All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest on the show is Darwin Bond-Graham.
He is a member of the Los Alamos Study Group.
And he's written a couple articles now, I think both originally for Foreign Policy and Focus, that have been reprinted at antiwar.com.
That's original.antiwar.com/bond-graham.
And both of them are about the New START Treaty.
Yay, a New START Treaty.
It has been my contention on this show in the past that you do not have to be a patchouli stinking hippie to think that our government ought to get rid of its hydrogen bombs, that they could spell the end of mankind, and that you don't want that.
And so a START Treaty, right?
Us and Russia, we still have thousands of thermonuclear weapons deliverable by all different means.
So we want any treaty we can possibly get along those lines.
Isn't that right, Darwin?
And welcome to the show.
Hi, good to be here.
That may be right, but treaties are, treaties do not necessarily always equal good things.
They aren't always actually about disarmament and human security.
In fact, treaties, more often than not, make people more insecure, oddly enough.
Well, and so we'll get to how that is.
And I think the story basically is the story of the military-industrial complex.
If we can skip down toward the bottom of your first article here about the influence that the companies involved in America's nuclear weapons complex, their relationship with Republican and Democratic members of Congress, and particularly in this case, the U.S. Senate.
This is, you know, the military-industrial complex, not as sort of this amorphous idea, but oh, I get it, this is exactly how it works.
There's a perfect portrait of it in action.
Right, that's exactly how it works.
There's nothing anomalous about what's going on right now in terms of negotiations in the U.S. Senate to ratify the START Treaty, that the Senate would use the START Treaty as a proxy to discuss instead the enormous levels to which they want to fund corporate contractors to build new weapons systems, nuclear and non-nuclear.
There's nothing out of the ordinary about this, except that in the case of the new START Treaty, this is kind of a more hyperactive example than what we're used to seeing.
All right, so I guess in the article, you kind of break this down into, you know, three major beneficiaries of the new START Treaty because of all the lobbying and all the riders and amendments added to the thing, and that's missile defense, the prompt global strike, and more nuclear weapons, newly designed, improved, updated nuclear weapons.
And I guess also part of that is new facilities, an incredible number of new facilities for building nuclear weapons.
But first, if you could please start with the prompt global strike, because I think this is perhaps the most important part of this entire article.
Yeah, prompt global strike is sort of a dream that the military has had for quite a while now.
What it entails is military planners want to be able to provide the president with the option of killing anyone anywhere on the planet or destroying anything anywhere on the planet within the window of about 30 minutes of making the decision to do so.
So right now, if, say, the United States, the people who run the United States wanted to carry out a military strike or attack someone or destroy something, a military operation like that takes a long time to actually piece together.
It can take upwards of 24 hours to hit something with a missile or to send an expeditionary force somewhere.
Prompt global strike will allow the president and the Pentagon to basically push a button and fire a missile that will then deposit some kind of warhead somewhere on Earth within about 30 minutes.
So a non-nuclear, three-stage intercontinental ballistic missile.
Yes, and so it takes an ICBM and it modifies it so that it launches and it puts into orbit this hypersonic vehicle which will then reenter the atmosphere at many times the speed of sound.
And then that vehicle will either launch missiles or it could drop munitions that work purely by inertia like tungsten rods or something.
So it's entirely non-nuclear, but it's strategic.
Like nuclear weapons, it's strategic in the sense that it's an option that the United States will have that is meant to deter or scare the crap out of anyone on the planet because they know they can be killed within 30 minutes of the decision.
Well, you know, it seems to me, and maybe I'm crazy, that it's probably a bad idea to go shooting off three-stage intercontinental ballistic missiles in a world where all of Europe, Russia, China, Israel, and soon India will be able to respond.
What if they get the wrong idea?
What if we're just doing an assassination with an ICBM and somebody gets the wrong impression that we're trying to nuke Beijing in some kind of first strike?
Right, well, that's, you know, during the Cold War and even in the 1990s, there were instances in which the United States or Russia or others launched missiles, not even ICBMs, not even having the same characterizations that ICBMs would have, but launched missiles which were then seen on radar screens in Moscow and elsewhere as possible first strikes or attacks.
And, you know, then the warning systems all go off and it, yes, it's, prompt global strike will be very destabilizing in a very bad way.
Not only, it's bad for multiple reasons.
Bad for that reason.
It's probably also bad to assume that the security of the United States would best be served by spending many billions of dollars creating this sort of godlike weapon to erase people from the planet.
Fear will keep the local systems in line.
Right.
That's my favorite Star Wars quote this week.
That's how an empire rules.
Yes, it is.
