US officials have been pushing for a massive, and massively expensive, modernization campaign for the US nuclear weapons arsenal. The enormous cache of weapons amassed over the past 60 years is aging, and in 2012, President Obama proposed a plan which he said would cost $208 billion.
Which is a lot, but the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revealed only a year later that it was a serious underestimation, saying in late 2013 that the real cost would be a minimum of $355 billion. The price keeps going up, and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Pentagon-linked think tank, now says it’ll likely cost around $963 billion and take a solid 30 years.
Politely, $963 billion is referred to by some officials as “unaffordable,” and could more accurately be described as an obscene amount of money, but those same officials show no sign of considering any alternative, like cutting the size of the enormous arsenal.
Other nations, like Britain, are similarly facing the reality that these huge nuclear arsenals aren’t particularly affordable, and decades of military careers built on the program likewise means a lot of resistance to even broaching the subject of a unilateral cut. Though during the Cold War era officials in all nuclear nations were able to point across the Iron Curtain to try to justify out of control spending to “keep up,” even the nominal justification for keeping multiple doomsdays worth of arms just doesn’t exist anymore. Despite this, and the unaffordability of the scheme, the money keeps flowing.
Well at least US saved some money for the nuke matetial as they brought home ftom JApan some 200 tons of weapon grade plutonium, all psrt of US Jspan secret nuke weapon program.
It is unknow how much eent into dtratospher that was.stored at Fukushima, one would have to ask GE/Westinghouse/Hitachi as they had vontractd to handle.
Just remember the US militarys duty is not to protevt your ass only their own and those above them in the chain of command.
Any leadership including our educational scientific that is willing to let millions of pacific coastlines people especially children suffer the consequences of the continuing Fukushima nightmare sure is not a government to trust.
They turned ofg all monitoes immediately even the international treaty of nuke free seas
They are playing dummy as the whole pacigic ocean is facing a mass extinction event, and they will delay snd obfuscate about amounts of radiation from initial 40 times Chrtnobyl and continuesradistin air and up to 800 tons of ocean waters daily.
Hillary Clinton had EPA jump by magnitude of 1000 the new permissable levrls in our water air and food and huaranteed Jspan yo have US continue buying their foods.
What does Fukushima have to do with nuke weapons other than super enriched plutonium for nmultipleof lowrr yirld so called clean nukes, eutrons, it is the minset og g thr littlr huy just as.long as their butts will be protected no matter the situation.
REMEMBER THE SHADOW GOVERENT OF CHENEY, that is your real hovernment today not the bureaucracy of do nothings that gollow doing their jobs.
So who gets to pocket a cool trillion.
So who gets to pocket a cool trillion?
Lots of people.
The sad part is that all this money just buys you unusable warcrap and Pu-suffused superfund sites. Some "investment"
On Hiroshima Day and only weeks after conclusion of a deal at the end of a long beating of Iran over the NPT that washington violates ….What a crazy F..ked up world.
NO just f up AMERIKA..
Modern societies, with the US leading this evolution – tend to foster human parasites! Efficient and motivated, but primarily by self-satisfaction as the primary motive. Wishes of the population are manipulated away, whenever necessary. Human values like objectivity, truth, responsibility, falsifiablity, moral… are completely downgraded and manipulated with. Constructed lives as the inevitable consequence. Meaningless reqalities, except for the parasites.
1 Trillion to pay for nukes. The average USG citizen who works
for a living is being shafted by these warmongering pathologic
criminals in control of Congress and the White House.
TRY the word Sodomized…again and again and again
And what would, should the Russians do about this? That´s easy, do nothing, just sit back and watch the USA deteriorate and collapse its economy, on their TVs, while eating pop corn.
I dunno. $963 billion over 30 years almost sounds like a bargain. We spend that much annually on "defense." I said "almost!"
idiot–this IS IN ADDITION TO THE DOD THIEVERY
This is one of the few things Obama has consistently stood for, starting with his backing by Exelon and promotion of nuclear power as being "green," (supposedly as in carbon emissions, not cash). I wonder if the trillion dollar price tag includes cleaning up Hanford. I wonder if it includes the price of mothballed Yucca Mt., the facility in New Mexico, the casked spent cores being stored at the 104 waste-producing power plants or any of the other onerous costs associated with the evil twins of nuclear war and nuclear power.
Pawn an F-35, that should pay for it.
This is why the new cold war with Russia was manipulated into being, to make a huge modernization program appear existentially necessary. There is no real need for these weapons, and actually no need for large standing armies. The history of the first Cold War, as it has become declassified, shows that efforts towards peace and understanding were often sabotaged by clandestine interests who profited from weapons systems and military infrastructure.
These people are tax junkies…sorry, I didn't mean to insult junkies.
Why we nuked Japan — History blindsided
This being the 70th anniversary of the day we vaporized Hiroshima, one would think that NPR would come clean and admit that we nuked 220,000 civilians in Japan for no other reason then to terrorize a world full of civilians. But no, for no this day in history NPR destroyed history saying, “The A-bomb was dropped on Japan to shorten the war and to make sure that no one ever again uses the A-bomb. That is why we bombed two cities without military bases.”
Actually, NPR was a cut above all the other mainstream media, for example on DemocracyNow.org in their three articles on the stupidity of it, not one word was expressed in regards to why we nuked Japan, especially when our military had broken their code and knew that Japan had written their articles of surrender.
Why would you have to upgrade the current arsenal? Don't we have enough to blow up the planet multiple times over? And if someone sets up a defense against our outdated arsenal we can just threaten to detonate all our nukes at once taking out the rest of the world with us.
Amazing. Just imagine the expressions of faux outrage from all and western sundry had the Russians announced such a plan…