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The first of 12 planned nuclear-armed submarines may cost $13 billion, $4 billion more than the Navy initially estimated. “We have to ask whether the nation can really afford a Navy that relies on $3 billion to $6 billion destroyers, $7 billion submarines and $11 billion carriers,” the then Pentagon chief Robert Gates told the annual Navy League conference in 2010.

With the Pentagon having secured its annual 47 percent of the April 15 federal tax haul ($1,335 billion out of a total of $2,890 billion) it’s a good time look at the ethics of stealing food from the poor in order to spend vaults full of money on nuclear weapons.
Without a public uproar, U.S. is looking to spend more than $600 billion on nuclear weapons over the next 10 years.
President Oh-bomb-ah has poetically mouthed some support for “arms control” and a “world without nuclear weapons,” but if you follow the money, his nuclear weapons budget says bombs, bombs and more bombs.
For 2014, the Prez plans a nuclear weapons spending increase over the current level of $7.227 billion. Where’s the money to come from? Taking a page from the Reagan era play book, Oh-bomb-ah plans to get it from the nuclear non-proliferation budget! According to a report by Jeffery Smith and Douglas Birch in Foreign Policy April 9, the president has proposed a $460 million cut from the nuclear non-proliferation program — so it can boost nuclear weapons building programs by exactly $500 million.
Since 2011, Obama has been pushing a plan to spend $85 billion over 10 years to rebuild thousands of H-bombs — bombs that should be retired and abolished. The president has also proposed pouring $125 billion over 10 years into a new fleet of nuclear-armed submarines, new nuclear bombers and new land-based ICBMs.
One proposal is to return 180 gravity H-bombs from five U.S. bases in Europe, where they are unwanted, and to replace their B61 warheads. Today, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy and Belgium are debating whether they want the U.S. nuclear bombs ousted permanently, yet the Pentagon plans to return them to European fighter bases with new warheads. We must stand with our friends in Europe and demand that the B61s be removed, dismantled and containerized as nuclear waste forever.
The H-bomb program, known as the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), estimated last year that the B61 make-work plan would cost $7 billion and produce its first replacement bomb in 2019. The Pentagon countered that it would cost $10.4 billion and take until 2022. Daryl Kimball and Tom Collina reported April 11 in Arms Control Now that 400 new B61s are planned, or roughly $25 million-per. That ten billion dollars would feed a lot of people for a very long time.
According to Edward Aguilar of Project for Nuclear Awareness, cancelling construction of the new submarines, reducing the current number of such subs, and retiring rather than replacing nuclear warheads and a couple hundred ICBMs would save $270 billion.

Billions for unneeded,
unworkable weapons

As every combat or terrorist casualty since 1950 proves, our nuclear weapons cannot protect us. So what is this spending for?
One answer was revealed on March 14, 1992, when the Associated Press reported on a study — by Admiral Bruce DeMars — that made clear that the purpose of new nuclear submarines was “to protect the vast industrial facilities and skilled workers needed to build them, not because the submarines themselves were needed.”
Today’s plans are precisely the same. With its 5,000 nuclear weapons, the US can pulverize all 200 major cities on earth with 250 each.
The NNSA calls new warhead production “modernization” or “refurbishment” or “life extension.” This is just euphemism, deception, deceit and disinformation used to help rob the taxpayers, and it has no purpose but to pamper billionaire industrialists and string out some cancer-causing careers.
Because, scary stories get taxpayers to ship half their federal tax dollars off to the Pentagon, to our militarized space program and the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons, the lying of our military industrial complex extends to the manufacture of threats too. Thus the North Korean nuclear gnat somehow threatens the Pentagon colossus. On April 3, the New York Times said North Korea may have six nuclear weapons. Four days earlier it noted two salient facts on its Page One, above the fold: (1) North Korea’s missiles cannot reach U.S. territory; and (2) There is no evidence that its six bombs can be made small enough to fit atop a missile.
With $1 billion being spent on new “missile interceptors” in Alaska “to foil North Korea,” cynical fear mongering has reached unheard-of depths. Experts have reported for decades the money’s wasted. Even the late Margaret Thatcher herself reportedly said, “I am a chemist. I know it won’t work.”
Two years ago, the Government Accountability Office found a staggering $70 billion in Pentagon spending that was nothing but waste. (“Audit of Pentagon Spending Finds $70 Billion in Waste,” NY Times, March 30, 2011) In the realm high crime, it takes a lot of bribery, larceny, robbery, kickbacks and embezzlement to protect so much theft from the law.
The weapons oligarchy is basically a racketeering-influenced and corrupt organization. Luckily the RICO Act provides for heavy criminal penalties for such death dealing corruption.
— John LaForge works for Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin, and edits its Quarterly.