All right, so we're talking with Darwin Bond-Graham.
He's a member of the Los Alamos Study Group and he's written this piece.
There's two of them.
New START, Arms Affirmation Treaty.
And New START's big winners, U.S. Nuke Complex, Pentagon, and Contractors.
And that is at, both of them are at antiwar.com.
And now, so talk to me about the building projects, the nuclear weapons factories that are, well, no, no, no.
Let's get back to that after we come back after the break.
Talk to me about the, well, hell, now I forgot what I was going to say.
Oh, well, go ahead.
Well, the- The building projects, I'm sorry.
Yes, the building projects.
The Obama administration is set to reinvest in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex at a level that has not been seen probably since Ronald Reagan, maybe before.
They're going to spend upwards of 80 or $90 billion over the next 10 years to build a transcontinental set of factories to manufacture uranium, plutonium, to manufacture and work on nuclear weapons and their components.
This perhaps constitutes the single largest coherent capital infrastructure project that the federal government is working on.
That's kind of an amazing thing to think about given the infrastructure that this nation needs right now in terms of renewable energy.
The numbers are absolutely astronomical.
You have, you say there are 14 building projects that are costing at minimum $20 million, and yet some of these projects make 20 million look like a joke.
Right, right.
Some of these projects are in the range of several billion dollars.
Brand new nuclear weapons production factories.
Yes, and this may come to a, this may be a surprise to a lot of people who are under the impression that President Obama is somehow for nuclear disarmament because he won a Nobel Peace Prize and he said some nice things about it.
But if you actually look beyond the rhetoric and if you look at what the administration is spending money on, they are for nuclear weapons in a major way.
And who, which politicians the nuclear weapons manufacturers are spending money on.
It's all there.
It's at antiwar.com, Darwin Bond Graham, and we'll be back with more.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Guest is Darwin Bond Graham from the Los Alamos Study Group.
He's got a couple of articles at antiwar.com about the new START Treaty.
Turns out in order to get a START Treaty ratified, it has to, or at least leave enough loopholes in it to allow for even the increase of nuclear weapons.
Tell me about the accounting of the numbers of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems in this treaty and how ridiculously far-schooled they are.
Please.
Yeah, the accounting methods in the treaty are very strange.
What it says is that the United States and Russia will each have no more than 1,550 active deployed nuclear weapons on 700 platforms, platforms being missiles, the ICBMs, and the bomber aircraft.
The biggest loophole that the treaty allows is that it counts every single bomber aircraft as one nuclear weapon, even though the two types of bombers that currently deploy nuclear weapons for the United States can hold 16 to 20 nuclear weapons each.
So instead of 16 to 20, it's one.
And when you actually calculate that out, you realize that there's kind of a hidden capacity within the treaty so that the United States and Russia could actually, if they wanted to, deploy more than 1,550 weapons.
And that's only the first level at which the treaty is somewhat duplicitous and not at all about disarmament.
More so, people need to keep in mind that a reduction of nuclear weapons to from, say, a level of 2,200 to 1,550 is rather meaningless when 1,550 nuclear weapons is still more than enough to wipe out most life on the planet.
Well, you know, on that point, there was just a thing I'm sure you saw in the Air Force's journal a few months back where some of the very highest level officers signed onto this thing, generals, I believe, signed onto this thing, saying, really, we only need 14 nukes and we have enough to dissuade the Russians and the Chinese and any further adversary, possible adversary, of the idea that they ought to nuke us.
And that's really it.
And that would be enough where even if they launched all 14 of them, probably, you know, humanity wouldn't be extinct from that.
We'd just have the worst economic breakdown and loss of life ever or something, but.
Yeah, I don't know if it was 14, but I've seen very small numbers thrown around in a lot of places.
And the whole universe of nuclear strategy is a very secretive and kind of bizarre thing.
I mean, why, yeah, why on earth is 1,550 considered the magical number at this point?
That completely escapes me.
So instead of looking toward military and militarily and strategically, what may or may not be required to, say, totally wipe out Russia if there was ever a nuclear exchange, I'm more often in trying to understand how nuclear weapons budgets get made and how strategy gets made.
I more often look toward the economic forces that work, like the powerful institutions that build and deploy the weapons, the corporations that have the contract to run those institutions or facilitate their work.
And if you start looking at that, then you can kind of understand why there's kind of a minimum threshold at which they constantly pressure for, because if you reduce the US arsenal to, say, 400 weapons, there might not be enough work to go around for these companies like Bechtel and Lockheed Martin.
But if you keep it at 1,550, maybe then there's enough work to go around or something like that.
