New Arms Race 2-5-2018

5, February 2018                                New Arms Race

A new treaty limiting the development of nuclear weapons between the United States and Russia signed by President Obama due to take effect this week is in danger of being gutted by the new Trump administration which plans to spend $1.2 trillion upgrading the US nuclear arsenal. This will include developing entirely new terrifying weapons. Anti-nuclear advocates denounced the Pentagon’s plans as “radical” and “extreme”. World leaders around the globe condemned the new Pentagon plans and fear that we are now on a dangerous slide into total annihilation of humanity.

The new policy also lowers the threshold for using nuclear weapons such as cyber attacks and belies the Pentagon’s false claims that it is committed to arms control and non-proliferation. While we never lose an opportunity to waggle our fingers and express outrage at other regimes developing weapons of mass destruction we never seem to hesitate to squander taxpayer money developing our own WMD’s. Forgotten are the hard lessons of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan (to name but a few) we continue to embark on the same foolish policies expecting different results. This is the definition of madness. In the State of the Union, Trump escalated his rhetoric describing the North Korea as “depraved” - an apt description for the occupant of the White House.