to be significant pressure on federal spending moving forward, including defense spending,” Reif said. “So, the cost and opportunity cost of maintaining and modernizing the arsenal, which were already punishing, will become even more so.”

May 14, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, business and costs, weapons and war | Leave a comment

USA’s record $3.7 trillion budget gap threatens Pentagon’s costly nuclear plans

Huge federal deficits may threaten Pentagon nuclear modernization program   Market Watch   May 12, 2020, By Associated Press
The deficit may lead to a lack of big defense spending on projects like rebuilding the nation’s nuclear arsenal.    WASHINGTON (AP) — The government’s $3 trillion effort to rescue the economy from the coronavirus crisis is stirring worry at the Pentagon. Bulging federal deficits may force a reversal of years of big defense spending gains and threaten prized projects like the rebuilding of the nation’s arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper says the sudden burst of deficit spending to prop up a damaged economy is bringing the Pentagon closer to a point where it will have to shed older weapons faster and tighten its belt.

“It has accelerated this day of reckoning,” Esper said in an Associated Press interview.

It also sets up confrontations with Congress over how that reckoning will be achieved. Past efforts to eliminate older weapons and to make other cost-saving moves like closing under-used military bases met resistance. This being a presidential election year, much of this struggle may slip to 2021. If presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden wins, the pace of defense cuts could speed up, if he follows the traditional Democratic path to put less emphasis on defense buildups.

After Congress passed four programs to sustain the economy through the virus shock, the budget deficit — the gap between what the government spends and what it collects in taxes — will hit a record $3.7 trillion this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. By the time the budget year ends in September, the government’s debt — its accumulated annual deficits — will equal 101% of the U.S. gross domestic product.

Rep. Ken Calvert of California, the ranking Republican on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, says defense budgets were strained even before this year’s unplanned burst of deficit spending……..   https://www.marketwatch.com/story/huge-federal-deficits-may-threaten-pentagon-nuclear-modernization-program-2020-05-12

May 14, 2020 Posted by | business and costs, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

UK’s nuclear weapons programmes $1.67 billion over budget 

Three British nuclear programs are $1.67 billion over budget  https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2020/05/12/three-british-nuclear-programs-are-167-billion-over-budget/ By: Andrew Chuter LONDON — Critical programs aimed at updating Britain’s nuclear weapons infrastructure have been hit by long delays and huge cost increases, according to the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee.

Poor management on three nuclear projects involving warhead assembly, core reactor production and submarine building have resulted in combined cost increases of £1.35 billion (U.S. $1.67 billion) as well as delays of between 1.7 and 6.3 years, the committee revealed in a report scheduled for release May 12.

The cost overruns were caused in large part by avoidable mistakes, such as beginning construction work without mature designs, said the committee.

The cost increases and delays cited in the report could be the tip of the iceberg in the nuclear sector. The three programs investigated by the committee represent about a quarter, by initial value, of the 52 nuclear infrastructure programs that the Ministry of Defence is pursuing. A report on nuclear infrastructure late last year by the government’s financial watchdog, the National Audit Office, said the initial value of all the projects was almost £5 billion.

The parliamentary committee said the MoD admitted that costs on the three projects “could keep rising, as its poor contract design has left the taxpayer to assume financial risk, while doing little to incentivize contractors to improve their performance.

The report said the MoD has poorly managed the three programs, failed to learn from past mistakes and agreed to poorly designed contracts with the major companies that have a stranglehold on Britain’s defense nuclear sector. The contracts did not allow the ministry to share the financial risk with contractors, which meant the government bore the full impact of cost increases, including those of subcontractors.

“To utterly fail to learn from mistakes over decades, to spectacularly repeat the same mistakes at huge cost to the taxpayer — and at huge cost to confidence in our defense capabilities — is completely unacceptable,” said Member of Parliament Meg Hillier, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee.

“We see too often these same mistakes repeated,” she added. “The department [MoD] knows it can’t go on like this. It knows it must change and operate differently. The test now is to see how it will do that, and soon.”

