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America prepares for a new nuclear-arms race
- worstspotgain 2y agohttps://archive.is/jcjx2 https://archive.is/jcjx2
- whatnotests2 2y agoSo much for build back better. Always enough money for war and weapons, while the infrastructure, education, and health systems disintegrate.
- llamaimperative 2y agoWhat suggests that the money approved for infra, education, and health is getting diverted?
- _heimdall 2y agoThe money doesn't have to be diverted. The Pentagon, who regularly fails audits, generally gets whatever they ask Congress for. Throw in concerns of a nuclear arms race and we'll print whatever money they ask for.
- randomdata 2y agoWhat suggests that there is suggestion of it being diverted? The parent claims that the infrastructure is disintegrating even with all of the funding currently being given to it. Said with the implication that more funding for war magically appears when there is threat of war, but not when infrastructure is under threat.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jmoak 2y agoAgreed, on healthcare our government spends ~2x the amount it spends on defense. Medicare: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W824RC1 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W824RC1 ($0.99t) Medicaid: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W729RC1 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W729RC1 ($0.95t) Defense: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FDEFX https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FDEFX ($1.048t) What should a good ratio be?
- bobthepanda 2y agoit would be nice if America could do the minimum that the rest of NATO theoretically agree to and spend just 2% of GDP on defense. Right now that figure is 2.9%.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- baerrie 2y agoUnfortunately among higher order mammals one being above the rest usually is one of the few ways to have peace.
- hollerith 2y agoConsider that most industrialized countries would have nukes by now if the US hadn't guaranteed to come to their aid if they are attacked by a nuclear power in exchange for their not trying to acquire nukes.
- rqtwteye 2y agoWe also spend around way more per capita on health care than any other country. I bet both health care and defense expenditures could be reduced significantly if they were run with at least a little efficiency and less profit making by middlemen.
- deciplex 2y agoThat would defeat the purpose of our health care system and military-industrial complex.
- kube-system 2y agoFederal spending on transportation, education, health, and social services outnumbers defense spending by over 4 to 1. https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function And in my opinion, compared to the first half of the 20th century, pax Americana is well worth that 13.5% chunk of the budget. War is also bad for health.
- feedforward 2y ago"Defense" spending (the US is currently involved in "defense" by its involvement in bombing Yemen, Gaza, Russia and other countries) is considered very narrowly - you don't count veteran's benefits as military spending. You don't count interest on the debt for past military spending as military spending. You don't consider international affairs spending, very wrapped up in military spending, as military spending. You don't count NASA's military work as military spending.
- kube-system 2y agoEverything is military spending if you consider anything two or three degrees removed as military spending.
- whatnotests2 2y agoTHIS.
- kurthr 2y agoWell, technically those might be negative spending to the extent that they are arms sales not offset by any subsidy or aid. Certainly, the cost of disposal for many of the older shells would have been higher than sending them off to Ukraine has been. Even the M4/M16 5.56 (223 cal) is now being replaced with the XM7 using 6.68mm ammo so that will all also have to be disposed of too (likely with the weapons). I don't want them on the streets here, and I'm not sure some wouldn't come back wherever in the world they're sent. Arguing whether sending weapons to a government and if it is justified is a reasonable conversation, but trying to claim they are particularly expensive (when they aren't) dilutes that point. Further, NASA's military work is paid for from the defense (or black) budgets not the publicly available ones so I'm not sure that's a great argument either.
- tptacek 2y agoA reminder that "money for weapons" is also a major 50-states jobs program; there are reasons having nothing to do with bellicosity that kind of spending is sticky.
- adrianN 2y agoYou could take that same money and fund jobs to build things that don't kill people
- tptacek 2y agoYes, and you would end up firing hundreds of thousands of voters. By and large Americans don't even agree with the overt merits of the policy you're proposing, but even if they did.
- deciplex 2y agoWhy is it that "creative destruction" is so celebrated here right up until you propose eliminating jobs that murder people (either in the direct manner, or indirectly by needlessly denying them care etc) and replacing them with jobs that don't do that. Suddenly all that "people will adapt, people will need to retrain" shit goes right out the window in place of "won't somebody please think of number?"
- tptacek 2y agoI don't personally care, though unlike you I believe that the median United States citizen does benefit from our global military supremacy and that it's probably worth what we're spending to maintain that position. But the point I'm making is more banal than that: people do not like "creative destruction". We have a lot of stupid weapons programs that aren't doing anything meaningful to preserve our ability to project force; we keep spending money on them because voters in the districts they're built would freak out at the prospect of their towns being gutted. That's not a normative claim! As is so often the case, the real, useful answer to all of this stuff is that it simply isn't up to message board nerds like us to make these calls, and our axiomatically-derived top-down economic plans are worth all the paper they're not printed on. My point is simply that there's more to military spending than a values statement about military force.
