More spending for more disarmament?

In a third op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, the “four horsemen”—Schultz, Perry, Kissinger, and Nunn (SPKN)—advocate for increased spending on nuclear weapons. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. As others have pointed out, “their work reflects a pragmatic strategy to maintain U.S. military and economic dominance well into the 21st century, resulting in the formation of a new intellectual paradigm perhaps best described as ‘anti-nuclear imperialism.’” The institutional loyalties of SPKN and their larger political agendas reflect a political economy that is not only fundamentally at odds with nuclear abolition, but is anathema to peace and justice.

Further evidence of this can be found in their 19 January 2010 op-ed, wherein they argue that as we “work to realize the vision of a world without nuclear weapons,” significant investments “are urgently needed to undo the adverse consequences of deep reductions over the past five years in the laboratories’ budgets for the science, technology and engineering programs that support and underwrite the nation’s nuclear deterrent.”

This misleading claim ignores the fact that while the US nuclear weapons budget has been reduced by about $1 billion over the past five years, this followed an increase over a decade (1995–2005) of about $3 billion. Instead, SPKN aim to support their friends at the labs in the expected request for increased funding for nuclear weapons in the FY 2011 budget. Indeed, SPKN argue, “The United States must continue to attract, develop and retain the outstanding scientists, engineers, designers and technicians we will need to maintain our nuclear arsenal, whatever its size, for as long as the nation’s security requires it.”

This statement assumes a lot. It assumes that the United States relies on, and will indefinitely continue to rely on, nuclear weapons for its security. It does not explain whose security nuclear weapons protect in the United States. Its citizens? Or its technocratic elite—the same people who work at the labs that SPKN and others who are part of that elite structure so vigorously defend? “National security,” as it is typically invoked in this sense, does not refer to the well-being of the general population but of those managing the military-industrial-academic complex.

The above statement also assumes that those who design, build, and maintain nuclear weapons have a right to continue doing this work—and what does that say about the possibilities for ever eliminating nuclear weapons throughout the world?

Andrew Lichterman of the Western States Legal Foundation has written extensively about the US nuclear weapon labs. In a recent article, he argues:

The constellation of organizations that constitute the nuclear weapons complex sits close to the apex of global power and privilege, and the upper echelon inhabitants of those organizations are quite determined to hold on to what they have. Nuclear weapons establishments, in fact, are preeminent manifestations of how far those in power will go to preserve it—they will play dice with all humanity, even all life on earth. The nature of the institutions ultimately can not be separated from the purposes and practices that have shaped them since their inception. Born in secrecy and sequestered throughout their existence within the least accountable sector of American government, the nuclear weapons laboratories and the broader nuclear weapons complex have become powerful institutions in their own right. They have done so by using all the tools that the powerful have developed in this society for staving off democracy—control of information and technologies, propaganda, and alliances with other huge organizations in common strategies aimed at extracting a steady and expanding stream of wealth from the rest of the economy. There is no way to provide the upper level denizens of the nuclear weapons establishment—the scientists and engineers, the technocrats, bureaucrats, and propagandists—with some other pursuit that gives them a similarly “rewarding” position in society, unless we can come up with some other set of “missions” that can assure them of an equally comfortable, secure, and largely unaccountable place in the upper few percent of a national and global economy characterized by stark disparities in wealth. And why should we want to do that?

Finally, SPKN frame their call for increased weapons spending in the context of disarmament—if we want to achieve a nuclear weapon free world, we need to make sure that our nuclear weapons are “safe, secure, and reliable” (that they remain an “effective deterrent” to others) until we achieve that world. This is outrageously circular logic. Modernized or “refurbished” nuclear weapons research and production facilities capable of building the nuclear threat anew, as a trade-off for arms control treaties or arsenal reductions, is not disarmament. If the danger of nuclear war is to be eliminated, ceasing to plan and build for an eternal nuclear threat must come early, not late, in the process. The “nuclear danger” does not come from without, but from within. To seek to “hedge” against the nuclear threat only perpetuates it, sustaining the global climate of fear and distrust that makes real disarmament progress always a receding goal.