nuclear-news

The sanity of cutting $100 billion from USA’s Cold War nuclear arsenal

 Try a Little Nuclear Sanity Lawrence S. Wittner, March 19, 2012  On February 8, 2012, Congressman Edward Markey (D-MA) took to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to introduce the Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures Act (H.R.
3974).

This SANE Act would cut $100 billion from the U.S. nuclear weapons budget over the next ten years by reducing the current fleet of U.S. nuclear submarines, delaying the purchase of new nuclear submarines, reducing the number of ICBMs, delaying a new bomber
program, and ending the nuclear mission of air bombers.

“America’s nuclear weapons budget is locked in a Cold War time machine,” noted Markey, the senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “It doesn’t reflect our twenty-first-century security needs. It makes no sense…….Since its introduction, the
SANE Act has picked up significant support. Not surprisingly, it is backed by major peace and disarmament organizations, such as Peace Action, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and the
Ploughshares Foundation. But it has also attracted the support of the National Council of Churches, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Indeed, the SANE Act now has 45 Congressional co-sponsors…. http://hnn.us/articles/145156.html

March 20, 2012 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

USA cannot afford to maintain its hoard of nuclear weapons, and a bad example to others

We are telling others, by our hoarding of warheads, that in order to be secure in the world today you need nuclear weapons — and lots of them. Is it any wonder if leaders in Iran and elsewhere might want to buy some protection for themselves with a nuclear stockpile of their own?

 the U.S. lavishes over $50 billion a year  on nuclear arms related programs.

Obama’s Controversial Plan for Nuclear Sanity Richard Schiffman: 03/14/2012 ” “Iran Worried U.S. Might Be Building 8,500th Nuclear Weapon,” read the headline . This front page banner in the satirical weekly, The Onion may not have gotten the number exactly right. The Obama administration reported in 2010 that the U.S. possesses 5,113 warheads in the stockpile and an additional 4,500 retired , but not yet dismantled, making the grand total even higher than the spoofers had guessed.

While media pundits in the U.S. warn darkly of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, America itself is regarded as the main nuclear threat in much of the world today. The United States argues that it needs these weapons to deter attacks on itself and its allies, and that it would only use them to prevent or respond to such an attack. But people in other countries wonder why we need so absurdly many of them — secreted away in missile silos, on submarines and in bombers, computer-targeted to obliterate their cities at the turn of a key.

The U.S. rightly wants to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to nations like Iran that do not yet possess them. Quite simply, the more actors that have the bomb, the greater the risk that it will eventually be used, either as part of a regional war, or in a freelance act of terror. Yet by what right can we ask others to abstain, when we ourselves continue — along with our Cold War rival Russia — to maintain an arsenal large enough to destroy life on the planet several times over?

The problem is not just that we lack the moral authority to preach nonproliferation. The larger problem is that the U.S. is setting a bad example for other nations to follow. Continue reading →

March 15, 2012 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment