A New Military-Industrial Complex Arises

This year’s record defense budget of approximately $850 billion includes $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weaponry. That $311 billion, most of which will be funneled to those giant defense firms, exceeds the total amount spent on defense by every other country on Earth.

Now, however, a new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.

The Secret War Within the Pentagon

 February 10, 2025 , By Michael Klare / TomDispatch

Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers — Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego — to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman — posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC.

For decades, a handful of giant firms like those three have garnered the lion’s share of Pentagon arms contracts, producing the same planes, ships, and missiles year after year while generating huge profits for their owners. But an assortment of new firms, born in Silicon Valley or incorporating its disruptive ethos, have begun to challenge the older ones for access to lucrative Pentagon awards. In the process, something groundbreaking, though barely covered in the mainstream media, is underway: a new MIC is being born, one that potentially will have very different goals and profit-takers than the existing one. How the inevitable battles between the old and the new MICs play out can’t be foreseen, but count on one thing: they are sure to generate significant political turbulence in the years to come.

The very notion of a “military-industrial complex” linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address to Congress and the American people. In that Cold War moment, in response to powerful foreign threats, he noted that “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” Nevertheless, he added, using the phrase for the first time, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Ever since, debate over the MIC’s accumulating power has roiled American politics. A number of politicians and prominent public figures have portrayed U.S. entry into a catastrophic series of foreign wars — in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere — as a consequence of that complex’s undue influence on policymaking. No such claims and complaints, however, have ever succeeded in loosening the MIC’s iron grip on Pentagon arms procurement. This year’s record defense budget of approximately $850 billion includes $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weaponry. That $311 billion, most of which will be funneled to those giant defense firms, exceeds the total amount spent on defense by every other country on Earth.

Over time, the competition for billion-dollar Pentagon contracts has led to a winnowing of the MIC ecosystem, resulting in the dominance of a few major industrial behemoths. In 2024, just five companies — Lockheed Martin (with $64.7 billion in defense revenues), RTX (formerly Raytheon, with $40.6 billion), Northrop Grumman ($35.2 billion), General Dynamics ($33.7 billion), and Boeing ($32.7 billion) — claimed the vast bulk of Pentagon contracts. (Anduril and General Atomics didn’t even appear on a list of the top 100 contract recipients.)

Typically, these companies are the lead, or “prime,” contractors for major weapons systems that the Pentagon keeps buying year after year. Lockheed Martin, for example, is the prime contractor for the Air Force’s top-priority F-35 stealth fighter (a plane that has often proved distinctly disappointing in operation); Northrop Grumman is building the B-21 stealth bomber; Boeing produces the F-15EX combat jet; and General Dynamics makes the Navy’s Los Angeles-class attack submarines. “Big-ticket” items like these are usually purchased in substantial numbers over many years, ensuring steady profits for their producers. When the initial buys of such systems seem to be nearing completion, their producers usually generate new or upgraded versions of the same weapons, while employing their powerful lobbying arms in Washington to convince Congress to fund the new designs.

Over the years, non-governmental organizations like the National Priorities Project and the Friends Committee on National Legislation have heroically tried to persuade lawmakers to resist the MIC’s lobbying efforts and reduce military spending, but without noticeable success. Now, however, a new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.

Along Came Anduril

Consider Anduril Industries, one of two under-the-radar companies that left three MIC heavyweights in the dust last April by winning the contract to build a prototype of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft.  Anduril (named after the sword carried by Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, a virtual-reality headset designer, with the goal of incorporating artificial intelligence into novel weapons systems. He was supported in that effort by prominent Silicon Valley investors, including Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and the head of another defense-oriented startup, Palantir (a name also derived from The Lord of the Rings).

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Buttressed by such arguments, as well as the influence of key figures like Thiel, Anduril began to secure modest but strategic contracts from the military and the Department of Homeland Security. 

……………………………………………………………………………… Anduril’s success in winning ever-larger Pentagon contracts has attracted the interest of wealthy investors looking for opportunities to profit from the expected growth of defense-oriented startups. ……………………………………………………………………..

The Replicator Initiative

Along with its success in attracting big defense contracts and capital infusions, Anduril has succeeded in convincing many senior Pentagon officials of the need to reform the department’s contracting operations so as to make more room for defense startups and tech firms. On August 28, 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, then the department’s second-highest official, announced the inauguration of the “Replicator” initiative, designed to speed the delivery of advanced weaponry to the armed forces.

