Privatizing the Apocalypse
How Nuclear Weapons Companies Commandeer Your Tax Dollars
By Richard Krushnic and Jonathan Alan King
September 23, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "TomDispatch"-
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.
Indeed, the detonations and ensuing fires would
send up so much smoke and particulates into the atmosphere that the
result would be a
nuclear winter, leading to
worldwide famine and the possible deaths of hundreds of
millions, including Americans (no matter where the missiles went
off). Yet, as if in a classic Dr. Seuss book, one would have to
add: that is not all, oh, no, that is not all. At the moment, the
Obama administration is planning for the spending of up to a
trillion dollars over the next 30 years to modernize and upgrade
America’s nuclear forces.
Given that the current U.S. arsenal represents
extraordinary overkill capacity -- it could destroy many Earth-sized
planets -- none of those extra taxpayer dollars will gain Americans
the slightest additional “deterrence” or safety. For the nation’s
security, it hardly matters whether, in the decades to come, the
targeting accuracy of missiles whose warheads would completely
destroy every living creature within a multi-mile radius was reduced
from 500 meters to 300 meters. If such “modernization” has no
obvious military significance, why the push for further spending on
nuclear weapons?
One significant factor in the American nuclear
sweepstakes goes regularly unmentioned in this country: the
corporations that make up the nuclear weapons industry. Yet the
pressures they are capable of exerting in favor of ever more nuclear
spending are radically underestimated in what passes for “debate” on
the subject.
Privatizing Nuclear Weapons Development
Start with this simple fact: the production,
maintenance, and modernization of nuclear weapons are sources of
super profits for what is, in essence, a cartel. They, of course,
encounter no competition for contracts from offshore competitors,
given that it’s the U.S. nuclear arsenal we’re talking about, and
the government contracts offered are screened from critical auditing
under the guise of national security. Furthermore, the business
model employed is “cost-plus,” which means that no matter how high
cost overruns may be compared to original bids, contractors
receive a guaranteed profit percentage above their costs. High
profits are effectively guaranteed, no matter how inefficient or
over-budget the project may become. In other words, there is no
possibility of contractors losing money on their work, no matter how
inefficient they may be (a far cry from a corporate free-market
model of production).
Those well-protected profits and the firms raking
them in have become a major factor in the promotion of nuclear
weapons development, undermining any efforts at nuclear disarmament
of almost any sort. Part of this process should be familiar indeed,
since it’s an extension of a classic Pentagon formula that Columbia
University industrial economist Seymour Melman once described so
strikingly in his
books and
articles, a formula that infamously
produced $436 hammers and $6,322 coffee makers.
Given the process and the profits, the weapons
contractors have a vested interest in ensuring that the American
public has a heightened sense of danger and insecurity (even as they
themselves have become a leading source of such danger and
insecurity). Recently, the International Campaign to Abolish
Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) produced a striking report, “Don’t
Bank on the Bomb,” documenting the major corporate contractors
and their investors who will reap those mega-profits from the coming
nuclear weapons upgrades.
Given the penumbra of national security that
envelops the country’s nuclear weapons programs, authentic audits of
the contracts of these companies are not available to the public.
However, at least the major corporations profiting from nuclear
weapons contracts can now be identified. In the area of nuclear
delivery systems -- bombers, missiles, and submarines -- these
include a series of familiar corporate names: Boeing, Northrop
Grumman, General Dynamics, GenCorp Aerojet, Huntington Ingalls, and
Lockheed Martin. In other areas like nuclear design and production,
the names at the top of the list will be less well known: Babcock &
Wilcox, Bechtel, Honeywell International, and URS Corporation. When
it comes to nuclear weapons testing and maintenance, contractors
include Aecom, Flour, Jacobs Engineering, and SAIC; missile
targeting and guidance firms include Alliant Techsystems and
Rockwell Collins.
To give a small sampling of the contracts: In
2014, Babcock & Wilcox was awarded $76.8 million for work on
upgrading the Ohio class submarines. In January 2013, General
Dynamics Electric Boat Division was awarded a
$4.6 billion contract to design and develop a next-generation
strategic deterrent submarine. More of what is known of such
corporate weapons contracts can be found in the ICAN Report, which
also identified banks and other financial institutions investing in
the nuclear weapons corporations.
Many Americans are unaware that much of the
responsibility for nuclear weapons development, production, and
maintenance lies not with the Pentagon but the Department of Energy
(DOE), which spends more on nuclear weapons than it does on
developing sustainable energy sources. Key to the DOE’s nuclear
project are the
federal laboratories where nuclear weapons are designed, built,
and tested. They include
Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in Los Alamos, New Mexico,
and Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratories in Livermore, California.
These, in turn, reflect a continuing trend in national security
affairs, so-called GOCO sites (“government owned, contractor
operated”). At the labs, this system represents a corporatization of
the policies of nuclear deterrence and other nuclear weapons
strategies. Through contracts with URS, Babcock & Wilcox, the
University of California, and Bechtel, the nuclear weapons labs are
to a significant extent
privatized. The LANL contract alone is on the order of $14
billion. Similarly, the Savannah River Nuclear Facility, in Aiken,
South Carolina, where nuclear warheads are manufactured, is jointly
run by Flour, Honeywell International, and Huntington Ingalls
Industries. Their DOE contract for operating it through 2016 totals
about $8 billion dollars. In other words, in these years that have
seen the rise of the
warrior corporation and a significant privatization of the U.S.
military and the
intelligence community, a similar process has been underway in
the world of nuclear weaponry.
