kleinbl00:

Long on alarmism, short on facts.

1) The US hasn't used unguided glide bombs with any real seriousness since the raid on Gaddhafi in '86. Yes, it's preposterous that it's going to cost $11 billion to put active avionics on 3,000 glide bombs built in '68, but that doesn't change the fact that these are warheads and casings assembled during the LBJ administration being brought up to mid '80s level readiness.

2) Whingeing about the Advanced Cruise Missile is disingenuous, considering it was developed during Reagan, deployed during Bush I and decommissioned during Obama's first term.

3) What the hawks really want is the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator but they were told "no" in no uncertain terms at the height of GWB's popularity.

4) The United States has seven nuclear weapons labs that were created to win WWII and developed to win the Cold War. They've had nothing to do, really, for the past 25 years. Every now and then we have to throw them a sop if we want to keep any sort of nuclear readiness... and the Republicans will NEVER let go of "nuclear readiness." Many of these scientists and facilities are focused on things other than megadeath these days but at the end of the day, people working on the miniaturization and efficiency of nuclear processes are gonna putter around a bit with things that go boom. The fact that literally nothing in this article has anything to do with nuclear weaponization is a testament to arms control, not militarization.

So far as I know, the only major "nuclear" development of the past 20 years is pit recycling. Simply put, nuclear weapons expire and GWB decided that we didn't want that to happen. Beyond that, the nuclear program is effectively dead dead dead.


posted 3025 days ago