Win a Nuclear War? Really?

Neocons Firmly Believe They Can Win a Nuclear War against Russia and China
By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Global Research, May 05, 2017
“The problem is that the world has listened to Americans for far too bloody long.” — Dr. Julian Osborne, from the 2000 film version of Nevil Shute’s 1957 book, On the BeacTheir insane plan is as follows: Washington will ring Russia and China with anti-ballistic missile bases in order to provide a shield against a retaliatory strike from Russia and China. Moreover, these US anti-ABM bases also can deploy nuclear attack missiles unknown to Russia and China, thus reducing the warning time to five minutes, leaving Washington’s victims little or no time in which to make a decision.
The neoconservatives think that Washington’s first strike will so badly damage the Russian and Chinese retaliatory capabilities that both governments will surrender rather than launch a response. The Russian and Chinese leaderships would conclude that their diminished forces leave little chance that many of their ICBMs will be able to get past Washington’s ABM shield, leaving the US largely intact. A feeble retaliation by Russia and China would simply invite a second wave US nuclear attack that would obliterate Russian and Chinese cities, killing millions and leaving both countries in ruins.
In short, the American warmongers are betting that the Russian and Chinese leaderships would submit rather than risk total destruction.
There is no question that neoconservatives are sufficiently evil to launch a preemptive nuclear attack, but possibly the plan aims to put Russia and China into a situation in which their leaders conclude that the deck is stacked against them and, therefore, they must accept Washington’s hegemony.
To feel secure in its hegemony, Washington would have to order Russia and China to disarm.
This plan is full of risks. Miscalculations are a feature of war. It is reckless and irresponsible to risk the life of the planet for nothing more than Washington’s hegemony.
The neoconservative plan puts Europe, the UK, Japan, S. Korea, and Australia at high risk were Russia and China to retaliate. Washington’s ABM shield cannot protect Europe from Russia’s nuclear cruise missiles or from the Russian Air Force, so Europe would cease to exist. China’s response would hit Japan, S. Korea, and Australia.
The Russian hope and that of all sane people is that Washington’s vassals will understand that it is they that are at risk, a risk from which they have nothing to gain and everything to lose, repudiate their vassalage to Washington and remove the US bases. It must be clear to European politicians that they are being dragged into conflict with Russia. This week the NATO commander told the US Congress that he needed funding for a larger military presence in Europe in order to counter “a resurgent Russia.”
Let us examine what is meant by “a resurgent Russia.” It means a Russia that is strong and confident enough to defend its interests and those of its allies. In other words, Russia was able to block Obama’s planned invasion of Syria and bombing of Iran and to enable the Syrian armed forces to defeat the ISIS force sent by Obama and Hillary to overthrow Assad.
Russia is “resurgent” because Russia is able to block US unilateral actions against some other countries.
This capability flies in the face of the neoconservative Wolfowitz doctrine, which says that the principal goal of US foreign policy is to prevent the rise of any country that can serve as a check on Washington’s unilateral action.
While the neocons were absorbed in their “cakewalk” wars that have now lasted 16 years, Russia and China emerged as checks on the unilateralism that Washington had enjoyed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. What Washington is trying to do is to recapture its ability to act worldwide without any constraint from any other country. This requires Russia and China to stand down.
Are Russia and China going to stand down? It is possible, but I would not bet the life of the planet on it. Both governments have a moral conscience that is totally missing in Washington. Neither government is intimidated by the Western propaganda. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov said yesterday that we hear endless hysterical charges against Russia, but the charges are always vacant of any evidence.
Conceiveably, Russia and China could sacrifice their sovereignty for the sake of life on earth. But this same moral conscience will propel them to oppose the evil that is Washington in order not to succumb to evil themselves. Therefore, I think that the evil that rules in Washington is leading the United States and its vassal states to total destruction.
Having convinced the Russian and Chinese leaderships that Washington intends to nuke their countries in a suprise attack (see, for example, http://www.fort-russ.com/2017/04/us-forces-preparing-sudden-nuclear.html ), the question is how do Russia and China respond? Do they sit there and await an attack, or do they preempt Washington’s attack with an attack of their own?
What would you do? Would you preserve your life by submitting to evil, or would you destroy the evil?
Writing truthfully results in my name being put on lists (financed by who?) as a “Russian dupe/agent.” Actually, I am an agent of all people who disapprove of Washington’s willingness to use nuclear war in order to establish Washington’s hegemony over the world, but let us understand what it means to be a “Russian agent.”
It means to respect international law, which Washington does not. It means to respect life, which Washington does not. It means to respect the national interests of other countries, which Washington does not. It means to respond to provocations with diplomacy and requests for cooperation, which Washington does not. But Russia does. Clearly, a “Russian agent” is a moral person who wants to preserve life and the national identity and dignity of other peoples.
It is Washington that wants to snuff out human morality and beome the master of the planet. As I have previously written, Washington without any question is Sauron. The only important question is whether there is sufficient good left in the world to resist and overcome Washington’s evil.

