Imagine for a moment a genuine absurdity: somewhere in the United States,
the highly profitable operations of a set of corporations were based on the
possibility that sooner or later your neighborhood would be destroyed and
you and all your neighbors annihilated. And not just you and your neighbors,
but others and their neighbors across the planet. What would we think of such
companies, of such a project, of the mega-profits made off it?
In fact, such companies do exist. They service the American nuclear weapons
industry and the Pentagon’s vast arsenal of potentially world-destroying
weaponry. They make massive profits doing so, live comfortable lives
in our neighborhoods, and play an active role in Washington politics.
Most Americans know little or nothing about their activities and the media
seldom bother to report on them or their profits, even though the work they
do is in the service of an apocalyptic future almost beyond imagining.
Add to the strangeness of all that another improbability. Nuclear weapons
have been in the headlines for years now and yet all attention in this period
has been focused like a spotlight on a country that does not possess a single
nuclear weapon and, as far as the American intelligence community can
tell, has shown no signs of actually trying to build one. We’re
speaking, of course, of Iran. Almost never in the news, on the other
hand, are the perfectly real arsenals that could actually wreak havoc on the
planet, especially our own vast arsenal and that of our former superpower
enemy, Russia.
In the recent debate over whether President Obama’s nuclear deal with
Iran will prevent that country from ever developing such weaponry, you could
search high and low for any real discussion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, even
though the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimates that it contains
about 4,700 active warheads. That includes a range of bombs and land-based
and submarine-based missiles. If, for instance, a single Ohio
Class nuclear submarine — and the Navy has 14 of them equipped with
nuclear missiles — were to launch its 24 Trident missiles, each with
12 independently targetable megaton warheads, the major cities of any targeted
country in the world could be obliterated and millions of people would die.