“[Our] budgeting and bureaucratic processes are slow, cumbersome, and byzantine,” she acknowledged. To overcome such obstacles, she indicated, the Replicator initiative would cut through red tape and award contracts directly to startups for the rapid development and delivery of cutting-edge weaponry. “Our goal,” she declared, “is to seed, spark, and stoke the flames of innovation.”

As Hicks suggested, Replicator contracts would indeed be awarded in successive batches, or “tranches.” The first tranche, announced last May, included AeroVironment Switchblade 600 kamikaze drones (called that because they are supposed to crash into their intended targets, exploding on contact). Anduril was a triple winner in the second tranche, announced on November 13th…………………………………………………………………….

Enter the Trumpians

Kathleen Hicks stepped down as deputy secretary of defense on January 20th when Donald Trump reoccupied the White House, as did many of her top aides. Exactly how the incoming administration will address the issue of military procurement remains to be seen, but many in Trump’s inner circle, including Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance, have strong ties to Silicon Valley and so are likely to favor Replicator-like policies.

Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who recently won confirmation as secretary of defense, has no background in weapons development and has said little about the topic. However, Trump’s choice as deputy secretary (and Hick’s replacement) is billionaire investor Stephen A. Feinberg who, as chief investment officer of Cerberus Capital Management, acquired the military startup Stratolaunch — suggesting that he might favor extending programs like Replicator.

In a sense, the Trump moment will fit past Washington patterns when it comes to the Pentagon in that the president and his Republican allies in Congress will undoubtedly push for a massive increase in military spending, despite the fact that the military budget is already at a staggering all-time high. Every arms producer is likely to profit from such a move, whether traditional prime contractors or Silicon Valley startups. If, however, defense spending is kept at current levels — in order to finance the tax cuts and other costly measures favored by Trump and the Republicans — fierce competition between the two versions of the military-industrial complex could easily arise again. That, in turn, might trigger divisions within Trump’s inner circle, pitting loyalists to the old MIC against adherents to the new one.

Most Republican lawmakers, who generally rely on contributions from the old MIC companies to finance their campaigns, are bound to support the major prime contractors in such a rivalry. But two of Trump’s key advisers, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, could push him in the opposite direction. Vance, a former Silicon Valley functionary who reportedly became Trump’s running mate only after heavy lobbying by Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires, is likely to be encouraged by his former allies to steer more Pentagon contracts to Anduril, Palantir, and related companies. And that would hardly be surprising, since Vance’s private venture fund, Narya Capital (yes, another name derived from The Lord of the Rings!), has invested in Anduril and other military/space ventures.

Tomgram

Michael Klare, Droning Washington

Posted on February 9, 2025

Yes, some of us still remember that the now-famous (or do I mean infamous?) phrase “the military-industrial complex” actually came from the farewell address of former World War II general and then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961. But how often do any of us remember the all-too-painfully appropriate context in which he offered it to the American people — as a warning about a future that today is so much ours, as the budget of the Department of Defense (so it’s still called despite the many disastrous and anything but “defensive” wars the U.S. military has fought in this century) heads for the trillion-dollar mark? Here, then, to introduce military expert and TomDispatch regular Michael Klare’s eye-opening account of where the MIC (the shorthand version of that phrase) is heading in the age of the drone and artificial intelligence, is the larger context for Eisenhower’s first use of the term:

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.”

And more than 60 years later, with Eisenhower’s grimly visionary statement in mind, let Klare suggest just how eerily on target he was. If you don’t believe me, note that tech giant Anduril is now setting up its first factory in the Midwest — Columbus, Ohio, to be exact — at the cost of an initial billion dollars to produce “autonomous systems and weapons,” as artificial intelligence prepares to go to war. Tom

A New Military-Industrial Complex Arises

The Secret War Within the Pentagon

By Michael Klare

Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers — Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego — to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman — posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC.

For decades, a handful of giant firms like those three have garnered the lion’s share of Pentagon arms contracts, producing the same planes, ships, and missiles year after year while generating huge profits for their owners. But an assortment of new firms, born in Silicon Valley or incorporating its disruptive ethos, have begun to challenge the older ones for access to lucrative Pentagon awards. In the process, something groundbreaking, though barely covered in the mainstream media, is underway: a new MIC is being born, one that potentially will have very different goals and profit-takers than the existing one. How the inevitable battles between the old and the new MICs play out can’t be foreseen, but count on one thing: they are sure to generate significant political turbulence in the years to come.