The Costly British Nuclear Horn (Daniel 7)

UK Nuclear Deterrent To Cost $256 Billion, Far More Than Expected

By Reuters
on October 25 2015 4:30 PM EDT

LONDON (Reuters) — The overall cost of replacing and maintaining Britain’s nuclear deterrent will reach 167 billion pounds ($256 billion), much more than expected, according to a lawmaker’s and Reuters’ calculations based on official figures.

The Scottish Nationalist Party, which wants Britain’s Scotland-based nuclear-armed Trident submarines scrapped, called the sum “unthinkable and indefensible

” at a time when deep cuts under the government’s “austerity” policies mean “thousands of people across the UK are struggling to afford basics like food.”

Some military officials also oppose investment in Trident, saying the money would be better spent on maintaining the army and on more-conventional technology, which have also faced cuts.
Until now, Prime Minister David Cameron’s government has said replacing the aging fleet of four submarines that carry nuclear warheads to provide a continuous at-sea deterrent would cost an estimated 15-20 billion pounds.

It has as yet given no official estimate of the cost of its replacement and maintenance.
Critics have previously said Britain would need to spend 100 billion pounds, a figure based on a 2014 report by the independent Trident Commission.

In a written parliamentary response to Crispin Blunt, a lawmaker in Cameron’s Conservative Party, Minister of State for Defense Procurement Philip Dunne said Friday the acquisition of four new submarines would cost 25 billion pounds.

He added that the in-service costs would be about 6 percent of the annual defense budget over their lifetime. The total defense budget for 2014-15 reached 33.8 billion pounds and rises to 34.1 billion pounds for 2015-16, according to the ministry.

“My office’s calculation is based on an in-service date of 2028 and a missile extension until 2060 … the total cost is 167 billion pounds,” Blunt told Reuters.

“The successor Trident program is going to consume more than double the proportion of the defense budget of its predecessor. … The price required, both from the U.K. taxpayer and our conventional forces, is now too high to be rational or sensible.”

His figure is based on the presumption that Britain will spend 2 percent of its annual gross domestic product (GDP) on defense as Cameron’s government has promised.

It also uses existing official government and International Monetary Fund figures, and an assumption of GDP growth of an annual average of 2.48 percent between 2020 and 2060.

Using the same figures, a Reuters calculation came to the same sum of 167 billion pounds.

Asked about the rising cost, a spokesperson for the British Ministry of Defense said the government had published an unclassified version of a review on alternatives to Trident that “demonstrated that no alternative system is as capable, or as cost-effective, as a Trident-based deterrent”.

“At around 6 percent of the annual defense budget, the in-service costs of the UK’s national deterrent … are affordable and represent an investment in a capability which plays an important role in ensuring the UK’s national security,” the spokesperson said.

Dangerous Obsession

The deputy leader of the SNP, Stewart Hosie, took aim at the Conservatives, or “Tories,” saying the new figure showed “just how dangerous the Tories’ obsession with nuclear really is”.

“This is truly an unthinkable and indefensible sum of money to spend on the renewal of an unwanted and unusable nuclear weapons system,” he said in a statement.

The SNP’s popularity has surged since Scots rejected independence in a vote last year, with millions of supporters won over by its anti-austerity message and criticism of Trident.

The opposition Labour Party had been a supporter of renewal, but its new leader, far-left veteran lawmaker Jeremy Corbyn, an anti-war campaigner, is opposed to the plans.

He was widely quoted last month as saying he would not be prepared to use nuclear weapons if he became prime minister.

Spiraling costs are likely to reinforce Corbyn’s opposition and possibly alarm many in his party who support renewal.

The new figures tally with comments this month by Jon Thompson, the top civil servant at the Ministry of Defense, when he described the project to replace the nuclear deterrent as a “monster.”