In addition to the prime nuclear weapons
contractors, there are hundreds of subcontractors, some of which
depend upon those subcontracts for the bulk of their business. Any
one of them may have from 100 to several hundred employees working
on its particular component or system and, with clout in local
communities, they help push the nuclear modernization program via
their congressional representatives.
One of the reasons nuclear weapons profitability
is extremely high is that the National Nuclear Security
Administration (NNSA) of the Department of Energy, responsible for
the development and operations of the DOE's nuclear weapons
facilities, does not monitor subcontractors, which makes it
difficult to monitor prime contractors as well. For example, when
the Project on Government Oversight filed a Freedom of Information
Act request for information on Babock & Wilcox, the subcontractor
for security at the Y-12 nuclear complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
the NNSA
responded that it had
no information on the subcontractor. Babcock & Wilcox was then
in charge of building a uranium processing facility at Y-12. It, in
turn, subcontracted design work to four other companies and then
failed to consolidate or supervise them. This led to an unusable
design, which was only scrapped after the subcontractors had
received $600 million for work that was
useless. This Oak Ridge case, in turn, triggered a Government
Accountability Office
report to Congress last May indicating that such problems were
endemic to the DOE's nuclear weapons facilities.
The Nuclear Lobbyists
Federal tax dollars expended on nuclear weapons
maintenance and development are a significant component of the
federal budget. Although difficult to pin down precisely, the sums
run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. In 2005, the
Government Accountability Office reported that even the Pentagon had
no firm numbers when it came to how much the nuclear mission costs,
nor is there a standalone nuclear weapons budget of any sort, so
overall costs must be estimated. Analyzing the budgets of the
Pentagon and the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security
Administration, as well as information gleaned from Congressional
testimony, the Center for Nonproliferation Studies suggests that,
from 2010-2018, the United States will spend
at least $179 billion to maintain the current nuclear triad of
missiles, bombers, and submarines, with their associated nuclear
weaponry, while beginning the process of developing their
next-generation replacements. The Congressional Budget Office
projects the cost of nuclear forces for 2015-2024 at $348
billion, or $35 billion annually, of which the Pentagon will spend
$227 billion and the Department of Energy $121 billion.
In fact, the price for maintaining and developing
the nuclear arsenal is actually far greater than either of those
estimates. While those numbers include most of the direct costs of
nuclear weapons and strategic launching systems like missiles and
submarines, as well as the majority of the costs for the military
personnel responsible for maintaining, operating, and executing the
missions, they don’t include many other expenses, including the
decommissioning process and nuclear-waste disposal issues involved
in “retiring” weapons. Nor do they include the pensions and
health-care costs that will go with retiring their human operators.
In 2012, a
report from a high-level committee chaired by former Vice
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright
concluded that “no sensible argument has been put forward for using
nuclear weapons to solve any of the major 21st century problems we
face [including] threats posed by rogue states, failed states,
proliferation, regional conflicts, terrorism, cyber warfare,
organized crime, drug trafficking, conflict-driven mass migration of
refugees, epidemics, or climate change. In fact, nuclear weapons
have on balance arguably become more a part of the problem than any
solution.”
Not surprisingly, for the roster of corporations
involved in the U.S. nuclear programs, this matters little. They,
in fact, maintain elaborate lobbying operations in support of their
continuing nuclear weapons contracts. In a 2012 study for the Center
for International Policy, “Bombs
vs. Budgets: Inside the Nuclear Weapons Lobby,” William Hartung
and Christine Anderson reported that, for the elections of that
year, the top 14 contractors gave nearly $3 million directly to
Congressional legislators. Not surprisingly, half that sum went to
members of the four key committees or subcommittees that oversee
spending for nuclear arms.
In 2015, the defense industry mobilized a small
army of at least 718 lobbyists and doled out more than $67 million
dollars
pressuring Congress for increased weapons spending generally.
Among the largest contributors were
corporations with significant nuclear weapons contracts,
including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Dynamics. Such
pro-nuclear lobbying is augmented by contributions and pressure from
missile and aircraft companies that are primarily non-nuclear. Some
of the systems they produce, however, are potentially dual-use
(conventional and nuclear), which means that a robust nuclear
weapons program increases their potential market.
The continuing pressure of Congressional
Republicans for cuts in
domestic social programs are a crucial mechanism that ensures
federal tax dollars will be available for lucrative military
contracts. In terms of quality of life (and death), this means that
underestimating the influence of the nuclear weapons industry is
singularly dangerous. For the $35 billion or more the U.S. taxpayer
will put into such weaponry annually to support the narrow interests
of a modest number of companies, the payback is fear of an
apocalyptic future. After all, unlike almost all other corporate
lobbies, the nuclear weapons lobby (and so your tax dollars) put
life on Earth at risk of rapid extinction, either following the
direct destruction of a nuclear holocaust or a radical reduction in
sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface that would come from the sort
of nuclear winter that would follow
almost any nuclear exchange. At the moment, the
corporate-nuclear complex is hidden in our midst, its budgets and
funds shielded from public scrutiny, its project hardly noticed.
It’s a formula for disaster.
Jonathan Alan King is professor of molecular
biology at MIT and chair of the Nuclear Abolition Committee of
Massachusetts Peace Action. He can be reached at
Jonking1@verizon.net.
Richard Krushnic is a former real estate loan asset manager and
housing and business contract analyst at Boston’s
Department of Neighborhood Development. He is currently involved in
community development in Latin America and can be reached at
rkrushnic@gmail.com.
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Copyright 2015 Richard Krushnic and Jonathan Alan
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