Run silent, run deep, run stupid

On the NewsHour tonight there was a piece about the upgrading or 'modernization' of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, slated to cost on the order of one trillion dollars over the next several decades.  There has been no discussion in the presidential campaign, at least so far as I'm aware, about the absurd levels of overkill embodied in the current arsenal, and it appears that the issue has not attracted much Congressional attention either.  This despite the fact that a number of informed analysts have concluded that the U.S. nuclear triad as currently configured makes no strategic sense.

ETA: IMDb reminds me that Run Silent Run Deep (1958) is a WW2 movie; it involves submarines, but not nuclear ones. But as we say on the interwebs: whatever.

Nuclear insanity to the nth degree

The U.S. is set to spend billions on refurbishing the B-61 gravity nuclear bomb, the kind of thing Slim Pickens rode in the closing frames of Dr. Strangelove. Would that this were only a movie. A WaPo editorial observes that about half of the refurbished B-61s would replace ones that are currently deployed as 'tactical' weapons in Europe. The U.S. nuclear arsenal as a whole has to be maintained, I suppose, in some reasonable state of non-decrepitude but the notion of spending billions of dollars to refurbish tactical nuclear weapons in Europe is insane.

(note: edited slightly after first posting)

On the cost of aircraft carriers, perceived threats, democracy, etc.

Phil Arena, never losing a chance to take a dig at Reiter and Stam (two scholars with whom he disagrees), mentions Jay Ulfelder's post on threat inflation and comments: "Clearly, Jay hasn't read Reiter and Stam on how democracy promotes a healthy marketplace of ideas."

Yes, the incentives of the press in a less-than-healthy marketplace of ideas can lead to distortion and exaggeration of threats, but I'm inclined to think that bureaucratic and economic interests, also mentioned by J. Ulfelder, play a larger role. Example: I learned from a recent Walter Pincus article in WaPo (here) that the U.S. navy has two aircraft carriers under construction (one about half finished) at a cost of roughly $12 billion [sic] apiece. The U.S. already has 11 aircraft carriers, in my view probably more than it needs, and to justify adding two more someone, somewhere -- and not only the press -- is going to have to do some pretty serious threat inflation. Maybe Phil could consider taking an occasional break from criticizing Reiter and Stam's enthusiasm about democracy and focus on the particular forces that drive bad, suboptimal policy in the particular democracy known as the United States. There are, after all, varieties of democracy, just as there varieties of capitalism. The problem isn't so much democracy per se as the particular form it is taking in the U.S. today.

Addendum: See here and here (and the comments attached to those posts).

Pity the poor unprotected U.S. defense budget

Jennifer Rubin, who writes a conservative blog at the Wash. Post -- apparently having Charles Krauthammer and George Will on the op-ed page isn't enough -- is worried that the defense budget will be cut too much as a result of the current budget negotiations. According to Rubin:

1) the primary duty of the federal government (higher than high-speed rail and a new health-care entitlement plan) is national defense; 2) defense spending is not driving the debt (it is skyrocketing domestic spending that has worsened our fiscal position); and 3) unless we want to cede our position as the sole superpower we can’t shatter the military that guarantees the West’s security and defends freedom around the planet.

Re point 2: of course, the one trillion plus spent on the Iraq misadventure has nothing to do with the deficit. Re point 3: we can't "shatter" the military, so let's continue ordering weapons systems that are outdated holdovers from the Cold War and funding layers of bureaucracy that have little real connection to military capability. After all, we can't "cede our position as the sole superpower."

I don't think I've seen someone refer to the U.S. as the "sole superpower" for quite a while. Krauthammer's "unipolar moment" has come and gone. And American policymakers themselves are realizing, as Gates's recent speech on NATO suggests, that trying to cling to the chimerical status of "sole superpower" is a recipe for, among other things, eventual bankruptcy.