Trump’s War On Arms Control and Disarmament
Seventy-five years ago, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 Japanese and injuring another 100,000. The great fires that raged in each city consumed many of the bodies. If ever there was a visceral force for promoting a world free of nuclear arms, it should be the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In view of Donald Trump’s ignorance and indifference, it is no surprise that the White House made no mention on August 6th and August 9th of these horrific events. Trump has been too busy scrapping many of the arms control and disarmament treaties that it inherited from previous administrations. Trump made it clear in the 2016 presidential debates that he had no understanding of the central issues of the nuclear arms race, including the nuclear triad. When he couldn’t answer a question on nuclear verification, Trump typically bluffed that “it would take me an hour and a half to learn everything there is to know about missiles. I think I know most of it anyway.”
Read more here:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/12/trumps-war-on-arms-control-and-disarmament-2/
Recent News and Latest Book
The USS Liberty: a Well-Planned Accident
Today marks the 56th anniversary of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, which has been described by too many U.S. and Israeli accounts as an accident. In fact, the attack took place after eight hours of aerial surveillance by Israel, and it involved a two-hour air and naval attack that killed 34 sailors and wounded an…
The Mainstream Media’s Unwillingness to Challenge U.S. Militarization
The Post regularly states that the United States spends as much on defense as the next 10 or 11 nations combined, but the cruel fact is that we spend as much as all other nations combined. The global total for defense spending is around $2.5 trillion, and U.S. defense spending exceeds $1.2 trillion. The Pentagon’s budget for next year is $886 billion, but that is not the full extent of defense spending. The budget for the Veteran’s Administration is over $120 billion, which takes total defense spending to more than $1 trillion. There is significant defense spending in the budgets of the intelligence community, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Homeland Security, bringing total defense spending to at least $1.2 trillion.