May 14, 2020 Posted by | UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Russia proposes 3 year extension of Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start-3): USA silent

Russia proposes five-year extension of nuclear weapons treaty,  https://www.plenglish.com/index.php?o=rn&id=55581&SEO=russia-proposes-five-year-extension-of-nuclear-weapons-treaty    Temas Relacionados:  11Moscow, May 11 (Prensa Latina) Russia proposed on Monday to extend for another five years the validity of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start-3), amid the silence of the United States to refer to that possibility.

In the course of five years, a new mechanism for controlling weapons of mass destruction can be developed, said Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Riabkov.

Contacts between Moscow and Washington in the area of strategic weapons are maintained on a permanent basis, stressed the Russian deputy foreign minister, who admitted the absence for now of any intention from the White House to seek an extension of the agreement, without conditions.
I believe that Start-3 has worked and produced results over the past decade and can be sought to be extended for another five years to achieve a new agreement or to improve the existing one in that important area, the official said.

Riabkov described the American hopes that the so-called Chinese factor might have some influence on the Russian position as unrealistic. One cannot unite in a single discussion issues, the content of which is lacking in common, he said.
For the Russian diplomat, it is truly cumbersome to overload the already difficult relations between Russia and the United States with new problems and concerns.

On the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it would be wise to show the utmost responsibility for keeping Start-3, signed in Prague in April 2010, he observed. That compromise expires next year.

May 12, 2020 Posted by | politics international, Russia, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty- its promise and its failure

Now, nuclear disarmament is at a standstill, existing treaties have either been dismantled or at risk, development in underway of new types of nuclear weapons with new missions and lowered threshold of use, and threats of use of nuclear weapons have been sounded.

May 12, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, history, politics international, Reference, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Barrow, UK – hub of nuclear weapons work and nuclear transport

Close Capenhurst 10th May 2020, Barrow is best known as the place where BAE Systems build Trident nukiller submarines. The company is also building the Astute-class submarines.

What is less well know is that the ships which transport nukiller waste around the globe go out of the port of Barrow. Neither do most people realise just what else goes on in the town. Pacific Nuclear Transport Limited, a subsidiary of International Nuclear Services, is based at Barrow. The
company website boast that it is ‘the world’s most experienced shipper of nuclear cargoes’. Barrow is also the home port for James Fisher & Sons, which works for the military, and built its first ship suitable fortransporting irradiated nuclear fuel in the 1960s. The company also  provides Nukiller equipment and services.

http://close-capenhurst.org.uk/

May 11, 2020 Posted by | safety, UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

America’s very dangerous $multibillion plan for a nuclear-powered fighter plane

May 11, 2020 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

France’s Strategic Nuclear Forces

May 11, 2020 Posted by | France, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Satellite images reveal North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s new nuclear facility

May 11, 2020 Posted by | South Korea, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Pandemic may force USA to cut back on bloated spending on nuclear weapons

May 9, 2020 Posted by | business and costs, politics, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

As U.S. military is plagued by COVID-19, Trump could end America’s endless losing wars, but will he?

Trump Must Choose Between a Global Ceasefire and America’s Long Lost Wars
Like his predecessors from Truman to Obama, Trump has been caught in the trap of America’s blind, deluded militarism.  Portside, May 5, 2020 Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

As President Trump has complained, the U.S. does not win wars any more. In fact, since 1945, the only 4 wars it has won were over the small neocolonial outposts of Grenada, Panama, Kuwait and Kosovo. Americans across the political spectrum refer to the wars the U.S. has launched since 2001 as “endless” or “unwinnable” wars. We know by now that there is no elusive victory around the corner that will redeem the criminal futility of the U.S.’s opportunistic decision to use military force more aggressively and illegally after the end of the Cold War and the horrific crimes of September 11th. But all wars have to end one day, so how will these wars end?

As President Trump nears the end of his first term, he knows that at least some Americans hold him responsible for his broken promises to bring U.S. troops home and wind down Bush’s and Obama’s wars. Trump’s own day-in-day-out war-making has gone largely unreported by the subservient, tweet-baited U.S. corporate media, but Trump has dropped at least 69,000 bombs and missiles on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, more than either Bush or Obama did in their first terms, including in Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Undercover of highly publicized redeployments of small numbers of troops from a few isolated bases in Syria and Iraq, Trump has actually expanded U.S. bases and deployed at least 14,000 more U.S. troops to the greater Middle East, even after the U.S. bombing and artillery campaigns that destroyed Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria ended in 2017. Under the U.S. agreement with the Taliban, Trump has finally agreed to withdraw 4,400 troops from Afghanistan by July, still leaving at least 8,600 behind to conduct airstrikes, “kill or capture” raids and an even more isolated and beleaguered military occupation.

