Footnote to the preceding

There is another, often related area, besides serving economic power where the demand is to justify the "don't" rather than the "do." That is serving military power. Since the former provides for the latter which is used to protect the former, a nice and historically long-standing symbiotic relationship, the same flipping of the burden of proof from the claimant to the questioner is not surprising.

Amtrak and other mass transit projects are not, of course, the only targets of the Republican Study Commission I mentioned a couple of posts earlier. Their list is a veritable plethora of traditional right-wing targets, most of which have the common feature of being something that government does well or where it provides a genuine service or in some other way makes an actual contribution, which is the one thing the wingers can never allow or admit to.

However, and again this will come as no surprise, there is one area where they had a strict hands-off policy, one area exempt from cuts or even any consideration of them: anything to do with war. Past, present, or future. Military spending is off the table. Veteran's benefits are off the table. "Security" is off the table.

Because we can always find money for war. Always. According to the Congressional Research Service, the Iraq war - Oh yeah, remember that? - is now costing about $5.4 billion every month. The Afghanistan war is costing $5.7 billion every month. In July, there was a "supplemental request" (of which I thought we were told there would be no more) of $34.4 billion, mostly for the cost of the escalation in Afghanistan.

In FY2010 $171 billion was spent on our wars and that same amount is desired for FY2011. Together, those two wars so far have cost about $1.1 trillion, says the CRS.

That same figure, by coincidence, represents something else: a minimum figure for military-related spending proposed for FY2011. A trillion dollars a year. Even the White House's own figures (see Table 3.2 at this link to the OMB or go directly to the file), which conceal some of the costs now being incurred due to past military spending, peg the figure at $778 billion ($750 billion for "national defense" plus $28 billion for "international security assistance"). Despite some TPer huffing and puffing, no official is going to be called before any committee with a requirement to justify it, as the "presumption of correctness" lies with the war chiefs and it's the opponents who not only have the burden of proof but must somehow overcome that presumption even to get a serious hearing.

Money to save life? You have to justify spending it. Money to take life? You have to justify not spending it. Money to raise people to health? Can't afford it. Money to lower people to hell? Can't afford not to. Money for smarter students? Prove it. Money for smarter bombs? Goes without saying. Money for railroads? No. For railguns? Yes.

While I started this by referring to the Republican Study Committee, I should emphazie that this is not a GOPper vs. Dimocrat thing - those budgets for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for FY2010 and FY2011 did not come from the George Bush White House, after all - and it's not even, strictly speaking, a left-right thing: The far right, driven by its isolationism, is sometimes even harsher on such matters than the left. There is, rather, a broad conservative-to-liberal consensus that spending on the military, on arms, ultimately on war, is all but sacrosanct. That consensus is not new and it did not originate in the US; it is, as I said at the top, historically long-standing. But that makes is nonetheless real and nonetheless deadly both because of what it enables by its biases and what it prevents by its sucking up of emotional, physical, financial, and scientific resources.

The thing that gives some hope in the short run is that Americans on the whole have come to realize that war spending is not and must not be given a special pass. Asked in a recent NYT/CBS poll whether they would cut Social Security, Medicare, or the military budget in order to reduce the deficit, a majority of Democrats and independents and a plurality of Republicans chose the military; 55% overall.

But the pushback among The Serious People has already begun: A couple of weeks ago, "Newsweek" carried a piece that called moves to cut war spending a "risky rush" which no one knows how to do "without jeopardizing security and our place as a world leader." Making actual cuts, cuts that are not merely symbolic or PR, will take a lot of work. A good place to start, not the only place but a good place, is the Friends Committee on National Legislation, while the more radical among you might try the War Resisters League while the more centrist could check out the Center for Defense Information.

Wishing us good luck.

Footnote: In case someone thinks this as I am almost certain someone will, while I do regard veteran's benefits as a present cost of past military spending and therefore part of current military spending, I do not object per se to such benefits nor do I object to veterans applying for them. They are there to be used. What I object to, as I explained (or at least tried to) in my post Heroics and later here, is veterans getting benefits simply because they are veterans, benefits that others are denied, and getting them without regard to need. Benefits, that is, which they receive as a kind of reward and which have the effect of declaring their lives and their contributions more important, more valuable, than those of non-veterans.

