The White people of this world have a peculiar way of thinking that they are the most wise and virtuous people of this world while painting all other races are war mongering or just downright stupid.
They talk of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons to decimate the small and lonely Israel,
or they picture nuclear winter caused by a nuclear exchange between the religious Bigots of India and pakistan.
ot they have sleep less nights imagining the chinese dragon overtaking all of Asia ,Africa and may be south america too .
But if one really looks at some sane analysis of what one single nation possesses and what a single nation has caused human misery in this century then US takes the top spot.
Such an ana;ysisi comes from the book written by an MIT proferssor/
This downsizing, in other words, has not removed the wherewithal to destroy the earth as we know it many times over. Such destruction could come about indirectly as well as directly, with even a relatively “modest” nuclear exchange between, say, India and Pakistan triggering a cataclysmic climate shift – a “nuclear winter” – that could result in massive global starvation and death.
Nor does the fact that seven additional nations now possess nuclear weapons (and more than 40 others are deemed “nuclear weapons capable”) mean that “deterrence” has been enhanced. The future use of nuclear weapons, whether by deliberate decision or by accident, remains an ominous possibility. That threat is intensified by the possibility that non-state terrorists may somehow obtain and use nuclear devices.
What is striking at this moment in history is that paranoia couched as strategic realism continues to guide US nuclear policy and, following America’s lead, that of the other nuclear powers. As announced by the Obama administration in 2014, the potential for nuclear violence is to be “modernized.”
In concrete terms, this translates as a 30-year project that will cost the United States an estimated U0S$1 trillion (not including the usual future cost overruns for producing such weapons), perfect a new arsenal of “smart” and smaller nuclear weapons, and extensively refurbish the existing delivery “triad” of long-range manned bombers, nuclear-armed submarines, and land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads.
Nuclear modernization, of course, is but a small portion of the full spectrum of American might –a military machine so massive that it inspired President Obama to speak with unusual emphasis in his State of the Union address in January 2016. “The United States of America is the most powerful nation on earth,” he declared. “Period. Period. It’s not even close. It’s not even close. It’s not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined.”
Official budgetary expenditures and projections provide a snapshot of this enormous military machine, but here again numbers can be misleading. Thus, the “base budget” for defense announced in early 2016 for fiscal year 2017 amounts to roughly US$600 billion, but this falls far short of what the actual outlay will be.
When all other discretionary military and defense-related costs are taken into account – nuclear maintenance and modernization, the “war budget” that pays for so-called overseas contingency operations like military engagements in the Greater Middle East, “black budgets” that fund intelligence operations by agencies including the CIA and the National Security Agency, appropriations for secret hi-tech military activities, “veterans affairs” costs (including disability payments), military aid to other countries, huge interest costs on the military-related part of the national debt, and so on – the actual total annual expenditure is close to US$1 trillion.
Such stratospheric numbers defy easy comprehension, but one does not need training in statistics to bring them closer to home. Simple arithmetic suffices. The projected bill for just the 30-year nuclear modernization agenda comes to over US$90 million a day, or almost US$4 million an hour. The US$1 trillion price tag for maintaining the nation’s status as “the most powerful nation on earth” for a single year amounts to roughly US$2.74 billion a day, over US$114 million an hour.
Creating a capacity for violence greater than the world has ever seen is costly – and remunerative.
So an era of a “new peace?” Think again. We’re only three quarters of the way through America’s violent century and there’s more to come.
This extract is adapted from “Measuring Violence,” the first chapter of John Dower’s new book, The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two
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