I didn’t read the article, only skimmed it, but couldn’t find much that supports the headline claim of $1.5 trillion. I tried searching for “$”, but all other dollar amounts are much smaller and don’t add up to $1.5 trillion, so it is unclear what this money will be conretely spent on. Also I couldn’t find a time frame over which this money would be spent.
Maybe you can add a summary of the parts of the article that deal with the headline amount, or say which things make you believe that this much money will likely/maybe be spent on nuclear missiles in the near future?
The article contains only the explanation of one immediate spend of $100 billion on a new Sentinel missile which was ordered in 2021. The precise details of the $1.5 trillion number are not outlined in the article itself, but are available at the following link, which reference this original source. The estimate is based on a 30 year time-frame, with a low-end estimate of $1.25 trillion. It is true that the original source comes from a group in favour of Arms Control.
That said, my point in writing this post was not to focus on the precise quantity (even if it’s “only” $1.0 trillion, that doesn’t make it OK). Rather to highlight that the US is spending huge amounts of money upgrading their nuclear weapons in a world which would be far better off without more nuclear weapons, and there has been (to my knowledge) almost no public debate or even political debate over whether upgrading nuclear missiles is the right thing to do. It just goes on behind the scenes.
To be clear, this is not about some utopian vision of a world without the need for nuclear deterrence. The US still has 900 submarine-based nuclear missiles. So there is no credible argument that the new and improved land-based missiles are needed for deterrence, since the submarine-based missiles would be impossible to destroy in a first-strike attack.
Somebody is peddling the notion that, with the right missiles, the US could win a nuclear war.
I would love to see more public debate about this, rather than these matters being decided in secret discussions between politicians (looking for campaign funds), armed forces personnel (looking for relevance and power) and arms producers (looking for profit). I’m not sure which of these actors actually represents the interests of the majority of citizens, of America or of the world.
I didn’t read the article, only skimmed it, but couldn’t find much that supports the headline claim of $1.5 trillion. I tried searching for “$”, but all other dollar amounts are much smaller and don’t add up to $1.5 trillion, so it is unclear what this money will be conretely spent on. Also I couldn’t find a time frame over which this money would be spent.
Maybe you can add a summary of the parts of the article that deal with the headline amount, or say which things make you believe that this much money will likely/maybe be spent on nuclear missiles in the near future?
This is a fair push-back.
The article contains only the explanation of one immediate spend of $100 billion on a new Sentinel missile which was ordered in 2021. The precise details of the $1.5 trillion number are not outlined in the article itself, but are available at the following link, which reference this original source. The estimate is based on a 30 year time-frame, with a low-end estimate of $1.25 trillion. It is true that the original source comes from a group in favour of Arms Control.
That said, my point in writing this post was not to focus on the precise quantity (even if it’s “only” $1.0 trillion, that doesn’t make it OK). Rather to highlight that the US is spending huge amounts of money upgrading their nuclear weapons in a world which would be far better off without more nuclear weapons, and there has been (to my knowledge) almost no public debate or even political debate over whether upgrading nuclear missiles is the right thing to do. It just goes on behind the scenes.
To be clear, this is not about some utopian vision of a world without the need for nuclear deterrence. The US still has 900 submarine-based nuclear missiles. So there is no credible argument that the new and improved land-based missiles are needed for deterrence, since the submarine-based missiles would be impossible to destroy in a first-strike attack.
Somebody is peddling the notion that, with the right missiles, the US could win a nuclear war.
I would love to see more public debate about this, rather than these matters being decided in secret discussions between politicians (looking for campaign funds), armed forces personnel (looking for relevance and power) and arms producers (looking for profit). I’m not sure which of these actors actually represents the interests of the majority of citizens, of America or of the world.