• 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

Beware of Pentagon Spin–It’s all about keeping Military Budget Growing!!

February 8, 2023 By Bob Kinsey

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/02/07/pentagon-warns-china-has-more-nuclear-missile-launchers-than-us-but-theres-one-big-catch/

 

Forbes

 

Pentagon Warns China Has More Nuclear Missile Launchers Than U.S. But There’s One Big Catch

 

Matt NovakContributor

FOIA reporter and founder of Paleofuture.com, writing news and opinion on every aspect of technology.

 

The Pentagon has warned lawmakers on Capitol Hill that China now has more ground-based facilities capable of launching nuclear missiles than the U.S., according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. But there’s one big catch: Many of China’s missile silos are sitting empty. And perhaps just as importantly, the count of China’s ground-based missile launchers doesn’t include submarine and aircraft-based nuclear capabilities, areas where the U.S. has a very real advantage.

 

U.S. Strategic Command wrote a letter late last month to both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, warning of China’s expanding nuclear capabilities, according to the Journal. But you have to read much further into the article to get the big caveats that many of the silos are empty, and that China doesn’t have nearly as many submarine-launched missiles and long-range bombers—the other two legs of the so-called nuclear triad that makes U.S. nuclear strike capabilities second to none.

 

The caveats are tremendously important because a build-up of more nuclear weapons by the U.S. will likely be a political football in the upcoming 2024 presidential elections, as both parties try to prove who’s tougher on China. And while the U.S. has nuclear treaties with one major New Cold War adversary—like the New START treaty with Russia—China isn’t a party to any treaty limiting its ability to produce nuclear weapons. That makes it difficult, of course, to know what to do in the face of any Chinese build-up of nuclear weapons.

 

The New Cold War is a very real fight that has consequences for the U.S. economy, whether it’s in the production of sensitive chip technology in Taiwan, or Apple’s decision to move some manufacturing out of China. But the New Cold War is also a conflict that’s caused real blood to be spilled, as we’ve seen play out in Ukraine, with the U.S. arming Ukraine’s military in the fight against Russia’s illegal invasion of the country.

 

But whatever you think of the politics involving a potential nuclear arms race with China, take some time to learn about the original Cold War stories of nuclear misses. Most people know about the Cuban Missile Crisis and that near-miss with nuclear apocalypse, but there’s also the time a computer simulation almost started a nuclear war in 1979, or the Soviet military officer whose hesitation over a false alarm likely saved the planet from World War III. The Able Archer exercise conducted by NATO in 1983 was yet another close call.

And none of that even touches on the psychological trauma of living under the constant threat of nuclear weapons. Some U.S. schools even handed out dog tags to little kids in the early 1950s so that any children killed in a potential nuclear war might be identified.

Bringing more nuclear weapons into the world gives humanity that many more times to mess up. And if you know anything about the first Cold War, it’s genuinely a miracle we made it out without blowing the entire world to pieces.

 

 

Filed Under: Perspective, Uncategorized

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