The very notion of a “military-industrial complex” linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address to Congress and the American people. In that Cold War moment, in response to powerful foreign threats, he noted that “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” Nevertheless, he added, using the phrase for the first time, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Ever since, debate over the MIC’s accumulating power has roiled American politics. A number of politicians and prominent public figures have portrayed U.S. entry into a catastrophic series of foreign wars — in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere — as a consequence of that complex’s undue influence on policymaking. No such claims and complaints, however, have ever succeeded in loosening the MIC’s iron grip on Pentagon arms procurement. This year’s record defense budget of approximately $850 billion includes $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weaponry. That $311 billion, most of which will be funneled to those giant defense firms, exceeds the total amount spent on defense by every other country on Earth.

Over time, the competition for billion-dollar Pentagon contracts has led to a winnowing of the MIC ecosystem, resulting in the dominance of a few major industrial behemoths. In 2024, just five companies — Lockheed Martin (with $64.7 billion in defense revenues), RTX (formerly Raytheon, with $40.6 billion), Northrop Grumman ($35.2 billion), General Dynamics ($33.7 billion), and Boeing ($32.7 billion) — claimed the vast bulk of Pentagon contracts. (Anduril and General Atomics didn’t even appear on a list of the top 100 contract recipients.)

Typically, these companies are the lead, or “prime,” contractors for major weapons systems that the Pentagon keeps buying year after year. Lockheed Martin, for example, is the prime contractor for the Air Force’s top-priority F-35 stealth fighter (a plane that has often proved distinctly disappointing in operation); Northrop Grumman is building the B-21 stealth bomber; Boeing produces the F-15EX combat jet; and General Dynamics makes the Navy’s Los Angeles-class attack submarines. “Big-ticket” items like these are usually purchased in substantial numbers over many years, ensuring steady profits for their producers. When the initial buys of such systems seem to be nearing completion, their producers usually generate new or upgraded versions of the same weapons, while employing their powerful lobbying arms in Washington to convince Congress to fund the new designs.

Over the years, non-governmental organizations like the National Priorities Project and the Friends Committee on National Legislation have heroically tried to persuade lawmakers to resist the MIC’s lobbying efforts and reduce military spending, but without noticeable success. Now, however, a new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.

Along Came Anduril

Consider Anduril Industries, one of two under-the-radar companies that left three MIC heavyweights in the dust last April by winning the contract to build a prototype of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Anduril (named after the sword carried by Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, a virtual-reality headset designer, with the goal of incorporating artificial intelligence into novel weapons systems. He was supported in that effort by prominent Silicon Valley investors, including Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and the head of another defense-oriented startup, Palantir (a name also derived from The Lord of the Rings).

Buy the Book

From the start, Luckey and his associates sought to shoulder aside traditional defense contractors to make room for their high-tech startups. Those two companies and other new-fledged tech firms often found themselves frozen out of major Pentagon contracts that had long been written to favor the MIC giants with their bevies of lawyers and mastery of government paperwork. In 2016, Palantir even sued the U.S. Army for refusing to consider it for a large data-processing contract and later prevailed in court, opening the door for future Department of Defense awards.

In addition to its aggressive legal stance, Anduril has also gained notoriety thanks to the outspokenness of its founder, Palmer Luckey. Whereas other corporate leaders were usually restrained in their language when discussing Department of Defense operations, Luckey openly criticized the Pentagon’s inbred preference for working with traditional defense contractors at the expense of investments in the advanced technologies he believes are needed to overpower China and Russia in some future conflict.

Such technology, he insisted, was only available from the commercial tech industry. “The largest defense contractors are staffed with patriots who nevertheless do not have the software expertise or business model to build the technology we need,” Luckey and his top associates claimed in their 2022 Mission Document. “These companies work slowly, while the best [software] engineers relish working at speed. And the software engineering talent who can build faster than our adversaries resides in the commercial sector, not at large defense primes.”

To overcome obstacles to military modernization, Luckey argued, the government needed to loosen its contracting rules and make it easier for defense startups and software companies to do business with the Pentagon. “We need defense companies that are fast. That won’t happen simply by wishing it to be so: it will only happen if companies are incentivized to move” by far more permissive Pentagon policies.

