Obama Upgrading The U.S. Nuclear Arsenal
"For A Direct Confrontation With Russia"
By Sherwood Ross
President
Obama's "gift" to Americans this holiday season is to renege on his
2009 pledge "to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear
weapons."
He is upgrading the lethality level
of an atomic arsenal already so deadly it can destroy all life on Earth.
Then he'll send Mr. and Mrs. America the bill, estimated by one Federal
study at $1-trillion, to pay for the deadly upgrades he wants, rather
than the peaceful improvements Americans need.
"The
stated goal of the program is to increase the 'reliability' of US
nuclear forces," writes Theodore Postol in the Dec. 29 issue of "The
Nation". "But a close analysis reveals a technically sophisticated
effort to ready US nuclear forces for a direct confrontation with
Russia."
Author Postol, a former adviser to the
Chief of Naval Operations, slams this modernization as "a reckless
policy that directly undermines our safety and national security."
He
writes, "No rational actor would take steps to start a nuclear war. But
the modernization effort significantly increases the chances of an
accident during an unpredicted, and unpredictable crisis---one that
could escalate beyond anyone's capacity to imagine."
Why,
Postol wants to know, does the White House aim to overhaul "the entire
US nuclear-weapons arsenal, with a particular focus on improving the
fusing systems and accuracy of long-range land- and sea-based
ballistic-missile warheads and on increasing the killing power of other
nuclear warheads."
And, he says, the scale and
character of these weapons' effects are so large and so deadly that any
notion of using them in a controlled or limited way "is completely
disconnected from reality." Postol's article is appropriately titled,
"Striving for Armageddon: How the Obama Administration Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb."
Today's nuclear
bombs are vastly more deadly than those the U.S. used to scourge Japan
at the end of World War Two. But Postol writes that improving the
reliability of fuses on the ballistic-missile warheads disguises the
fact the fuses "have been modified to increase the killing power of the
warheads."
What's more, "Painstaking efforts
have also gone into improving their delivery accuracy" and when the
results of these combined activities are summarized for Russian
political leaders, "it is not hard to understand their alarm." Postol
asserts that it is the U.S. that has pushed the Russians to a higher
state of alert.
He reminds, "There is a long
history of accidents during the Cold War that brought the United States
treacherously close to disaster." In one major false alert, a training
tape loaded into a computer "made it appear to US launch officers that a
full-scale Soviet attack was under way."
And
he believes the Russians have good reason to be worried. "With a fully
modernized arsenal, the formerly 'less capable' nuclear warheads will be
able to destroy Russian silo-based ICBMs with confidence. This would
free up higher-yield nuclear warheads for other war-fighting tasks,
enabling the US military to inflict greater damage on Russian command
centers, fixed military facilities and civilian industrial
infrastructures."
Despite Mr. Obama's
recognition that peace depends on nuclear disarmament, Postol says, "the
US is making those nightmare scenarios more likely by rebuilding the
stockpile of atomic warheads as if they were just another form of
conventional weapon." They aren't.
When Russia
was communist and occupying much of Eastern Europe, U.S. leaders claimed
they had to be armed to the teeth. Now that the Russians have scrapped
the failed Bolshevik system, have become largely capitalist, and have
withdrawn from Eastern Europe, President Obama is ratcheting up the same
old tensions. Only now the game he is playing is much more dangerous
than ever.#
(Sherwood Ross, a national public
relations consultant from Miami, formerly worked for wire services,
major dailies and civil rights organizations. He is both an
award-winning journalist and award-winning poet. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com)
[Image is from Third's "New York Times, Early Edition."]