- jandrewrogers 2y agoThe US spends a trillion dollars per year on education, an astounding number compared to other countries even on a per capita basis. There are few issues that would be solved by diverting military spending to other already indefensibly bloated budgets. It isn't an argument of should the government be spending this money on something else but more if the government should be spending this money at all. Particularly given the budget deficits.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- VyseofArcadia 2y agoI think the scenario laid out in the first paragraph would literally be World War III.
- bluSCALE4 2y agoYep and will more than likely happen if any superpowers engage in direct war.
- labster 2y agoAmerica’s doctrine is to be ready for WW3 so that we don’t accidentally have to fight WW3. If everyone knows that we can fight them even while at war elsewhere, it discourages any great power wars from starting.
- 1-6 2y agoAll the nuclear power plants today are concentrated on the US east coast. Could it be a defensive posture against ICBMs flying from the Pacific Ocean?
- alwa 2y agoI’m not sure I follow. Is the argument just that nuclear power plants are related to nuclear weapons because both use fission to do their jobs? Why would such power plants be a primary target for city-killer “strategic nuclear weapons” more than, say, an entire city? In any case, isn’t the shortest path [0] from the missile fields [1] over the arctic? For what it’s worth, though, I’d vaguely understood that distribution [2] to involve a combination of seismic instability on the West coast and populations too sparse to be worthwhile in the inland areas of the vast American West. [0] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=jgn-jfk http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=jgn-jfk [1] https://fas.org/publication/a-closer-look-at-chinas-missile-silo-construction/ https://fas.org/publication/a-closer-look-at-chinas-missile-... [2] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/manuel1/images/f1big.png http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/manuel1/images/...
- craigmoliver 2y agoIt doesn't matter where the nuclear power plants are. If nuclear war starts the world ends.
- Log_out_ 2y agoEveryone near a ex empire is currently scrambling for nukes.
- hollerith 2y agoNot Ukraine: when Washington started providing aid to Ukraine, it no doubt made it clear what it expected from Kiev in return (unless the US foreign policy establishment is even more incompetent than I have suspected) and almost certainly, Kiev's not trying to acquire nukes was one of the explicit expectations.
- bradgessler 2y agoThis increases the likelihood of accidents and misinterpretations triggering a nuclear war, which is inevitable as long as these weapons exist. The first bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945 and the world has successfully avoided incidents, accidents, etc. from spiraling out of control into a full-scale exchange for 79 years. Will this continue for 10 more months? 10 more years? 100 years or longer? Nobody knows, but the thing we do know is that there's a non-zero chance of the worst happening. There's a book about incidents worth reading called "Command and Control": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book) that's worth reading if you want to better understand the risks we're dealing with by having nuclear weapons.
- jp63727 2y ago[flagged]
- Carrok 2y agoNot disagreeing with anything you said, just curious if you have a proposed solution.
- bradgessler 2y agoI think eliminating nuclear weapons is out of the question. We see that over and over again when nations that don't have nuclear weapons get dominated by nuclear nation-states, which sends a clear message to non-nuclear countries that they should develop nuclear weapons if they care about their sovereignty. The next best thing is to try to slow down how fast the destruction unfolds. There was actually an incident where NORAD's terminals lit up with a full scale nuclear attack from Russia. They only had a few minutes to determine whether or not to launch a counter-attack. During that time they found out somebody left a training tape on the "production system" and fortunately it ended there. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2020-03-16/false-warnings-soviet-missile-attacks-during-1979-80-led-alert-actions-us-strategic-forces https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2020-0... The world got lucky on that day. In my mind this incident is the same as the "configuration management errors" we see take down huge websites. It's just a matter of time. My proposal would look something like at traditional arms treaty with limits to the size and number of warheads, but I'd also add to that a time dimension. Maybe we agree to allow 10's of weapons that can be deployed in minutes, then there's another tranche of 100's of weapons that take more time to prepare... perhaps it takes hours to deploy them, or days. This would give people more time to determine if the threat is real and possibly let cooler heads prevail. I have no idea how that would be enforced and how nations would prevent other nations from having a secret stash of deployed nuclear weapons.
- slothtrop 2y agoMy read on the hypothetical described in the first paragraph is that a) an indefinite stalemate with Ukraine would defer this possibility to a time world circumstances will be different, b) trajectory of US industrial manufacturing expansion following CHIPS act will relegate Taiwan to medium importance and once in that position the US will not risk all-out-war to protect it, c) North Korea matters most if the former scenarios are in play, relations with China will still be cold without a war but they would not be keen to sanction NK aggression owing to potential response