The Pentagon’s five year plan has been planted (or in Pentagon-speak, “front loaded”) with the seed money for a top-to-bottom modernization of our nuclear forces — a new bomber, new inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBM) (even though the Minutemen III has just been completely modernized and is essentially a new missile), new nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBM), upgraded (read “new”) submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM), a new cruise missile, and big upgrade (read “new”) to the B-61 dial-a-yield nuclear bomb (including precision guidance which implies going back to the looney tit-for-tat nuclear war-fighting doctrines of late 1970s), a new nuclear-hardened satellite based command and control system to manage all these goodies in a nuclear war, even more money for the strategic defense initiative (SDI) (the shield to protect the aforementioned swords), and a rebuilding of the nuclear lab infrastructure.
The current estimate for all of this is one trillion dollars, with a spending tail out to at least 2080. That number is surely a grotesque underestimate, because no one really has a clue what these as yet undesigned systems will cost to buy, much less to operate in the distant future. And if the problem-plagued F-35 has proven anything, it is that the Pentagon’s ability to predict the future budgetary consequences of high-complexity weapons development programs is laughable.
If you were a Russian with proud and painful memories of the bloodletting, terror, bravery, and patriotic myths of the 1812, WWI, WWII, and the Cold War, how would you react when a possible adversary becomes hell-bent on shoveling money into such a program? Would you believe it is for deterrence only?
Read the rest at Ron Paul’s Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
