Privatizing the Apocalypse
Page 3 of 3
|
|
There's gold in that there sentence. During the Cold War, spending on nuclear weapons averaged $4.2 billion a year (in current dollars). Almost two decades after the "nuclear animosity" between the two great superpowers ended, the United States is spending one-and-a-half times the Cold War average on nuclear weapons. In 2001, the weapons-activities budget of the Department of Energy, which oversees the nuclear weapons complex through its "semi-autonomous" National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), totaled $5.19 billion; and a "revitalized nuclear weapons complex," ready to "design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads," means a more than billion-dollar jump in spending to $6.4 billion by fiscal year 2006.
And that's just the beginning. The NNSA's five-year "National Security Plan" calls for annual increases to reach $7.76 billion by 2009. David Hobson, Republican congressional representative from Ohio, calls this kind of budgeting "the ultimate white-collar welfare," saying that the weapons complex can be "viewed as a jobs program for PhDs."
He's right. That's a lot of money for a few labs and a few thousand scientists. And private military contractors large and small are all over it.
Entering Acronym Land
To justify this huge jump in spending, the nuclear laboratories have cooked up plans for an alphabet soup of projects as part of the SSMP, scientists are pushing -- to mention just a few of the acronyms on the table right now -- ASCC, MESA, the RRWP, the ICFHY campaign and the RNEP.
In the interest of not putting everyone to sleep, we can take a closer look at just a few of the Bush administration's proliferating nuclear projects. Under the umbrella of Stockpile Stewardship Management (SSMP), scientists are working to safeguard the stockpile of nuclear weapons and materials so it is not ravaged by time and neglect. The Reliable Replacement Warhead Program (RRWP) will exchange existing warheads for more "reliable" (read: more powerful) ones. There are plans underway to develop the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) and other "useable" new nuclear weapons supposedly to meet new threats by new enemies -- "rogue states" like Iran -- in future preemptive anti-proliferation wars. Under each of these programs are many other acronym-heavy, cash-rich programs that seem to lead nowhere -- except toward further nuclear proliferation.
The Inertial Confinement Fusion and High Yield Campaign is just one of the more outlandish and expensive of these projects. It proposes using lasers to replicate what happens inside an actual nuclear explosion in weapons labs. Sounds simple enough, right? The Nuclear Ignition Facility -- where the lasers will do their work -- is the single largest project in the NNSA budget and, according to analyst Christopher Paine, "quite possibly the most expensive experimental facility ever built." The Department of Energy projects $3.5 billion in costs for this alone, but the independent environmental group, the National Resources Defense Council, puts the figure higher yet -- at $5.32 billion -- and that money will be spent before anyone can even demonstrate that the system works.
The Age of Nuclear Terror?
Do nuclear weapons have a role in the "Age of Terror" -- other than as potential weapons for terrorist groups? In a new and ever-shifting environment of emerging regional powers and wars that transcend national boundaries, the Bush administration is taking a have-it-both-ways approach: It is pushing aggressive non-proliferation policies for chosen enemy nations and embracing a policy of accelerated nuclear proliferation for itself. How much harder will it be in the future to dissuade other powers from building nuclear weapons when the American nuclear industry and its weapons labs have switched even more fully into private mode and the profit-motive is increasingly at stake in global nuclear planning? These and many other questions unfortunately remain unasked. Yet, a new era of nuclear weapons for profit threatens to turn Armageddon into a paying operation.
During the height of the Cold War, when competition between the nuclear laboratories seemed to rival the superpower stand-off, a Lawrence Livermore scientist posted a sign that read: "Remember, the Soviets are the Competition, Los Alamos is the Enemy."
In a new era of potential corporate antagonism over apocalyptic weaponry, will there be a sign at the Bechtel-run nuclear lab emblazoned with: "Remember, the Terrorists are the Competition, Lockheed Martin is the Enemy"?
Frida Berrigan (berrigaf@newschool.edu) is a Senior Research Associate at the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center. Her primary research areas with the project include nuclear-weapons policy, war profiteering and corporate crimes, weapons sales to areas of conflict, and military-training programs. She is the author of a number of Institute reports, most recently Weapons at War 2005: Promoting Freedom or Fueling Conflict.
Copyright 2006 Frida Berrigan
This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.com