Buttressed by such arguments, as well as the influence of key figures like Thiel, Anduril began to secure modest but strategic contracts from the military and the Department of Homeland Security. In 2019, it received a small Marine Corps contract to install AI-enabled perimeter surveillance systems at bases in Japan and the United States. A year later, it won a five-year, $25 million contract to build surveillance towers on the U.S.-Mexican border for Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In September 2020, it also received a $36 million CBP contract to build additional sentry towers along that border.

After that, bigger awards began to roll in. In February 2023, the Department of Defense started buying Anduril’s Altius-600 surveillance/attack drone for delivery to the Ukrainian military and, last September, the Army announced that it would purchase its Ghost-X drone for battlefield surveillance operations. Anduril is also now one of four companies selected by the Air Force to develop prototypes for its proposed Enterprise Test Vehicle, a medium-sized drone intended to launch salvos of smaller surveillance and attack drones.

Anduril’s success in winning ever-larger Pentagon contracts has attracted the interest of wealthy investors looking for opportunities to profit from the expected growth of defense-oriented startups. In July 2020, it received fresh investments of $200 million from Thiel’s Founders Fund and prominent Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz, raising the company’s valuation to nearly $2 billion. A year later, Anduril obtained another $450 million from those and other venture capital firms, bringing its estimated valuation to $4.5 billion (double what it had been in 2020). More finance capital has flowed into Anduril since then, spearheading a major drive by private investors to fuel the rise of defense startups — and profit from their growth as it materializes. 

The Replicator Initiative

Along with its success in attracting big defense contracts and capital infusions, Anduril has succeeded in convincing many senior Pentagon officials of the need to reform the department’s contracting operations so as to make more room for defense startups and tech firms. On August 28, 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, then the department’s second-highest official, announced the inauguration of the “Replicator” initiative, designed to speed the delivery of advanced weaponry to the armed forces.

“[Our] budgeting and bureaucratic processes are slow, cumbersome, and byzantine,” she acknowledged. To overcome such obstacles, she indicated, the Replicator initiative would cut through red tape and award contracts directly to startups for the rapid development and delivery of cutting-edge weaponry. “Our goal,” she declared, “is to seed, spark, and stoke the flames of innovation.”

As Hicks suggested, Replicator contracts would indeed be awarded in successive batches, or “tranches.” The first tranche, announced last May, included AeroVironment Switchblade 600 kamikaze drones (called that because they are supposed to crash into their intended targets, exploding on contact). Anduril was a triple winner in the second tranche, announced on November 13th. According to the Department of Defense, that batch included funding for the Army’s purchase of Ghost-X surveillance drones, the Marine Corps’ acquisition of Altius-600 kamikaze drones, and development of the Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle, of which Anduril is one of four participating vendors.

Just as important, perhaps, was Hicks’ embrace of Palmer Luckey’s blueprint for reforming Pentagon purchasing. “The Replicator initiative is demonstrably reducing barriers to innovation, and delivering capabilities to warfighters at a rapid pace,” she affirmed in November. “We are creating opportunities for a broad range of traditional and nontraditional defense and technology companies… and we are building the capability to do that again and again.”

Enter the Trumpians

Kathleen Hicks stepped down as deputy secretary of defense on January 20th when Donald Trump reoccupied the White House, as did many of her top aides. Exactly how the incoming administration will address the issue of military procurement remains to be seen, but many in Trump’s inner circle, including Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance, have strong ties to Silicon Valley and so are likely to favor Replicator-like policies.

Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who recently won confirmation as secretary of defense, has no background in weapons development and has said little about the topic. However, Trump’s choice as deputy secretary (and Hick’s replacement) is billionaire investor Stephen A. Feinberg who, as chief investment officer of Cerberus Capital Management, acquired the military startup Stratolaunch — suggesting that he might favor extending programs like Replicator.

In a sense, the Trump moment will fit past Washington patterns when it comes to the Pentagon in that the president and his Republican allies in Congress will undoubtedly push for a massive increase in military spending, despite the fact that the military budget is already at a staggering all-time high. Every arms producer is likely to profit from such a move, whether traditional prime contractors or Silicon Valley startups. If, however, defense spending is kept at current levels — in order to finance the tax cuts and other costly measures favored by Trump and the Republicans — fierce competition between the two versions of the military-industrial complex could easily arise again. That, in turn, might trigger divisions within Trump’s inner circle, pitting loyalists to the old MIC against adherents to the new one.

