When It Comes To Nuclear Weapons, Tell It Like It Is
Calling things what they aren’t by using bureaucratic language is an art form in Washington, and the Pentagon (once known more accurately as the War Department) is the worst offender. A case in point is using the word “modernization” when referring to the Pentagon’s hugely expensive effort to build a new generation of nuclear weapons. “Modernization” sounds like a good thing, like putting a new roof on your house. Buying new weapons to boost the Pentagon’s ability to destroy the world is decidedly not a good thing.
Such an alluring term is inappropriate for the business of creating instruments of mass destruction. Yet even arms control advocates regularly use the word. In doing so they hurt their cause and obfuscate the reality of a massive expansion of nuclear weapons capacity.
The Pentagon is committed to spending an estimated $1.7 trillion dollars of taxpayer funds over a thirty-year period to completely rebuild the US nuclear weapons complex. There are plans for land-based missiles, ballistic missile-firing submarines and missiles, new aircraft and air-launched cruise missiles, and enormous new facilities to produce plutonium components for additional nuclear warheads. The nuclear upgrade is not merely a refurbishing of aging weapons as the modernization narrative implies. It is a vast program for the reconstruction and enhancement of the entire nuclear arsenal and it is an unnecessary and wasteful diversion of federal funds to pursue an arms race with Russia and China that increases the risk of nuclear war.
A Brief History of “Modernization”
The term nuclear modernization entered the lexicon in the 1980s at the height of the US-Soviet arms race when each side deployed tens of thousands of warheads and developed new weapons technologies. The term disappeared with the ending of the Cold War as arms reduction agreements slashed nuclear arsenals by more than 80%. It reappeared decades later, amidst rising tensions with Russia and China, as weapons makers and Pentagon officials lobbied for expanding and strengthening US nuclear capabilities. In 2010 the Obama administration negotiated the New START treaty, which restricts the US and Russia to 1550 strategic warheads each, but to win Republican support the White House agreed to spend hundreds of billions on new and upgraded weapons systems. The Trump administration reneged on previous arms limitation agreements, including the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty and continued the arms buildup, as an array of new and upgraded weapons programs poured forth under the rubric of modernization.