Now a compelling call by U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres for a global ceasefire during the Covid-19 pandemic has given Trump a chance to gracefully deescalate his unwinnable wars – if indeed he really wants to. Over 70 nations have expressed their support for the ceasefire. President Macron of France claimed on April 15th that he had persuaded Trump to join other world leaders supporting a U.N. Security Council resolution backing the Secretary General’s call. But within days it became clear that the U.S. was opposing the resolution, insisting that its own “counterterrorism” wars must go on, and that any resolution must condemn China as the source of the pandemic, a poison pill calculated to draw a swift Chinese veto.

So Trump has so far spurned this chance to make good on his promise to bring U.S. troops home, even as his lost wars and ill-defined global military occupation expose thousands of troops to the Covid-19 virus.   The U.S. Navy has been plagued by the virus: as of mid-April 40 ships had confirmed cases, affecting 1,298 sailors. Training exercises, troop movements and travel have been canceled for U.S.-based troops and their families. The military reported 7,145 cases as of May 1, with more falling sick every day. 

The Pentagon has priority access to Covid testing, protective gear and other resources, so the catastrophic shortage of resources at civilian hospitals in New York and elsewhere are being exacerbated by shipping them all over the world to 800 military bases, many of which are already redundant, dangerousor counter-productive.  ………  https://portside.org/2020-05-05/trump-must-choose-between-global-ceasefire-and-americas-long-lost-wars

May 7, 2020 Posted by | health, weapons and war | Leave a comment

As with viruses, containment of atomic weapons may be good, but eradication is best.  

The Novel Coronavirus and Nuclear Weapons  As with viruses, containment of atomic weapons may be good, but eradication is best.  Common Dreams by Sergio Duarte , Ira Helfand  4 May 20 

The entire international community is justifiably concerned and disturbed with the serious consequences of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Thousands have already died and many more are in danger. Local and national governments find it increasingly difficult to deal adequately with the sanitary and social emergency deriving from the spread of the virus. It will take many months before the situation can come back to normal.

What has this to do with nuclear weapons?

In the current climate of fear, uncertainty and helplessness, it is impossible not to think about what would happen in the case of a different and more ominous disaster: a nuclear conflagration, albeit of limited proportions. The possessors of nuclear weapons are relentlessly increasing the destructive power of their arsenals and seem willing to use them as they see fit to respond to their perceived security concerns. This, in fact, brings insecurity to all. Command and control systems are not immune against cyber viruses and accidents, nor are they protected against whimsical or emotionally unstable rulers.   ……..

The entire international community is justifiably concerned and disturbed with the serious consequences of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Thousands have already died and many more are in danger. Local and national governments find it increasingly difficult to deal adequately with the sanitary and social emergency deriving from the spread of the virus. It will take many months before the situation can come back to normal.

What has this to do with nuclear weapons?

In the current climate of fear, uncertainty and helplessness, it is impossible not to think about what would happen in the case of a different and more ominous disaster: a nuclear conflagration, albeit of limited proportions. The possessors of nuclear weapons are relentlessly increasing the destructive power of their arsenals and seem willing to use them as they see fit to respond to their perceived security concerns. This, in fact, brings insecurity to all. Command and control systems are not immune against cyber viruses and accidents, nor are they protected against whimsical or emotionally unstable rulers.

It may well be impossible to eliminate all disease-causing viruses; yet nuclear disarmament is not only possible, but a legally binding obligation embedded in Article VI of the NPT. Fifty years after the Treaty’s inception, it is high time for the possessors of nuclear weapons to effectively comply with this obligation. As with viruses, containment may be good, but eradication is best. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/05/04/novel-coronavirus-and-nuclear-weapons, Common Dreams

May 5, 2020 Posted by | politics international, weapons and war | 2 Comments

SPD, junior partner in Germany’s coalition government, calls to withdraw US nuclear arms

May 5, 2020 Posted by | Germany, politics, weapons and war | Leave a comment

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