Most Republican lawmakers, who generally rely on contributions from the old MIC companies to finance their campaigns, are bound to support the major prime contractors in such a rivalry. But two of Trump’s key advisers, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, could push him in the opposite direction. Vance, a former Silicon Valley functionary who reportedly became Trump’s running mate only after heavy lobbying by Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires, is likely to be encouraged by his former allies to steer more Pentagon contracts to Anduril, Palantir, and related companies. And that would hardly be surprising, since Vance’s private venture fund, Narya Capital (yes, another name derived from The Lord of the Rings!), has invested in Anduril and other military/space ventures.

Named by Trump to direct the as-yet-to-be-established Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, like Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, fought the Department of Defense to obtain contracts for one of his companies, SpaceX, and has expressed deep contempt for the Pentagon’s traditional way of doing things. In particular, he has denigrated the costly, generally ill-performing Lockheed-made F-35 jet fighter at a time when AI-governed drones are becoming ever more capable. Despite that progress, as he wrote on X, the social media platform he now owns, “some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.” In a subsequent post, he added that “manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway.”

His critique of the F-35 ruffled feathers at the Air Force and caused Lockheed’s stock to fall by more than 3%. …………………………

President Trump has yet to indicate his stance on the F-35 or other high-priced items in the Pentagon’s budget lineup. He may (or may not) call for a slowdown in purchases of that plane and seek greater investment in other projects. Still, the divide exposed by Musk — between costly manned weapons made by traditional defense contractors and more affordable unmanned systems made by the likes of Anduril, General Atomics, and AeroVironment — is bound to widen in the years to come as the new version of the military-industrial complex only grows in wealth and power. How the old MIC will address such a threat to its primacy remains to be seen, but multibillion-dollar weapons companies are not likely to step aside without a fight. And that fight will likely divide the Trumpian universe.

February 13, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

America’s nuclear gamble: The dangerous push to resume atmospheric testing

Experts warn of catastrophic fallout as calls grow to restart nuclear weapons tests abandoned since 1963.

By Karl Grossman, February 10, 2025

“The United States may need to restart explosive nuclear weapons testing,” declared Robert Peters, research fellow for nuclear deterrence and missile defense at The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing organization close to the Trump administration, in a lengthy report last month.  Issued on January 15, it was titled: “America Must Prepare to Test Nuclear Weapons.”

Peters stated that “the President may order the above-ground testing of a nuclear weapon….And while the United States leaving the [Nuclear] Test Ban Treaty may not be optimal and may indeed have negative downstream effects, doing so may be necessary to stave off further adversary escalation.”

There has not been a nuclear weapon tested above-ground in the United States since 1962, Peters said. That was a year before the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 was signed by the U.S., Soviet Union and United Kingdom. It prohibits nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, underwater or in outer space. It allowed underground tests as long as they didn’t result in “radioactive debris to be present outside the territorial limits of the state under whose jurisdiction or control” the test was conducted.

“Resuming atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons would be disastrous,” says Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project. He cited the “lessons learned from above-ground nuclear weapons testing—the radioactive fall-out that harmed many people, especially infants and children.”

Testimony by a co-founder of the Radiation and Public Health Project, the late Dr. Ernest Sternglass, a physicist, before the then Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, was instrumental in President John F. Kennedy signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. 

As President Kennedy said in a 1963 national address: “This treaty can be a step towards freeing the world from the fears and dangers of radioactive fallout.” He said that “over the years the number and the yield of weapons tested have rapidly increased and so have the radioactive hazards from such testing. Continued unrestricted testing by the nuclear powers, joined in time by other nations which may be less adept in limiting pollution, will increasingly contaminate the air that all of us must breathe.” Kennedy spoke of “children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs” as a result.

The Heritage Foundation’s 900-page publication “Project 2025” is the “governing agenda” for the Trump administration, writes Susan Caskie, executive editor of the magazine The Week, in its current issue. “Many of its authors and contributors,” she noted, are now members of the administration, some appointed to “even Cabinet posts.” …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Are we, if there is a return to atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, to go back to the years of radioactive fallout—and the resulting health impacts? And, as Kennedy stated, “children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs.”  more https://www.nationofchange.org/2025/02/10/americas-nuclear-gamble-the-dangerous-push-to-resume-atmospheric-testing/

February 12, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Top Pentagon contractors poised for gains as Trump pushes missile shield expansion

The proposed “Iron Dome for America” system is heavily reliant on space-based sensors and potentially controversial space-based interceptors

Space News, by Sandra Erwin, February 3, 2025

WASHINGTON — The nation’s top defense contractors are positioning themselves to capitalize on a new missile defense initiative announced by the Trump administration. Executives from Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and L3Harris told Wall Street analysts last week that they are well-equipped to support the administration’s push for a “next-generation missile defense shield.”

