America prepares for a new nuclear-arms race

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/08/12/america-prepares-for-a-new-nuclear-arms-race

by worstspotgain • 2 years ago

25 56 2 years ago

economist.com

worstspotgain• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/jcjx2

whatnotests22• 2 years ago

So much for build back better.

Always enough money for war and weapons, while the infrastructure, education, and health systems disintegrate.

llamaimperative• 2 years ago

What suggests that the money approved for infra, education, and health is getting diverted?

_heimdall• 2 years ago

The 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• 2 years ago

What 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.

jmoak2• 2 years ago

Agreed, on healthcare our government spends ~2x the amount it spends on defense.

Medicare: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W824RC1 ($0.99t)

Medicaid: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W729RC1 ($0.95t)

Defense: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FDEFX ($1.048t)

What should a good ratio be?

kube-system4• 2 years ago

Federal spending on transportation, education, health, and social services outnumbers defense spending by over 4 to 1.

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• 2 years 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.

woooooo3• 2 years ago

You're blending some very different numbers there, social security and Medicare are huge, while federal spending on transportation is lower and education is a pittance.

romanovcode• 2 years ago

Weird, why don't US has decent train network across the country still and people are scrambling for clean water in places? China did it in 20 years while US rebuilt the WTC.

tptacek12• 2 years ago

A 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• 2 years ago

You could take that same money and fund jobs to build things that don't kill people

jandrewrogers• 2 years ago

The 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.

VyseofArcadia• 2 years ago

I think the scenario laid out in the first paragraph would literally be World War III.

bluSCALE4• 2 years ago

Yep and will more than likely happen if any superpowers engage in direct war.

labster• 2 years ago

America’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• 2 years ago

All 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• 2 years ago

I’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

[1] https://fas.org/publication/a-closer-look-at-chinas-missile-...

[2] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/manuel1/images/...

craigmoliver• 2 years ago

It doesn't matter where the nuclear power plants are. If nuclear war starts the world ends.

Log_out_• 2 years ago

Everyone near a ex empire is currently scrambling for nukes.

hollerith2• 2 years ago

Not 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.

bradgessler2• 2 years ago

This 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) that's worth reading if you want to better understand the risks we're dealing with by having nuclear weapons.

Carrok• 2 years ago

Not disagreeing with anything you said, just curious if you have a proposed solution.

bradgessler2• 2 years ago

I 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/2020-0...

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.

baggy_trough• 2 years ago

The problem is that reducing the (admitted) number to zero does not necessarily reduce the overall likelihood of use, given that knowledge cannot be erased.

slothtrop• 2 years ago

My 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

America prepares for a new nuclear-arms race

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