RECENTLY declassified documents by the Pentagon and reports released by nuclear weapons watchdogs in June come with a concerning alert: nuclear war is more likely than it was in the last eight decades as superpowers race to increase their arsenals.
The logic? A fear that rivals are fast-tracking their nuclear arsenals.
Those which have them, like the United States, Russia and China — all superpowers — want more. Others who have them but are outside the league want more, too. And those who don't have any are racing to acquire nuclear weapons, a reading of the declassified documents and reports by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) suggest.
The nuclear armed nations — there are nine of them — know that no nation can win a nuclear war and yet this tragic flaw in their thinking. Because of distrust among the superpowers, arms control is now as dead as the old Cold War.
Keeping up with the rivals is a flawed logic for a few reasons. Firstly, take the case of the US, which appears to want to go nuclear warhead to nuclear warhead with its rivals. It needn't. It has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world.
Even those it disabled because of the New SALT pact, can, with relative ease, be brought back to use. Some sophisticated ones may take years, but most just take months to be made ready for war, experts say. But the military complex isn't buying such arguments. Secondly, such flawed thinking has a domino effect. All it takes is for one rival to up the nukes and the rest will follow.
That is exactly what is happening right now, a fact acknowledged by the Pentagon, SIPRI and ICAN. In a report issued on June 17, ICAN said that the nine nuclear-armed nations spent US$91.4 billion last year — US$10.7 billion more than in 2022 — on either modernising or expanding nuclear weapons. A whopping US$3,000 per second if ICAN's estimate is right.
Of the total, the US spent US$51.5 billion, China US$11.8 billion and Russia US$8.3 billion. Not too far was the United Kingdom, with US$8.1 billion. A tragic story of missed opportunities in helping themselves and the world in better ways. It is a moral tragedy, too, given that nuclear weapons are most inhumane and destructive.
The money wasted on nuclear warheads in just one year could have provided wind power to 27 million homes, not to mention the millions who go hungry every day, ICAN pointed out to the media in Geneva.
But the military complex, especially in the US, is unrepentant. The logic that no country wins a nuclear war and one shouldn't be started is a hard one to push to the military complex. To it, the promise of nuclear war is good business. Last year, nuclear weapons production companies walked away with nearly US$8 billion worth of contracts in the calculation of ICAN.
Over the last five years, the nine nuclear armed nations spent an indecent US$385 billion: most of it went to such companies. Never mind if the world is destroyed in the process. Profit precedes people and the planet.