President Donald Trump’s executive order, titled “The Iron Dome for America,” directs the Department of Defense to accelerate the development and deployment of an advanced missile defense system. The order calls for a multi-layered approach capable of countering a range of threats, including ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, with a heavy reliance on space-based sensors and potentially controversial space-based interceptors.

“We welcome the urgency that the Trump administration is placing on protecting the homeland from escalating global missile threats,” said Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden during a fourth-quarter earnings call. The company has contracts for satellite-based missile detection and hypersonic weapon interceptors under development.

………..Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris are prime contractors in key missile defense programs that could expand under the initiative. L3Harris CEO Christopher Kubasik highlighted his company’s role in producing missile-defense tracking satellites for the Space Development Agency’s Tracking Layer program, a network of satellites designed to detect and track hypersonic threats from low Earth orbit………………………………………………………………………………………..

The administration has yet to provide a cost estimate for the ambitious Iron Dome initiative. The Pentagon’s missile defense efforts are currently funded through a complex web of programs. The Missile Defense Agency receives approximately $10 billion annually, while the Space Development Agency operates with a budget of about $4 billion. The U.S. Space Force maintains additional multi-billion dollar funding streams for missile-warning and missile-detection satellites.  https://spacenews.com/top-pentagon-contractors-poised-for-gains-as-trump-pushes-missile-shield-expansion/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Contractors%20prep%20for%20%20Iron%20Dome%20for%20America&utm_campaign=FIRST%20UP%202025-02-04

February 9, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Elon Musk Can Find His $2-Trillion Federal Spending Cut in Nuclear Weapons

DOGE’s Elon Musk should turn his $2-trillion hatchet to wasteful and perilous U.S. nuclear weapons modernization plans

Scientific American, By Dan Vergano edited by Jeanna Bryner, 5 Feb 25

Famously fortunate, Elon Musk now faces a rare opportunity—delivering on one of his signature overblown promises. From his newly created White House cost-cutting desk, all Musk must do is recommend ending one of the most misguided, wasteful and dangerous programs contemplated by the U.S. government, one that Scientific American has pushed for elimination.

Last November Musk set an ambitious target for his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the meme-coin-joke name for his cost-cutting office, his reward for bankrolling Trump’s campaign. Under DOGE, Musk said he would trim $2 trillion from the federal budget. That’s a hefty sum even for the space mogul now regarded as the $400-billion-worth wealthiest man on Earth. (Musk subsequently downplayed $2 trillion as a “best-case outcome.”)

Luckily for him, there is one big, fat target with just that price tag, already sitting in Uncle Sam’s shopping cart, and it’s ripe for cutting: nuclear weapons. In 2010 Trump’s nemesis, then president Barack Obama, first proposed “modernizing” the U.S. triad of land-, sea- and air-based weapons over more than three decades. Almost unnoticed outside of national security circles, the initiative’s $1-trillion sticker price has nearly doubled and, as American University national security scholar Sharon Weiner wrote last year, “is likely to escalate even further by 2050—the supposed end date for modernization.”

Conveniently enough for Musk, his new boss, Trump, called in January for talks on reducing nuclear weapons with China and Russia, while speaking to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about today, because you don’t want to hear it,” Trump said. “It’s too depressing.”……………………. more https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/elon-musk-can-find-his-usd2-trillion-federal-spending-cut-in-nuclear-weapons/

February 7, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The national missile defense fantasy—again

Bulletin, By Joe Cirincione | February 4, 2025

National missile defense advocates live in a world of magic and make-believe. Fantasy replaces science, assertions replace facts, and cartoon weapons replace real capabilities.

This enduring fantasy, however, has real-world consequences.

President Donald Trump’s pledge last week to build “a next-generation missile defense shield” that would “defeat any foreign aerial attack on the Homeland [with] space-based interceptors” has provoked a predictable reaction. Russia blasted Trump’s plan, detailed in his new executive order, “The Iron Dome for America.”

