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Current Events Update

Current Events February 08

Nuclear weapons are obviously illegal, immoral, obscenely dangerous and ridiculously expensive. A vast super-majority of nations and people around the world want to be rid of them. The highest court on the planet, the International Court of Justice, has said that all nations are legally obligated to eliminate them, and yet we cannot seem to get serious debate going on this issue. How can this be? Follow the money.

The key to this puzzle is the last two words of the first sentence above—“ridiculously expensive.” In the US, nuclear weapons and delivery systems are worth at least 40 billion a year. Now, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which is a part of the Department of Energy (DOE), is trotting out a new plan called Complex Transformation, which will spend another $150 billion over the next 25 years to replace warheads that do not need to be replaced (even according to the government’s own findings). Complex Transformation and the whole nuclear weapons industry are a giant slab of pork that have cost the United States 5.8 trillion dollars already, and the pigs at the trough want to keep the slop flowing.

Nuclear pork, however, is just a tiny piece of a far larger problem. When President Eisenhower stepped down in 1961 he left us with an oft-quoted warning about the military-industrial complex, but the deeper implications of this warning have rarely been discussed. Here is a longer-than-usual excerpt of what he had to say:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or, indeed, by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

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 alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

Now 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 Statehouse, 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.

Eisenhower, a decorated general, was warning us that our economic, political and even our spiritual lives were in danger of distortion and colonization by the war machine. It is obvious that we have failed to heed his warning, and we do now live in a world utterly dominated by military economics, military politics and even military religion. We are vastly over-militarized, but we are still headed in that direction.

In a Feb. 14, 2008 article for the Asian Times entitled Asian arms race gathers speed, John Feffer explains that, behind the six-party talks and the Beijing Olympics, Northeast Asia is completely devoted to the military build-up.

Since the dawn of the 21st century, five of the six countries involved in the six-party talks have increased their military spending by 50% or more. The sixth, Japan, has maintained a steady, if sizeable military budget while nonetheless aspiring to keep pace. Every country in the region is now eagerly investing staggering amounts of money in new weapons systems and new offensive capabilities.

The arms race in Northeast Asia undercuts all talk of peace in the region. It also sustains a growing global military-industrial complex. Northeast Asia is where four of the world's largest militaries - those of the United States, China, Russia, and Japan - confront each other. Together, the countries participating in the six-party talks account for approximately 65% of world military expenditures, with the US responsible for roughly half the global total.

Here is the real news that should hit the front pages of papers today: wars grip Iraq, Afghanistan and large swathes of Africa, but the heart of the global military-industrial complex lies in Northeast Asia. Any attempt to drive a stake through this potentially destabilizing monster must start with the militaries that face one another there.

He specifically describes the militarization of Japan as follows:

Perhaps the most paradoxical participant in this new arms race is Japan. Its famous peace constitution has traditionally been one of the few brakes on arms spending in the region. The country has long limited its military expenditure to an informal ceiling of 1% of its overall budget. As that budget grew, however, so did military spending. Japan's army is now larger than Britain's, and the country spends more on its military than all but four other nations. (China surpassed Japan in military spending for the first time in 2006.) Nonetheless, for decades, the provisions of its peace constitution at least put limits on the offensive capabilities of the Japanese military, which is still referred to as its Self-Defense Forces (SDF).

These days, however, even the definition of "offensive" is changing. In 1999, the SDF first used offensive force when its naval vessels fired on suspected North Korean spy ships. Less than a decade later, Japan provides support far from its "defensive" zone for US wars, including providing fuel to coalition forces in Afghanistan and transport in Iraq.

Japan was once incapable of bombing other countries, largely because its air force didn't have an in-air refueling capability. Thanks to Boeing, however, the first KC-767 tanker aircraft will arrive in Japan this year, providing government officials, who occasionally assert the country's right to launch preemptive strikes, with the means to do so. This is not happy news for Japan's neighbors, who retain vivid memories of the 1930s and 1940s, when its military went on an imperial rampage throughout the region.

Tokyo already has among the best air forces and naval fighting forces in the world, trailing only the US. But leading Japanese officials have displayed an even larger appetite. Some Japanese politicians are lobbying to amend the peace constitution or even scrap it entirely, while sending military spending skyrocketing. To promote these ideas, they use the thin rationale that Japan should be participating regularly in "international peacekeeping missions".

