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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.

 

 

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Disarmament Quotes

Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. We scientists recognise our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of atomic energy and its implication for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death. 

Albert Einstein, January 22, 1947

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal ... 

George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, January 4, 2007

So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see... 

Mahatma Gandhi from The Essential Gandhi, Louis Fisher, ed.

Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not. 

Robert McNamara Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

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

Kenneth Bainbridge Deputy Director

It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason. 

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1995

Now, understand, this matters to people everywhere. One nuclear weapon exploded in one city -– be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague –- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be -– for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival. 

Former President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009

"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 Eisenhower US President 1953-1961

[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

5-Star Admiral William D. Leahy Chief of Staff to President's Roosevelt and Truman, leader of Combined US-UK Chiefs of Staff during WWII

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

Over the past 15 years, the goal of elimination of nuclear weapons has been so much on the back burner that it will take a true political breakthrough and a major intellectual effort to achieve success in this endeavor.

Mikhail Gorbachev, January 31, 2007

There are still thousands of warheads loaded on operational systems and standing on high states of alert on virtually hair-trigger posture. And you have to ask yourself: Why is that? Who is the enemy? What is the threat? 

U.S. General Lee Butler Former Commander in Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command in 1991-92

We seek the elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. 

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

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 Butler Former Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

It is my fervent goal and hope…that we will some day no longer have to rely on nuclear weapons to deter aggression and assure world peace. To that end the United States is now engaged in a serious and sustained effort to negotiate major reductions in levels of offensive nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal of eliminating these weapons from the face of the earth. 

Ronald Reagan, October 20, 1986

“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 McAlister Kings Bay Protestor 2019

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