“That’s the project that keeps me awake at night the most,” he told parliament’s Public Accounts Committee.

“It’s the biggest project the Ministry of Defense is ever going to take on. If the government were to proceed with renewing the deterrent, then in due course that would exceed 5 billion [pounds] a year. That is a significant proportion of the defense budget, and it’s an incredibly complicated area.”

He added that it is extremely difficult to estimate what the future costs will be.

A final decision on replacing the existing vessels carrying the Trident missiles — four Vanguard-class submarines — is due next year, and Cameron says he will press ahead with the renewal.

In August, the government said it would spend more than 500 million pounds refurbishing its Faslane naval base in Scotland.

“I think it is right to maintain our independent nuclear deterrent, and anyone who has any doubts of it only has to look at the dangers and uncertainty in our world,” Cameron told parliament Wednesday.
In a speech last week, Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said global threats mean renewing Trident is vital.

“I appeal to all moderate MPs [lawmakers] to put our national security first and to support building four new Trident submarines,” he said. “Spread across the 30-year life of the new boats, this represents an annual insurance premium of around 0.13 percent of total government spending.”

The US Nuclear Horn (Daniel 7:7)

Aging nuclear arsenal grows ever more costly

A nuclear warhead is displayed as a museum piece at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

 

By Ralph Vartabedian, W.J. Hennigan

Pipes, tanks and other equipment rust in the humid Southern air. Leaky roofs leave puddles on factory floors. Abandoned buildings are scattered across an 800-acre site contaminated with hundreds of tons of mercury.

If this were a factory making cars in Detroit or steel in Pennsylvania, it would have long ago been shuttered.

But this is the Y-12 National Security Complex, a linchpin of the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons complex, responsible for making thermonuclear assemblies for hydrogen bombs.

The 1940s-era plant is part of a weapons program that has become increasingly costly to operate because of aging equipment, deteriorating facilities and soaring overhead costs. At its root, it is bloated and mismanaged, say former Energy Department officials, outside experts and members of Congress.

The nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile has shrunk by 85% since its Cold War peak half a century ago, but the Energy Department is spending nine times more on each weapon that remains. The nuclear arsenal will cost $8.3 billion this fiscal year, up 30% over the last decade.

The source of some of those costs: skyrocketing profits for contractors, increased security costs for vulnerable facilities and massive investments in projects that were later canceled or postponed.

“We are not getting enough for what we are spending, and we are spending more than what we need,” said Roger Logan, a senior nuclear scientist who retired in 2007 from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “The whole system has failed us.”

The Defense Department’s fleet of submarines, bombers and land-based missiles is also facing obsolescence and will have to be replaced over the next two decades, raising the prospect of further multibillion-dollar cost escalations.

Now the Obama administration is moving forward with a plan to modernize the strategic weapons system over the next decade, an effort the Congressional Budget Office estimates will cost $355 billion. That comes as the Pentagon is under pressure to reduce its budget, and outside experts warn that the modernization could reach $1 trillion over the next 30 years.

“Simply stated, there is no plan for success with available resources,” said Norman Augustine, a former Pentagon and defense industry official who is leading a review of the Energy Department’s bomb program.

U.S. nuclear weapons strategy rests on a triad of delivery systems — bombers, submarines and land-based missiles — developed early in the Cold War to deliver warheads anywhere in the world.  Today, elements of the systems are virtual museum pieces. An example is the B-52. One of the massive gray bombers recently sitting on a tarmac at the Global Strike Command at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana rolled off Boeing Co.’s assembly line in 1960 — during the Eisenhower administration.

Under current plans, B-52s will probably fly another 26 years. By the time the bomber retires, it will be 80 years old — older than any strike aircraft ever flown in military service.

The other legs of the nuclear triad are 450 1960s-era Minuteman III missiles based in silos in Wyoming, Montana and Nebraska, and 14 Ohio-class submarines from the 1980s that are also nearing the end of the design life of their nuclear propulsion systems.

The nuclear warheads that these vehicles carry are maintained at the legacy sites of the Manhattan Project. Although it is significantly smaller than in its Cold War heyday, the Energy Department industrial complex stretches from South Carolina to California with more than 40,000 employees.

The department has three scientific design laboratories, a site for underground experiments the size of Rhode Island and an assembly factory on the flatlands of West Texas, despite the fact the government hasn’t designed, built or tested a new nuclear warhead in decades.

