For decades people who want peace have publicized the horribly expensive military budget, and we have been urging ordinary people to demand that Congress and presidents spend money for better purposes instead of killing people.
Now that Obama and Trump and both houses of Congress have committed us to BUILDING ALL NEW NUCLEAR WEAPONS — including all new warheads and all new missiles and all new submarines and all new bombers — and now while our nation continues to suffer from horrible poverty and homelessness and lack of education and lack of health care — and now while the Coronavirus pandemic is killing our people and crashing our economy — WOULDN’T IT MAKE SENSE TO QUESTION OUR FEDERAL BUDGET PRIORITIES?
How much do you pay for nuclear weapons?
The U.S. DOMINATES worldwide spending on nuclear weapons:
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN, www.icanw.org) is the worldwide organization that successfully convinced the United Nations General Assembly to pass the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in July 2017. See several posts about that elsewhere in the “Nuclear Weapons” part of my blog, www.parallaxperspectives.org.
ICAN produced an easy-to-understand visual image showing that the nine nations that do have nuclear weapons spent a record $73 BILLION on nuclear weapons in 2019. Meanwhile, the Coronavirus pandemic spreads worldwide and needs vigorous public spending in order to save our lives. The United States has more Coronavirus infections and deaths than any other nation, but the U.S. spent nearly half of the world’s total spending on nuclear weapons. SEE THIS:
2019 worldwide spending on nuclear weapons
We need hospital beds, not more nuclear weapons:
An active member of the Olympia Coalition to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (OCANW) provided this information, which was written by a long-time friend of hers:
Our overpopulated planet faces three existential threats. One, as we now understand, is the rapid spread of pandemics. A second is climate heating, and a third is the continued existence of stocks of nuclear weapons capable of destroying the earth multiple times over.
All three urgently require national action and international cooperation. The mitigation, or, hopefully, the elimination of each will require the expenditure of great amounts of money. With regard to the first two crises, many nations are now spending all they think they can, but admittedly not enough, for mitigation. In the case of nuclear weapons, many are spending enormous amounts to exacerbate rather than mitigate the crisis; to update weapons and improve delivery systems.
ICAN, an international campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons, and the winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, is proposing an initiative to change the equation. It has noted, for example, that France earmarked 4.5 billion Euros for nuclear weapons, enough to provide for a needed 100,000 beds in intensive care plus 10,000 ventilators, plus 20,000 nurses and 10,000 doctors; the United Kingdom 7.2 billion pounds, enough for 100 beds, 30,000 ventilators, 50,000 nurses, and 40,000,doctors; and, finally, the United States 35.1 billion dollars, enough for 300,000 beds, 35,000 ventilators, 150,000 nurses, and 75,000 doctors. (https://www.icanw.org/healthcare_costs)
Reallocating this money and a policy focusing on international cooperation rather than competition could mitigate all three of these threats. The planned expenditure can be found in the 2021 US Department of Energy budget under the heading NUCLEAR WEAPONS https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/budget
