Dear CCI Readers,

We get all sorts of responses to emails that we send out to our CCI list. This one below is from an acknowledged Air Force “Missiler” of earlier years, Larry Rhoades. I thought you might enjoy his reflection on our $100 Billion for nuclear weapons and asked his permission to print his note, which he graciously gave.

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives

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Why is America getting a new $100 billion nuclear weapon?

Bulletin
February 8, 2021
By Elisabeth Eaves

America is building a new weapon of mass destruction, a nuclear missile the length of a bowling lane. It will be able to travel some 6,000 miles, carrying a warhead more than 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It will be able to kill hundreds of thousands of people in a single shot.

The US Air Force plans to order more than 600 of them.

On September 8, the Air Force gave the defense company Northrop Grumman an initial contract of $13.3 billion to begin engineering and manufacturing the missile, but that will be just a fraction of the total bill. Based on a Pentagon report cited by the Arms Control Association Association and Bloomberg News, the government will spend roughly $100 billion to build the weapon, which will be ready to use around 2029.

To put that price tag in perspective, $100 billion could pay 1.24 million elementary school teacher salaries for a year, provide 2.84 million four-year university scholarships, or cover 3.3 million hospital stays for covid-19 patients. It’s enough to build a massive mechanical wall to protect New York City from sea level rise. It’s enough to get to Mars.

One day soon, the Air Force will christen this new war machine with its “popular” name, likely some word that projects goodness and strength, in keeping with past nuclear missiles like the Atlas, Titan, and Peacekeeper. For now, though, the missile goes by the inglorious acronym GBSD, for “ground-based strategic deterrent.” The GBSD is designed to replace the existing fleet of Minuteman III missiles; both are intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. Like its predecessors, the GBSD fleet will be lodged in underground silos, widely scattered in three groups known as “wings” across five states. The official purpose of American ICBMs goes beyond responding to nuclear assault. They are also intended to deter such attacks, and serve as targets in case there is one.

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Dear CCI Friends,

A startling review by Paula Day, a Maine attorney and CCI volunteer.

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives

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The Last Handoff

By Paula Day

Immediately before the Biden presidential inauguration, the New York Times Magazine ran an article, “The Last Handoff”–– a review of the Obama/Trump transition, a leap into “uncharted waters,” according to the author.

It was a provocative title that brought to mind the upcoming transition from Trump to Biden, certainly an event less charted than the one before.

Consider the similarities: both the 2016 and 2020 elections were so close that the  electoral college votes were critical; the losing sides were so incredulous that each insisted the winning side had somehow rigged the outcome.  Clinton acknowledged Trump’s win in 2016, but the Democrats, the FBI, the Intelligence Community, the Democratic Congress and mainstream media spent the next four years discrediting Trump to the point of trying to have him indicted for colluding with Russia. Donald Trump refused to concede and spent two months after the election insisting that he was the legitimate winner.

Had the Times acknowledged these similarities, its readers might have considered “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”  Surely there can be no benefit to the country in this level of hysterical partisanship.

But a Balanced View was not what the Times had in mind.
It invested thousands of words in white on an ominous black background accompanied by suggestively sinister graphics, rehashing not one but three of the most thoroughly debunked cliches of the last four years: 1) the Russian “hacking” of the DNC emails, 2) the Steele Dossier, and 3) an exhaustive re-telling of the Michael Flynn story.

The only possible reason for the appearance of this January 11 article could be one more attempt to breath life into the cold corpse of Russiagate.  No matter how flimsy the accusations against Russia, Russia must remain the enemy by those in power. The article spins mundane facts into deceptive propaganda and we are reminded yet again that “the constant repetition of a lie is far more persuasive than the demonstration of truth.”

Read it and weep.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/11/magazine/trump-obama-presidential-transition.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage.

In Global Affairs, no more US Preeminence 

By Andrew Bacevich
Dr. Bacevich is a professor emeritus at Boston University and president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Dear President Biden:

Soon after winning election to the presidency, you announced that “America is back, ready to lead the world” and to resume its accustomed place “at the head of the table.” Among those distressed that your predecessor showed so little interest in leading anything anywhere, such sentiments resonate.

In the political circles where you have spent virtually your entire adult life, belief that history summons the United States to lead the world is an article of faith. So too is the conviction that the world itself yearns for American leadership, with other nations eager for Washington to occupy a position of privilege. A return to pre-Trump normalcy implies a restoration of U.S. global preeminence.

I urge you to reconsider any such expectation. In the aftermath of World War II, with international politics centered on a bipolar competition between East and West, such a formulation possessed a certain utility. The euphoria unleashed by the end of the Cold War made the temptation to double down on such claims all but irresistible.

But the era of American primacy has ended. We may date its demise from the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which as a U.S. senator you supported. In the roughly two decades since, as the U.S. was squandering trillions of dollars in failed military campaigns, the global order has undergone a transformation. The emergence of new threats in the form of climate change and pandemics offers one example. The shifting distribution of power in East Asia offers a second, with nuclear proliferation and our nation’s emergence as the world’s leading debtor others.

So the global table at which your administration will take a seat is not rectangular. It is round. No nation or body of nations will sit at its head. No doubt the clout wielded by individual countries gathered around that table varies – not all are equal. But none will dominate – not China, not Russia, not us, not anyone. Acknowledging this reality implies a radically different approach to statecraft, one that should emphasize collaboration rather than coercion, setting an example rather than issuing threats and inflicting punishment.

Yes, the U.S. must always stand ready to defend its vital interests from attack. But much as those interests are changing, so too should the means employed to protect them.