But no magic shield is going to protect the United States against nuclear attack.

An idea that never dies. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Friday of Trump’s plan that “it directly envisages a significant strengthening of the American nuclear arsenal and means for conducting combat operations in space, including the development and deployment of space-based interception systems.”

“We consider this as another confirmation of the US focus on turning space into an arena of armed confrontation… and the deployment of weapons there,” Zakharova added.

The Russian reaction could scuttle Trump’s stated desire to negotiate limits on nuclear weapons. If so, it would repeat the role strategic defenses have played in the Cold War’s nuclear arms race. Efforts to build national defenses always trigger efforts to overcome them with more missiles and other counter-measures—the well-known security dilemma.

Despite all the formidable technical and geopolitical evidence against such schemes, however, “faith in national missile defense never dies,” Washington Post columnist Max Boot observes.

It is no coincidence that Trump’s new order is lifted almost entirely from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 wish list. In the 1980s, the group championed President Ronald Reagan’s original dream to “put in space a shield that missiles could not penetrate—a shield that could protect us from nuclear missiles just as a roof protects a family from rain,” as he told a 1986 high school graduating class.

“Like Israel’s highly effective system of the same name, President Trump’s Iron Dome will provide an impenetrable defense for the American people that will bring peace through strength,” Heritage Foundation fellow Victoria Coates said. It “will fulfill President Reagan’s vision for the Strategic Defense Initiative laid out some four decades ago,” she added.

Doomed to fail. Trump’s executive order is a jumble of false claims and imaginary solutions. It begins by declaring that the risk of a missile attack “remains the most catastrophic threat facing the United States.” That would surprise most experts on existential risks. The climate crisis, the threat of new pandemics, artificial intelligence, and crippling cyber attacks are all at least as likely catastrophic events as nuclear weapons delivered by other means. But threat inflation has always been a key part of efforts to justify urgent action and massive investment.

Trump claims that “over the past 40 years, rather than lessening, the threat from next-generation strategic weapons has become more intense and complex.” Despite being utter nonsense, this claim has gone largely unchallenged.

While it is true that new technologies have increased the lethality of missiles, the missile threat to the United States has decreased dramatically. Arms control treaties and the collapse of the Soviet Union slashed the number of nuclear weapons and nuclear-armed missiles threatening the United States.

In 1985, the Soviet Union deployed 2,345 land-based and submarine-based missiles carrying over 9,300 nuclear warheads. That was the threat Reagan hoped to render “impotent and obsolete” with his missile shield.

Thanks to negotiated agreements, today’s Russia fields only 521 missiles, carrying 2,236 warheads. China’s land-based nuclear-armed missiles capable of reaching the United States have increased from around 20 in 1985 to some 135 today (carrying 238 warheads) and perhaps 72 single-warhead submarine-based missiles. In sum, the United States today faces roughly one-fifth the number of enemy missiles compared to 40 years ago and one-quarter of the nuclear warheads (728 vs. 2,365 missiles and 2,546 vs. 9,320 warheads). That is still a very dangerous threat but by no means a greater one.

Where arms control succeeded, missile defense technology failed.

None of the scores of systems developed by Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and its successor organizations have ever come close to providing the imaginary shield that Reagan promised. National missile defenses did not work then. They do not work now. They will likely never work………………………………………

As it became clear that the space-based laser weapons Edward Teller told Reagan he could build were a fantasy, Reagan and subsequent presidents scaled down the program to try to get some kind of workable defense. But after spending over $415 billion over decades, all the United States has to show for the effort is 44 ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California that can hit a cooperative target in carefully scripted demonstrations—about half of the time. Congress currently allocates $30 billion a year on missile defense and defeat programs, most run by the SDI successor, the Missile Defense Agency.

Not an iron dome; more like an iron colander. The major technical problems that remain unresolved—and eventually forced the cancellation of all SDI’s ambitious plans—are the same obstacles that have ruled out an effective ballistic missile defense for more than 60 years:

• the ability of the enemy to overwhelm a system with offensive missiles;
• the questionable survivability of space-based weapons;
• the inability to discriminate among real warheads and hundreds or thousands of decoys;
• the problem of designing battle management, command, control, and communications that could function in a nuclear war; and,
• the low confidence in the ability of the system to work perfectly the first—and, perhaps, only—time it is ever used.

