Nuclear security

Interview with legendary whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg following his 89th arrest for resisting nuclear weapons, nuclear war and government secrecy

One of the things I learned today from talks given at Lawrence Livermore Labs was that for the past seven years, each budget for nuclear weapons has increased. In particular it was true in 2015 under Obama, who increased it to over Cold War levels. The peak of Cold War spending was in 1985. Spending went down with the fall of the Soviet Union until the second Bush came into power. We’re back at Cold War levels, $9 billion per year. From 2015 till now, each year the budget has risen. It didn’t start under Trump. But right now, under Trump, we are budgeting 40% higher than in the Cold War. It is obscene, it is crazy, it is wrong. 

That money doesn’t go to foreigners, it goes to Americans: Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, Grumman, General Dynamics. They do very well in this process. There is one reason why we are budgeting for a weapon being designed at Lawrence Livermore right now and that is to put it on new ICBMs being made by Boeing. There isn’t a reason in the world for having those except for the jobs in each district that Boeing has distributed around the country. And Lockheed will be a subcontractor. The votes, the campaign contributions and the profits.

Amazingly enough, I learned something today which has made me more hopeful than I have been for a long time. The House defense budget authorization is different from the Senate version. The House version cuts out funding for the new ICBMs and for the new production facilities.