Re: CBC: ``Bush slashing nuclear weapons''
A letter to the CBC regarding their story, ``Bush, Putin sign deal to slash nuclear weapons supply ''.
What a comically inaccurate headline. In fact, the treaty just signed by Bush and Putin specifies the destruction of exactly zero nuclear warheads and exactly zero delivery systems. It comes on the heels of the US backing out of 30 years of nuclear disarmament treaties -- treaties which did result in the destruction of warheads -- and offers neither a schedule for destruction nor provisions for monitoring.
The US is merely making good public relations while doing what it wanted to do all along: develop highly accurate low-yield nuclear weapons based on Trident missiles to target at non-nuclear nations, as outlined in their ``Nuclear Posture Review'' document, portions of which were leaked some time ago [1] .
Or, as TomPaine.com quotes [2] the Bush administration, ``What we have now agreed to do under the treaty is what we wanted to do anyway.''
Donald Rumsfeld identified this goal in January during his presentation on the new (at that time) Nuclear Posture Review. Said one of his slides, ``[..] Goal of 1,700-2,200 operationally deployed warheads by 2012 to meet requirements of new defense policy goals - Force sizing not driven by an immediate contingency involving Russia [..]''
Isn't it slightly curious that the topmost of these numbers is exactly what the US-Russia treaty specifies?
This treaty can hardly be called ``disarmament'' (or, as the CBC laughingly puts it, ``slash[ing] nuclear weapons'') when the US is planning on funding further nuclear arms development. Indeed, there are such bills before Congress right now.
US military spending as a whole will increase nearly $20 billion from 2001 to 2002 (to $319 billion; well more than the combined military budgets of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, and Cuba who together spent $109 billion on their militaries in 1999). By comparison, this increase in military spending is more than the total combined US budget for international diplomacy, humanitarian aid and development assistance.
Why were none of these obviously-pertinent facts mentioned in the CBC story?