Let’s take responsibility to lead in making Nebraska, the region, the country and world safer. Northrop Grumman is the lead contractor on the Money Pit Missile Program, and not surprisingly, has spent millions in congressional lobbying and campaign contributions to make sure its bread is buttered and the GBSD gets built to fatten profits. His proposed $753 billion Pentagon budget is an increase over Trump’s bloated war budgets. Joe Biden has astutely talked about building a “foreign policy for the middle class,” but unfortunately it appears to be the same old foreign and military policy for the weapons contractors. But no such consent was ever asked, nor granted, by the foreign policy elites, mostly on the East Coast, who know and care little about the everyday concerns of folks in the Heartland and Mountain West. Perhaps if the people in these five states were fully aware of and consented to this arrangement, that would be copasetic. So the target and nuclear sponge element are unique to the ICBM force. Bombers can be scrambled into the air, so they are not sitting duck targets for an attack, and submarines are stealthy, hiding deep in the world’s oceans. nuclear triad, long-range bombers and nuclear submarines, are much harder to target. As noted, the ICBMs are stationary, and their locations known by other nations’ militaries and by the farmers and ranchers whose land the silos abut. If there were a nuclear war, all life on Earth would be at risk, as even a ‘limited’ nuclear war, for instance between India and Pakistan, could cause nuclear winter, threatening the global food and water supply. Said weapons are supposedly only for deterrence, designed never to be used, to rust in peace. Surely, were there a national referendum on priorities, people would choose addressing climate chaos and pandemics, remedying racial and economic inequality, and creating green jobs by sustainably rebuilding the country’s crumbling infrastructure, over new nuclear weapons. Congress and three successive administrations, including the current one, seem unconcerned about the opportunity cost of this folly. nuclear weapons complex is projected by the CBO at $1.7 trillion over 30 years. The overall cost of upgrading the entire U.S. The projected cost of our tax dollars for these new weapons of omnicide is $264 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Now comes a Strangelovian plan to replace those missiles with new ones, in a program dubbed the “Ground Based Strategic Deterrent” (GNSD), or more properly, the ‘Money Pit Missile’. Largely forgotten but not gone, 400 Minuteman III ICBMS have been in their silos since 1959, despite the Cold War having ended nearly 30 years ago. Nobody asked the people in the Nebraska Panhandle, or in the other states, for their consent to be a nuclear sponge, or more accurately, a target. As such, these missiles would draw at least some fire away from other natural targets, such as the national capital in Washington, D.C., or other large population centers. The idea is the missiles in these states would be targeted, since the adversary knows exactly where they are, and would seek to destroy them before they could be launched in a nuclear war. land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) sit in underground silos, serving as a “sponge” for nuclear attacks by Russia, China or another adversary armed with nuclear weapons. It refers to Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Montana and North Dakota, where U.S. Most people probably have not heard the term “nuclear sponge” before. The Omaha World-Herald published the following “Midlands Voices” oped by NFP State Board member Paul Olson and Peace Action National President Kevin Martin in its June 17, 2021, edition.
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