Another year

Time moves on. Memories dim. Awareness fades. The number who were there decreases. Other concerns, other events, fill our attention.

But the reality remains. Undimmed, unfaded, undecreased.

Today, August 6, is the 65th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And while you'd be forgiven for thinking that the only nuclear weapons-related issue in the world today is whether or not Iran will get them, the fact is that there are, today, over 25,000 nuclear weapons in the world, including, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, nearly 8,000 deployed weapons of which over 2,200 are on alert, ready for use in as little as minutes.

Here's the good news:

By the end of 2012, the United States plans to reduce its deployed long-range weapons to 2,200; Russia plans to reduce to approximately 2,000. These reductions meet the terms of the Treaty Between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Strategic Offensive Reductions, more commonly known as SORT or the Moscow Treaty.

SORT was to expire at the end of 2012, but in April the US and Russia came to a new SALT agreement, covering not only numbers of deployed weapons but verification protocols. The agreement provides for a further reduction over time in the number of US and Russian deployed strategic nuclear weapons to 1,550 each, a 30% reduction below the SORT numbers.

Meanwhile, also in April the US issued a new nuclear posture review, making what the Friends Committee on National Legislation called "a modest incremental step in the right direction," one which turned out better than it might have due to the direct intervention of Barack Obama. (See? He can do some good things! And yes, I can admit it.)

Okay, now the bad news:

Most of the nuclear weapons deployed today would explode with a force roughly 8 to 100 times larger than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which averaged the equivalent of 18,000 tons of TNT). The deployed warheads are primarily on long-range land- or submarine-based ballistic missiles that can deliver the warheads thousands of miles with great accuracy.

And remember, there are nearly 8,000 of them.

At least eight and perhaps nine nations possess nuclear weapons and somewhere between 10 and 20 more are "nuclear capable," meaning they have the technology and industrial base to produce nuclear weapons within five years. (Interestingly, despite what the news, parroting the official line, would have you believe, Iran is not on that list.) Treaties like SALT and SORT apply only to the US and Russia; no other nation ever has had or now has its nuclear arsenal limited by treaty.

Then there are the little-noted "undeclared nuclear powers," those nations that have or have access to nukes but aren't called nuclear powers. (Some still include Israel in this category since it does not formally admit to having nuclear weapons, but its possession of them is so widely known and accepted that most just call it a nuclear state.) The significant undeclared powers are Turkey, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Italy, all of which nations are home to US nuclear weapons and all of which have planes capable of delivering those weapons to a target and the pilots and crews trained to do so. They avoid being called nuclear powers because the weapons themselves are technically under the control of the US, but the fact is they function as an extension of the US nuclear arsenal.

We may have forgotten nuclear weapons, we may have allowed ourselves (with relief) to be convinced they are no longer an issue. But they have not forgotten us. And they will not as long as they continue to exist.

A Footnote: Five years ago I wrote about some little-known history about the development and use of The Bomb. It began this way:

This week marks the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the week there will be, if past experience is any guide, a few news stories recalling the events, a few photographs of paper cranes showered over the monument in Hiroshima's Peace Park, and a few "it must not happen again" editorials all expressing with appropriate regret the "necessity" of the bombings. It will, in short, be a week of comforting, reinforcing, oft-told tales - that is, of myths.

That is perhaps more fitting than we realize, because the nuclear weapons age was born in a myth....

I think you'd find it interesting reading. And you may want to follow it up with this short post, which was a footnote to that one.

Another Footnote: That nuclear posture review also said the US rejects the development of "new" nuclear weapons. That might be another good thing but what constitutes a "new" weapon can be a slippery matter. During the Reagan administration, a good deal of effort went into arguing that "modernization" of weapons, making them more accurate, more powerful, more destructive, even adding additional warheads in some cases, did not constitute a "new" weapon. Attention is still required.