When the U.S. stockpile reached its peak in 1967 with 31,255 warheads and bombs, it cost $7 billion annually in today’s dollars to build and maintain nuclear weapons.

In that year, the government had seven reactors humming to make plutonium; it built submarine reactors, refined large quantities of plutonium and uranium and manufactured new weapons. Almost once a week, it set off a bomb underground in Nevada.

Today, it does none of those things, but simply maintains the existing 4,804 weapons at $1.3 billion more than in 1967. And the costs would be even higher if items such as submarine reactors, included in the 1967 budget, were added.

We are not getting enough for what we are spending, and we are spending more than what we need. The whole system has failed us. – Roger Logan, a retired senior nuclear scientist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Don Cook, chief of the nation’s nuclear weapons program for the Energy Department, argued that the size of the stockpile doesn’t matter, because the facilities still have to have capability and special machines to repair even small numbers of weapons.

“You would think the saving grace would be having smaller numbers of weapons, so somehow it must be cheaper, but it doesn’t work that way,” Cook said.

Critics sharply dispute that assertion, saying the department’s capacity is beyond its needs, its vast complex is a political pork barrel, and its operations are hindered by mismanagement.

Profits paid to the contractors that run the system have tripled since 2006 to $312 million, The Times found.

The eight major nuclear weapon labs and production sites are run by a network of joint ventures and private companies, including the University of California, Bechtel Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp., Honeywell International Inc. and Lockheed Martin Corp.

The increases came after a series of embarrassing security lapses at Los Alamos National Laboratory while it was managed by the University of California. The lapses led to a movement to pay more and demand far stricter security.

Cook said the agency knew it would have to pay more to attract top-tier defense contractors. “Part of the deal was profit,” he said.

As a result, profits paid to the new consortium hired to run the Los Alamos lab jumped tenfold to $59 million in 2013. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is now run by the University of California and San Francisco-based Bechtel, among others, profits grew from $4 million to $41 million.

Costs for security at the labs since 2003 have doubled to $665 million annually in the last decade, a response to Sept. 11. The department also spends more than $100 million a year on cyber security.

Another major cost is maintaining parts for the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Of 70,000 nuclear weapons that the U.S. built, only about 4,800 remain in service. But the government must still maintain a costly inventory of old parts.

Those parts, as well as some retired parts that are too sensitive or toxic for disposal, all have to be guarded in high-security warehouses, said Philip Coyle, former deputy director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and more recently scientific advisor to the Obama administration.

At a Texas warehouse, congressional investigators this year found a stash of 3 million parts, about half of them common screws, nuts and bolts that did not appear to need any special security measures.

In 2010, the Energy Department opened a $549-million warehouse at Y-12 for thousands of parts.

Among the parts are pieces of a megaton-sized weapon that is stored in case Earth has to be defended from an inbound asteroid, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

The $355-billion modernization plan being championed by the Obama administration would upgrade weapon production facilities, refurbish warheads and build new submarines, bombers and ground-based missiles.

The Air Force wants $91 billion to design and build 80 to 100 bombers to replace B-52 and B-2 bombers. The Navy plans to replace its fleet of 14 missile submarines with 12 new boats, along with new missiles, costing about $60 billion. The Air Force would get new land-based missiles and a command-control system for the underground silos at a yet unspecified cost.

“If modernization isn’t done properly, the perception of U.S. strength is at risk — and by extension our national security is at risk,” said Norton A. Schwartz, a retired four-star general who served as Air Force chief of staff.

So far, Congress has set aside only a small fraction of that money. The Energy Department has made several attempts to replace outdated facilities, but the efforts have collapsed.

This year, the department shelved plans for a new plant in South Carolina that would have converted surplus plutonium to commercial reactor fuel. Nearly $4 billion was spent before the project was deemed too expensive.

The department also halted a new plutonium manufacturing plant in New Mexico when the cost shot up sixfold to $5.8 billion.

At the Y-12 National Security Complex, officials put on hold plans to replace the main production facility, a uranium foundry known as Building 9212 that was built during World War II. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a federal oversight panel, has warned that an earthquake could cause the building to collapse, trigger a fire and release uranium into the environment.

The project to replace it was stopped after costs rose from $600 million to between $12 billion and $19 billion, after $500 million was spent.

Vartebedian reported from Oak Ridge, Hennigan from Barksdale Air Force Base.