……………………………………………………………………“There is zero possibility of a comprehensive missile defense of the United States in the foreseeable future,” James N. Miller, who served as undersecretary of defense in the Obama administration, told Max Boot. “We are not going to escape mutual assured destruction vis-à-vis Russia or China.”

As shown repeatedly over the past 60 years, the only way to eliminate the threat of nuclear-armed missiles is to negotiate their elimination. Pretending that there is a magic shield that can be willed into existence will only make the problem of national missile defense worse.  https://thebulletin.org/2025/02/the-national-missile-defense-fantasy-again/

February 6, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Local opinion: Raytheon pushes The Doomsday Clock closer to midnight

because of their work on both the LRSO and Tomahawk cruise missiles, Raytheon is now seen as the leading contender to produce even more nuclear weapons in the form of new sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles. This further escalation would represent a huge setback to hard-won nuclear arms control progress, when nuclear-armed Tomahawks were removed from submarines over 30 years ago.

Jack Cohen-Joppa Special to the Arizona Daily Star, Jan 31, 2025,  31, 2025, https://tucson.com/opinion/column/local-opinion-raytheon-pushes-the-doomsday-clock-closer-to-midnight/article_46da901c-df20-11ef-8e77-235556fbeeb6.html

In Tom Lehrer’s classic Cold War ditty, “So Long Mom,” a nuclear bomber pilot sings, “I’ll look for you when the war is over, an hour and a half from now.”

It’s darkly funny, because even though we don’t talk much about it, we all know it’s true. Planned or imagined, nuclear war scenarios rarely last longer.

But how much time have we got before then? How near is that threat of omnicide today?

The Doomsday Clock is a visual metaphor created by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists back in 1947 to illustrate how close we are to global calamity from nuclear weapons and other looming threats to civilization as we know it. Originally set at seven minutes to midnight, in 2023 it advanced to 90 seconds to midnight, largely due to nuclear threats from war in Ukraine.

And Raytheon keeps pushing us closer.

In April 2020, Raytheon, with more than 12,000 local employees and the bulk of its research, development and production based here in Tucson, was awarded a sole-source contract to produce about 1,000 new nuclear-armed, air-launched cruise missiles. Known by the anodyne acronym LRSO (Long Range Stand Off), the missile is arguably both redundant and destabilizing in a time of disappearing nuclear diplomacy.

Not only that, but because of their work on both the LRSO and Tomahawk cruise missiles, Raytheon is now seen as the leading contender to produce even more nuclear weapons in the form of new sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles. This further escalation would represent a huge setback to hard-won nuclear arms control progress, when nuclear-armed Tomahawks were removed from submarines over 30 years ago.

Why aren’t we talking about it in Tucson? Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego and Rep. Juan Ciscomani all vote for U.S. nuclear domination. Only Rep. Raul Grijalva has spoken out for the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, now adopted by more than half the nations of the world. Despite near-universal condemnation of nuclear weapons by leaders of the world’s religions, we could use more local political and religious leaders speaking out against this blasphemous enterprise in our backyard.

It’s not as if it’s a military secret. The industry press has recently carried reports of LRSO flight tests, budget allocations, production schedules and more. Yet local media have not kept up.

Raytheon also has nothing to say. Usually, Southern Arizona’s largest employer and exporter is mighty proud of the panoply of products in their military portfolio. Their website is filled with fulsome boasts and lurid photos of deadly hardware. But the baddest boy of the bunch is missing in action. The nuclear-armed LRSO only pops up in a handful of financial reports. Raytheon’s original press release heralding the multibillion-dollar contract was posted on its website and quoted by the Tucson media in April 2020. But now it’s gone, simply deleted from its media archive.

Perhaps management has realized that there is nothing to be gained by crowing about their only product that, if used as intended, would be the instrument of multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity (incomprehensible death and devastation, disproportionate civilian casualties, lasting contamination of land and water, etc.). Raytheon’s “products” are certainly nothing I’m proud of as a Tucsonan.

This is the same Raytheon/RTX that last November was fined nearly $1 billion for defrauding the government (i.e., the taxpayer) and paying multiple bribes to promote business with the government of Qatar.

Experts debate whether the LRSO is intended for a nuclear surprise attack, or just another layer of “deterrence.” But if it isn’t meant to be used first, that just makes it fit into plans for a full-scale nuclear war. All ninety minutes of it.

Shouldn’t we all pay more attention, and demand that our elected leaders resist this insanity?

February 6, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment