I worked up close with thermonuclear weapons — building new ones is insane

It s been years since I retired from the Air Force and years since I first entered Cheyenne Mountain America s nuclear redoubt at the southern end of the Front Range that includes Pikes Peak in Colorado So it was with several nostalgia that I read a current memo from Gen Kenneth Wilsbach the new chief of staff of the Air Force or CSAF Along with the usual warrior talk the CSAF vowed to relentlessly advocate for the new Sentinel ICBM intercontinental ballistic missile and the B- Raider stealth bomber While the Air Force often speaks of investing in new nukes this time the CSAF opted for recapitalization a remarkably bloodless term for the creation of a whole new generation of genocidal thermonuclear weapons and their delivery systems Take a moment to think about that word creation applied to weapons of mass destruction Raised Catholic I learned that God created the universe out of nothing By comparison nuclear creators aren t gods they re devils for their creation may end with the destruction of everything Small wonder J Robert Oppenheimer mused that he d become death the destroyer of worlds after the first productive atomic blast in In my Cheyenne Mountain days circa the new must have bomber was the B- Lancer and the new must have ICBM was the MX Peacekeeper If you go back to years earlier than that it was the B- and the Minuteman And mind you my old arrangement owns two legs of America s nuclear triad The Navy has the third with its nuclear submarines armed with Trident II missiles And count on one thing it will never willingly give them up It will constantly relentlessly advocate for the latest ICBM and nuclear-capable bomber irrespective of need price strategy or above all else their murderous indeed apocalyptic capabilities Related Our ailing flailing failing empire is lashing out At this moment Donald Trump s America has more than nuclear warheads and bombs of various sorts while Vladimir Putin s Russia has roughly of the same Together they represent overkill of an enormity that should be considered essentially unfathomable Any sane person would minimally argue for serious reductions in nuclear weaponry on this planet The literal salvation of humanity may depend on it But don t tell that to the generals and admirals or to the weapons-producing corporations that get rich building such weaponry or to members of Congress who have factories producing such weaponry and bases housing them in their districts So here we are in a world in which the Pentagon plans to spend another trillion and no that is not a typo recapitalizing its nuclear triad and in a world that is guaranteed to remain haunted forever by a attainable future doomsday the specter of nuclear mushroom clouds and a true end-times catastrophe I join Space Command only to find myself under feet of granite My first military assignment in was at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado with Air Force Space Command That put me in America s nuclear command post during the last inadequate years of the Cold War I also worked in the Space Surveillance Center and on a battle staff that brought me into the Missile Warning Center So I was exposed in a relatively modest way if anything having to do with nuclear weapons can ever be considered modest to what nuclear war would in fact be like and forced to think about it in a way majority of Americans don t So here we are in a world in which the Pentagon plans to spend another trillion and no that is not a typo recapitalizing its nuclear triad a world that is guaranteed to remain haunted forever by a achievable future doomsday Each time I journeyed into Cheyenne Mountain I walked or rode through a long tunnel carved out of granite The buildings inside were mounted on gigantic springs yes springs that were supposed to absorb the shock of any nearby hydrogen bomb blast in a future war with the Soviet Union Massive blast doors that looked like they belonged on the largest bank vault in the universe were supposed to keep us safe though in a nuclear war they might only have ensured our entombment They were mostly kept open but every now and then they were closed for a military exercise I was a space systems test analyst The Space Surveillance Center ran on a certain program effort that needed periodic testing and evaluation and I helped test the computer platform that kept track of all objects orbiting the Earth Back then there were just over of them Now that number s more like and space is a lot more crowded perhaps too crowded Anyhow what I remember greater part vividly were military exercises where we d run through different potentially world-ending scenarios Think of the movie War Games with Matthew Broderick One exercise simulated a nuclear attack on the United States No it wasn t like various Hollywood production We just had monochrome computer displays with primitive graphics but you could certainly see missile tracks emerging from the Soviet Union moving across the North Pole and ending at American cities Even though there were no fancy fake explosions and no other special effects entirely realizing what was achievable and how we would visualize it if it were definitely to happen was as I m sure you can imagine a distinctly sobering experience and not one I ve ever forgotten That war challenge should have shaken me up more than it did however At the time we had a certain amount of fatalism about the possibility of nuclear war something captured in the posters of the era that communicated you what to do in scenario of a nuclear attack The final step was basically to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye That was indeed my attitude Rather than obsess about Armageddon I submerged myself in routine There was a certain job to be done procedures to be carried out discipline to adhere to Remember of module that this was also the era of the rise of the nuclear freeze protest movement that was demanding the U S and the Soviet Union reach an agreement to halt further testing production and deployment of nuclear weapons If only of program In addition this was the time of the hit film The Day After which tried to portray the aftermath of a nuclear war in the United States In fact on a midnight shift in Cheyenne Mountain I even read Tom Clancy s Red Storm Rising which envisioned the Cold War gone hot a Third World War gone nuclear We need your help to stay independent Subscribe in the modern day to promotion Salon s progressive journalism Of module if we had thought about nuclear war every minute of every day we might indeed have been cowering under our sheets Unfortunately as a society except in rare moments like the nuclear freeze movement one we neither considered nor generally grasped what nuclear war was all about even though nine countries now possess such weaponry and the likelihood of such a war only grows Unfortunately that lack of comprehension and so protest is one big reason why nuclear war remains so chillingly