• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
    • Allies
    • Board of Directors
    • Guiding Principles
    • Member Organizations
    • Mission & History
  • Membership
  • Request a Speaker
  • Volunteer
  • Contact Us
  • Contribute

The Colorado Coalition

Envision a World without Nuclear Weapons

Click Here to Contribute

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Featured
  • Events
  • Take Action
  • News
  • Perspective
  • Subscribe

Nuclear Weapons in the Budget: Costly and Dangerous

April 8, 2019 By Bob Kinsey

The Congressional Budget Office predicts the costs of designing, producing, deploying and maintaining for 30 years the nuclear weapons and support systems currently sought by the Department of Defense as $1.2Trillion in 2017 dollars. At the current rate of inflation this will entail public expenditures of at least $1.7 Trillion, not to include cost overruns –always to be expected. This is a lot of money even by Pentagon standards. (as reported in “The Nation” April 8 Page 19 by Michael Klare)
For what??? —
A new ICBM to replace all Minuteman III’s (The Air Force plans to purchase more than 600 new missiles)
A new fleet of missile carrying submarines (Columbia Class–The Navy plans to by 12 each carrying 16 submarine -launched missile
A New Long-Range bomber (the B21 Raider to replace the B-2 and B-52. The Air Force plans to buy aat least 100 at an average cost of $606 million apiece)
A New air-launched cruise missile (called a “long-range stand -off weapon” LRSO The Air Force plans to procure 1000 having greater range, accuracy, and stealth capabilites than current cruise missiles)
Klare analyses all this spending within the context of the Trump 2018 Nuclear Policy Review” which asserts the need for more useable nuclear weapons. It leads in the opposite direction from the Obama nuclear policy. The ultimate result appears to lead to higher likelyhood of the use of nuclear weapons leading to another nuclear arms race squandering the assets of humanity and a higher likelyhood of a nuclear holocaust that would bring on nuclear winter that would likely bring human civiization to an end. Do we really want to do this??
The 2020 DOD budget includes $31 Billion for initiating these “upgrades” to the nuclear arsenal. Let your Representatives and Senators know what you think. Adam Smith (D-WA) chair of the House Armed Services Committee is raising the right questions. “WE could meet our needs from a national security standpoint with a lot fewer nuclear weapons”. Sounds like he’s got the picture at least.

Filed Under: News

About Bob Kinsey

Primary Sidebar

Disarmament Quotes

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth BainbridgeDeputy Director Manhatten Project

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlisterKings Bay Protestor 2019

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight EisenhowerUS President 1953-1961

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford"The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee ButlerFormer Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

Copyright © 2025 The Colorado Coalition


A Website by Arielle Elak Design