Well, yeah, I mean, from reading your article, it's clear that that's the only thing at stake here.
Although, are there not guys in the Pentagon who have their first strike strategy where they wanna be able to hit Russia so hard that they can't even shoot back?
Certainly the Dr. Strangelove still exists, but- Is that not the current plan for America's nuclear forces, to be able to do that?
I mean, they are putting, you mentioned Obama and his anti-nuke rhetoric.
The best anti-nuke rhetoric he ever gave was the first half of his speech in Prague in the Czech Republic.
Second half said, yeah, we're keeping our radar station here and we're putting anti-missile missiles on the border of Russia and Poland.
Yeah, those people, the nuclear hawks, they definitely still exist.
They're not quite as powerful as they used to be.
And that's partly evidenced by, for instance, the PROMPT Global Strike Program.
A lot of the generals and a lot of the national security strategists think that having a non-nuclear strategic deterrent, it's more useful than having a nuclear weapon.
They intend to use PROMPT Global Strike.
So they would rather spend billions of dollars developing and deploying that than keeping this large Cold War era nuclear arsenal around.
But that said, yes, there are still a lot of people in the Pentagon and the corporate contractors and the political establishment in particular places, like New Mexico and California and elsewhere, who strongly support nuclear weapons as a matter of politics, because it brings money to their states, it brings money to their constituencies, the people who give them campaign contributions.
It's just amazing.
I don't know that you would have in a republic or something where the people that, the companies that make nuclear weapons lobby the government to have them make more nuclear weapons all the time.
I mean, nevermind amorality.
Our country has been completely and totally hijacked by those who would kill all of humanity if they could turn a buck.
Yeah, and there's a similarity worth pointing out here to another story that recently broke.
It was reported that the law in Arizona, SB 1070, which basically criminalized all immigrants there and turned local law enforcement agencies into a sort of a very militarized anti-immigrant police force, that that law itself was written by the for-profit prison industry, which has a lot of prisons in Arizona and they see locking up immigrants as a growth area.
Of course, it's the only one left, the police state and the overseas empire.
Very much so.
These private prison corporations or these corporations that run nuclear weapons facilities, they're very similar.
They are very involved in the legislative process from the very beginning.
They have full-time staff and they put a lot of resources into protecting their bottom line.
Yeah, well, and this is a great lead up to our next interview with a couple of my favorite economists about David Broder's piece in the Washington Post about how we ought to nuke Iran because war's good for the economy.
Oh my.
I don't know if you saw that thing, but David Broder, that's the Washington Post talking.
He talks like that.
Well, I don't know if war is good for the economy.
I think the last nine years of the Bush administration's large, expansive overseas wars have proven rather disastrous to the economy.
I'm not sure how anyone could actually debate that.
Well, you know, Garrett Garrett wrote years ago that in empire, specifically in our empire, all the money, all the profit is made as the money goes out, but virtually nothing comes back.
Yeah, the Saudis buy our debt and that kind of thing, but for the most part, all the money is made on the expenditure by the government on the empire itself, not in looting the booty from the countries that we invade like a typical empire from the past.
And so it's clearly just a equation for bankruptcy.
No wonder we're all broke.
Everything we spend is on nuclear bombs and locking each other up in cages.
I mean, how are we supposed to produce any goods and services in an economy like that?
Yeah, this gets to the ratification of the START treaty in the Senate in some ways.
Some of the senators are simply opposed to diplomacy and they want to maintain the United States as a very strong fisted kind of empire.
But a lot of people would say that that resort, that constant resort to militarism, to spending all our money on prisons and nuclear weapons budgets and so forth, that that's actually an indication of an empire that has become very weak precisely because it's lost its ability to win the struggle for hegemony in the economic and political sphere.
So not being an economic power anymore, being a debtor, not being a political power so much, the empire constantly reaches for the only thing it has left, which is just brute force.
Yeah, well, Carol Quigley always said, world empire is the last stage of a civilization before it finally completely kills itself.
And I guess we can see why.
Yeah.
All right, well, listen, I really appreciate your time and your insight and I strongly urge y'all to read these articles.
They're both very long and in-depth and very well-written and well-researched and very well-worth notes.
Can I add one more thing real quick?
Please.
Everything we just talked about, listeners should not receive that as some kind of bad news.
It's not that these things are just happening.
People are opposing them.
My organization is opposing the Obama administration and the Republican reinvestment in the nuclear weapons complex.
And if people want to learn about our work and support us, please visit us on the web at www.lasg.org.
Lasg.org for the Los Alamos Study Group.
Hey, thanks very much.
I really do appreciate your time, Darren.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