The Japanese Defense Agency - its Pentagon - which was upgraded to ministry level last year, wants more goodies like an aircraft carrier, nuclear-powered submarines and long-range missiles. A light aircraft carrier, which the government has coyly labeled a "destroyer", will be ready in 2009. The subs and missiles, however, will have to wait. So, too, will Tokyo's attempt to take a quantum leap forward in air-fighting capabilities by importing advanced US F-22 stealth planes. Concerned about releasing latest-generation technology to the outside world, Congress scotched this deal at the last moment in August 2007.

Washington has been a good deal more accommodating when it comes to missile defense. Japan has been a far more enthusiastic supporter of missile defense than any of America's European allies. In fact, the United States and Japan are spending billions of dollars to set up an early-warning-and-response prototype of such an advanced missile system. Part of this missile shield is land-based. Last month, Japan installed its third Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) surface-to-air interceptor and plans on nine more by 2011. The more ambitious part of the program, however, is based at sea. In December, Japan conducted its first sea-based interceptor test.

Why is this happening? Is it because the Japanese are truly afraid of an invasion by North Korea or China? Impossible. North Korea can’t even provide its people with food and electricity. How could it hope to invade anyone? Its nuclear weapons are a desperate attempt to look dangerous and stay in the lucrative military game. China is Japan’s best supplier and second best customer. Would China want to kill the goose that lays so many golden eggs year after year? Ridiculous. Japan is building its military for the same reason everyone else is doing it—for the money.

The whole military build up around the world derives from greed mixed with fear and atavistic imperialist thinking. Because so many enormously powerful companies in all countries derive a high percentage of their profits from war-related products and activities, they enthusiastically exaggerate every threat they can possibly imagine. The fear they create stimulates the build-up, and a build-up in one country stimulates build-ups everywhere. Enemies are essential to any war industry, so war industries everywhere do whatever they can to create and sustain credible enemies.

People know that our world is a mess. Our environmental and economic practices are obviously unsustainable. Thus, people are afraid. As fear grows, the people become increasingly vulnerable to unscrupulous political and religious leaders who, rather than trying to address the real problems with realistic solutions, use tough talk and fear mongering to sell themselves and their parties. This trend leads to the emergence of pseudo-Christians like Pat Robertson, who openly advocated the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and to pseudo-Muslims like Osama bin Laden, who is also willing to kill to get his way. Perhaps worst of all, it leads to a flood of movies and TV shows glorifing the military and teaching our youth that murder and mayhem are perfectly acceptable in fighting evil or getting revenge. Our minds are being colonized by anger, fear, and the urge to violence. Just when we need to learn to cooperate and solve serious global problems through dialogue, we are being trained to think like soldiers, who are carefully taught to find and kill a hated enemy.

So now the US economy is entirely dependent on the military. Only a nuclear attack would be more devastating to the US economy than an extended outbreak of peace. If we couldn’t sell arms overseas, violent movies and music would be our only exports. Chalmers Johnson, in a recent article entitled Why the US has really gone broke, points out:

By 1990 the value of the weapons, equipment and factories devoted to the Department of Defense was 83% of the value of all plants and equipment in US manufacturing. From 1947 to 1990, the combined US military budgets amounted to $8.7 trillion. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, US reliance on military Keynesianism has, if anything, ratcheted up, thanks to the massive vested interests that have become entrenched around the military establishment. Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is a form of slow economic suicide.

Later he says:

Nuclear weapons furnish a striking illustration of these anomalies. Between the 1940s and 1996, the US spent at least $5.8 trillion on the development, testing and construction of nuclear bombs. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the US possessed some 32,500 deliverable atomic and hydrogen bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used. They perfectly illustrate the Keynesian principle that the government can provide make-work jobs to keep people employed. Nuclear weapons were not just America’s secret weapon, but also its secret economic weapon. As of 2006, we still had 9,960 of them. There is today no sane use for them, while the trillions spent on them could have been used to solve the problems of social security and health care, quality education and access to higher education for all, not to speak of the retention of highly-skilled jobs within the economy.

Now, the whole world is in thrall to military Keynesianism. Instead of useful efforts to build infrastructure, clean the environment, or reduce poverty, the world is going on a military equipment binge. This binge is evidence of extremely dangerous, greedy, short-term and selfish thinking going on at high levels. This thinking must be changed, and the place to start is nuclear weapons.