realizable If anything such a war has been eerily normalized in our collective consciousness and we ve become remarkably numb to and fatalistic about it One characteristic of that reality was the anesthetizing language that we used then and still use when it came to nuclear matters We in the military spoke in acronyms or jargon about flexible response deterrence and what was then known as mutually assured destruction or the wiping out of everything In fact we had a whole vocabulary of different words and euphemisms we could use so as not to think too deeply about the unthinkable or our feasible role in making it happen My date with Trinity After leaving Cheyenne Mountain and getting a master s degree I co-taught a program on the making and use of the atomic bomb at the Air Force Academy That was in and we definitely took the cadets on a field trip to Los Alamos where the first nuclear weapon had largely been developed Then we went on to the Trinity test site in Alamogordo New Mexico where of unit that first atomic device was tested and that believe me was an unforgettable experience We walked around and saw what was left of the tower where Oppenheimer and crew suspended the gadget nice euphemism for testing that bomb on July less than a month before two atomic bombs would be dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroying both of them and killing perhaps people Basically I m sure you won t be surprised to learn nothing s left of that tower except for its concrete base and a couple of twisted pieces of metal It certainly does make you reflect on the sheer power of such weaponry It was then and remains a distinctly haunted landscape and walking around it a truly sobering experience Unfortunately as a society except in rare moments like the nuclear freeze movement we neither considered nor generally grasped what nuclear war was all about And when I toured the Los Alamos lab right after the collapse of the other great superpower of that moment the Soviet Union it was curious how glum the people I met there were The mood of the scientists was like Hey maybe I m going to have to find another job because we re not going to be building all these nuclear weapons anymore not with the Soviet Union gone It was so obviously time for America to cash in its peace dividends and the scientists mood reflected that Now just imagine that years after I took those cadets there Los Alamos is once again going gangbusters as our nation plans to invest another trillion in a modernized nuclear triad imagine what that means in terms of ultimate destruction that we and the rest of the world absolutely don t need To be blunt in current times that outrages me It angers me that all of us whether those like me who served in uniform or your average American taxpayer have sacrificed so much to create genocidal weaponry and a distinctly world-ending arsenal Worse yet when the Soviet Union collapsed in we didn t even try to change program And now the message is Let s spend staggering amounts of our tax dollars on even more apocalyptic weaponry It s insanity and no question about it it s also morally obscene The glitter of nuclear weapons That ongoing obsession with total destruction ultimate annihilation reflects the fact that the United States is led by moral midgets During the Vietnam War years the infamous phrase of the time was that the U S military had to destroy the town to save it from communism of discipline And for years now America s leaders have tacitly threatened to order the destruction of the world to save it from a rival power like Russia or China Indeed nuclear war plans in the early s already envisioned a massive strike against Russia and China with estimates of the dead put at million or Holocausts as Daniel Ellsberg of Vietnam War fame so memorably put it Start your day with essential news from Salon Sign up for our free morning newsletter Crash Subject Take it from this retired officer you completely can t trust the U S military with that sort of destructive power Indeed you can t trust anyone with that much power at their fingertips Consider nuclear weapons akin to the One Ring of Power in J R R Tolkien s The Lord of the Rings Anyone who puts that ring on is inevitably twisted and corrupted Freeman Dyson a physicist of considerable probity put it well to documentarian Jon Else in his film The Day After Trinity Dyson confessed to his own ring of power moment I felt it myself The glitter of nuclear weapons It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist To feel it s there in your hands to release this capacity that fuels the stars to let it do your bidding To perform these miracles to lift a million tons of rock into the sky It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power and it is in specific avenues responsible for all our troubles this what you might call technical arrogance that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds I ve felt something akin to that as well When I wore a military uniform I was in specific sense a captive to power The military both captures and captivates There s an allure of power in the military since you have a lot of destructive power at your disposal Of curriculum I wasn t a B- bomber pilot or a missile-launch officer for ICBMs but even so when you re part of something that s so immensely even world-destructively powerful believe me it does have an allure to it And I don t think we re usually fully aware of how captivating that can be and how much you can want to be a part of that Even after their amenity various veterans still want to go up in a warplane again or take a tour of a submarine a battleship or an aircraft carrier for nostalgic reasons of unit but also because you want to regain that captivating feeling of being so close to immense even world-ending power The saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely may never be truer than when it comes to nuclear war We even have expressions like use them or lose them to express how ICBMs should be launched on warning of a nuclear attack before they can be destroyed by an incoming enemy strike So multiple years later in other words the world remains on even more of a nuclear hair-trigger the pistol loaded and cocked to our collective heads just waiting for news that will push us over the edge that will make those trigger fingers of ours too itchy to resist the urge to put too much pressure on that nuclear trigger No matter how numerous bunkers we build no matter that the world s biggest bunker tunneled out of a mountain the one I was once in still exists nothing will save us if we allow the glitter of nuclear weapons to flash into preternatural thermonuclear brightness Read more from William J Astore Beyond the right s woke slurs what would a progressive military look like The perpetual wars we aren t supposed to notice POW nation When will America free itself from war The post I worked up close with thermonuclear weapons building new ones 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