Despite being fiscal hawks, Alaska\u2019s Congressional delegation were elated by the Pentagon\u2019s announcement that Eielson Air Force Base will be a home for a fleet of F-35A stealth fighters. It\u2019ll bring more than 2,000 jobs to the region and could generate $450 million in economic activity. But the contrived military threat they\u2019ve used to justify it should be recognized as a source for Donald Trump\u2019s insane rhetoric about using nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n
The F-35 is the most complex and expensive defense system ever conceived. The $1 trillion price tag includes pilot helmets that alone will cost $400,000 each. Like all big Pentagon projects though, there\u2019s been multiple design problems which, according to a 2015 Defense Department report, makes the schedule for operational tests unrealistic. And that means Eielson\u2019s F-35s will probably be arriving later than their 2020 target date.<\/p>\n
So for at least five years the F-35s won\u2019t be ready to counter what Sen. Dan Sullivan referred to last week as \u201crising threats in the Arctic, on the Korea Peninsula, and in the South China Sea.\u201d But we shouldn\u2019t lose any sleep over that. Neither Russia, China or North Korea have any real interest in starting a war by attacking our nation.<\/p>\n
Unlike the Soviet Union of another era, there\u2019s no tangible ideology that Putin\u2019s Russia is seeking to export. Communist China is more concerned with stability. And North Korea is militarily insignificant. If we don\u2019t start a war with any of them, then they\u2019ll happily leave us alone. <\/p>\n
Any country in the world would also be foolish to attack Japan, South Korea or the islands nations in the South China Sea because it\u2019s well known that the U.S. military has their backs. And that\u2019s what infuses the first line of Trump\u2019s national defense position. He believes America can no longer afford to have our military protecting other nations from attacks unless their treasuries start contributing significantly for that support.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s not the policy proposed by Trump that\u2019s stunned the establishment.<\/p>\n
First he went on record as saying nuclear nonproliferation is dead. He\u2019s suggested America can\u2019t stop Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arab from developing their own nuclear weapons. \u201cIt\u2019s going to happen anyway\u201d he said on CNN. \u201cIt\u2019s only a question of time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Why would these countries need such weapons? Well, any American who trusts the Republicans in Congress is probably convinced that the nuclear deal President Obama signed with Iran means they\u2019ll soon have nuclear weapons. And those same politicians are frequently warning us that both Iran and North Korea, which already has a handful of them, are so unstable and unpredictable that they\u2019d use them in a first strike.<\/p>\n
So by saying other countries need nukes to defend themselves against these threats, Trump is doing little more than echoing an alarm already sounded by war hawks across the country.<\/p>\n
He takes it a dangerous step further though. \u201cI\u2019m not going to take it off the table for anybody,\u201d he told Chris Matthews on MSNBC in response to whether he\u2019d order the military to use nuclear weapons first.<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019m not claiming to understand Trump. But there might be a method to his madness if you examine his statements beyond their sensationalist appeal. He\u2019s said more than once that nuclear weapons are the biggest problem the world faces. He\u2019s acknowledged our nuclear system is \u201cin very terrible shape,\u201d so it seems he knows we\u2019re planning to spend $1 trillion to modernize it. Even more significant is that he immediately qualified his statement about the inevitability that Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia will acquire nuclear weapons by saying \u201cor we have to get rid of them entirely.\u201d<\/p>\n
If it was anybody but Trump, those remarks could be interpreted as a call for worldwide nuclear disarmament. Indeed, by not taking a first use off the table, Trump could even be trying to scare the rest of the world into moving in that direction.<\/p>\n
Yet even if that\u2019s his objective, it\u2019s the kind of game that no one holding the nuclear codes should ever think of playing. It could embolden an erratic leader in another country to actually use one in a preemptive first strike.<\/p>\n
And then again, what if he\u2019s not bluffing?<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s campaign should be a lesson to Americans that we\u2019re not immune from electing a president who foolishly believes something good can from initiating a nuclear exchange.<\/p>\n
And anyone with authority who frequently exaggerates the threats we face increases the risk we\u2019ll make such a catastrophic mistake.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s exactly what many members of Congress, including Alaska\u2019s delegation, have been doing for years to justify military spending in their state. Not only must it stop. Trump\u2019s misguided bluster makes it a moral imperative to rid the world of all nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Despite being fiscal hawks, Alaska\u2019s Congressional delegation were elated by the Pentagon\u2019s announcement that Eielson Air Force Base will be a home for a fleet of F-35A stealth fighters. It\u2019ll bring more than 2,000 jobs to the region and could generate $450 million in economic activity. But the contrived military threat they\u2019ve used to justify […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":8,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-33494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33494"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=33494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}