Reply to post: Newspeak, we can haz it!

Newspeak, we can haz it!

"watch over its arsenal of nukes"

In the same way as a car manufacturer "watches over its supply of cars". Only in this case, the cars are meant to do extreme drive-by shootings.

The current "nuclear posture" is all about keeping billions of the freshly printed money go to the nice people in the military-industrial complex:

The 2013 “Nuclear Employment Strategy” continued U.S. government reliance on a “nuclear triad” of ground-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles, and bomber-launched nuclear weapons. Although the need for one or more legs of this “triad” has been debated since the early 1990s, the 2013 report concluded that “retaining all three triad legs will best maintain strategic stability....

Another indication that the Obama administration is in no hurry to fulfill its promises about building a nuclear weapons-free world is found in its fiscal 2014 budget proposal to Congress. Here, amid sharp cuts for a broad variety of programs, there is a proposed 9 percent increase in federal funding for the Energy Department’s U.S. nuclear weapons activities, including upgrading nuclear warheads (like the B61 gravity bomb, slated for a $10 billion makeover) and modernizing nuclear weapons production facilities.

In particular the B61 is is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate-pushed retardation. Well, maybe Obama has information about Chtulhu's upcoming awakening, who knows:

Obama’s B61 Life Extension Program proposes to spend over $11 billion over several years to keep the variable-yield bombs “operational” through 2025 (nuclear weapons have limited shelf lives). This includes a billion dollars to add new tail fins in order to raise the intelligence of the things, to convert them from ‘dumb bombs’ subject solely to gravity to ‘smart bombs’ that can be steered to their targets. The new tail fins also permit B61s to be carried by the F-35 stealth fighter, perhaps the single greatest Pentagon boondoggle of all time. Not only does the proposed modernization violate the promise of the 2010 NPR to avoid new capabilities, it lowers the ‘nuclear threshold’ by making the bombs more ‘usable.’ This is because the F-35 can (hypothetically) get closer to its target prior to detection and attempted interdiction, reducing the required yield of the more precise bomb, reducing the radioactive fallout of the explosion, and reducing the consequences of its use.

Why in the world do the US and NATO need a refurbished nuclear bomb first imagined by weapons designers at Los Alamos shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis? They don’t, even by both parties own reckoning. There is no conceivable military use for the things today. NATO wrestled with its mission, its very reason for being, following the collapse of the Soviet threat in the early nineties. Rather than fold the tent, throw a party, and call it an era—as the peace movements of its member-states suggested—NATO expanded eastward, making new members of its former foes. The US ignored (often gleefully) the howling protests of successive Russian leaders who claimed NATO expansion violated an agreement between Boris Yeltsin and George H.W. Bush to keep the alliance where it was.