William Hartung reports on a resurgent network of nuclear hawks who want to build more kinds of nuclear weapons and ever more of them.

Department of Energy’s Device Assembly Facility at the Nevada Test Site, 2019. (US Department of Energy, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
By William Hartung
TomDispatch
A primary responsibility of the government is, of course, to keep us safe. Given that obligation, you might think that the Washington establishment would be hard at work trying to prevent the ultimate catastrophe — a nuclear war. But you would be wrong.
A small, hardworking contingent of elected officials is indeed trying to roll back the nuclear arms race and make it harder for such world-ending weaponry ever to be used again, including stalwarts like Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA), and other members of the Congressional Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group.
But they face ever stiffer headwinds from a resurgent network of nuclear hawks who want to build more kinds of nuclear weapons and ever more of them. And mind you, that would all be in addition to the Pentagon’s current plans for spending up to $2 trillion over the next three decades to create a whole new generation of nuclear weapons, stoking a dangerous new nuclear arms race.
There are many drivers of this push for a larger, more dangerous arsenal — from the misguided notion that more nuclear weapons will make us safer to an entrenched network of companies, governmental institutions, members of Congress, and policy pundits who will profit (directly or indirectly) from an accelerated nuclear arms race.
One indicator of the current state of affairs is the resurgence of former Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, who spent 18 years in Congress opposing even the most modest efforts to control nuclear weapons before he went on to work as a lobbyist and policy advocate for the nuclear weapons complex.
His continuing prominence in debates over nuclear policy — evidenced most recently by his position as vice-chair of a congressionally-appointed commission that sought to legitimize an across-the-board nuclear buildup — is a testament to our historical amnesia about the risks posed by nuclear weapons.
Senator Strangelove

Jon Kyl speaking at an event in Phoenix in 2017. (Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Republican Jon Kyl was elected to the Senate from Arizona in 1995 and served in that body until 2013, plus a brief stint in late 2018 to fill out the term of the late Senator John McCain.
One of Kyl’s signature accomplishments in his early years in office was his role in lobbying fellow Republican senators to vote against ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which went down to a 51-to-48 Senate defeat in October 1999.
That treaty banned explosive nuclear testing and included monitoring and verification procedures meant to ensure that its members met their obligations.
Had it been widely adopted, it might have slowed the spread of nuclear weapons, now possessed by nine countries, and prevented a return to the days when aboveground testing spread cancer-causing radiation to downwind communities.
The defeat of the CTBT marked the beginning of a decades-long process of dismantling the global nuclear arms control system, launched by the December 2001 withdrawal of President George W. Bush’s administration from the Nixon-era Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty.

May 26, 1972: U.S. President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signing the ABM Treaty and Interim Agreement on Strategic Arms Limitation in Moscow. (Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)
That treaty was designed to prevent a “defense-offense” nuclear arms race in which one side’s pursuit of anti-missile defenses sparks the other side to build more — and ever more capable — nuclear-armed missiles.
James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace called the withdrawal from the ABM Treaty an “epic mistake” that fueled a new nuclear arms race. Kyl argued otherwise, claiming the withdrawal removed “a straightjacket from our national security.”
The end of the ABM treaty created the worst of both worlds — an incentive for adversaries to build up their nuclear arsenals coupled with an abject failure to develop weaponry that could actually defend the United States in the event of a real-world nuclear attack.

June 1, 1988: Reagan and General Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev at the signing ceremony for the ratification of Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. (Reagan White House, Wikimedia Commons)
Then, in August 2019, during the first Trump administration, the U.S. withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which prohibited the deployment of medium-range missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers.
That treaty had been particularly important because it eliminated the danger of having missiles in Europe that could reach their targets in a very brief time frame, a situation that could shorten the trigger on a possible nuclear confrontation.
Then-Senator Kyl also used the eventual pullout from the INF treaty as a reason to exit yet another nuclear agreement, the New START treaty, co-signing a letter with 24 of his colleagues urging the Trump administration to reject New START.
He was basically suggesting that lifting one set of safeguards against a possible nuclear confrontation was somehow a reason to junk a separate treaty that had ensured some stability in the U.S.-Russian strategic nuclear balance.
Finally, in November 2023, NATO suspended its observance of a treaty that had limited the number of troops the Western alliance and Russia could deploy in Europe after the government of Vladimir Putin withdrew from the treaty earlier that year in the midst of his ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
The last U.S.-Russian arms control agreement, New START, caps the strategic nuclear warheads of the two countries at 1,550 each and has monitoring mechanisms to make sure each side is holding up its obligations.
That treaty is currently hanging by a thread. It expires in 2026 and there is no indication that Russia is inclined to negotiate an extension in the context of its current state of relations with Washington.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and after signing the New START treaty in Prague, April 2010. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
As early as December 2020, Kyl was angling to get the government to abandon any plans to extend New START, coauthoring an op-ed on the subject for the Fox News website. He naturally ignored the benefits of an agreement aimed at reducing the chance of an accidental nuclear conflict, even as he made misleading statements about it being unbalanced in favor of Russia.
Back in 2010, when New START was first under consideration in the Senate, Kyl played a key role in extracting a pledge from the Obama administration to throw an extra $80 billion at the nuclear warhead complex in exchange for Republican support of the treaty.
Even after that concession was made, Kyl continued to work tirelessly to build opposition to the treaty. If, in the end, he failed to block its Senate ratification, he did help steer billions in additional funding to the nuclear weapons complex.
Our Man from Northrop Grumman
In 2017, between stints in the Senate, Kyl worked as a lobbyist with the law firm Covington and Burling, where one of his clients was Northrop Grumman, the largest beneficiary of the Pentagon’s nuclear weapons spending binge. That company is the lead contractor on both the future B-21 nuclear bomber and Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
The Sentinel program drew widespread attention recently when it was revealed that, in just a few years, its estimated cost had jumped by an astonishing 81 percent, pushing the price for building those future missiles to more than $140 billion (with tens of billions more needed to operate them in their years of “service” to come).
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That stunning cost spike for the Sentinel triggered a Pentagon review that could have led to a cancellation or major restructuring of the program. Instead, the Pentagon opted to stay the course despite the enormous price tag, asserting that the missile is “essential to U.S. national security and is the best option to meet the needs of our warfighters.”

Concept rendering of the U.S. Air Force’s LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile. (U.S. Air Force, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
Independent experts disagree. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry, for instance, has pointed outthat such ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons we have” because a president, warned of a possible nuclear attack by an enemy power, would have only minutes to decide whether to launch them, greatly increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war triggered by a false alarm.
Perry is hardly alone. In July 2024, 716 scientists, including 10 Nobel laureates and 23 members of the National Academies, called for the Sentinel to be canceled, describing the system as “expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary.”
Meanwhile, as vice-chair of a congressionally mandated commission on the future of U.S. nuclear weapons policy, Kyl has been pushing a worst-case scenario regarding the current nuclear balance that could set the stage for producing even larger numbers of (Northrop Grumman-built) nuclear bombers, putting multiple warheads on (Northrop Grumman-built) Sentinel missiles, expanding the size of the nuclear warhead complex, and emplacing yet more tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.
His is a call, in other words, to return to the days of the Cold War nuclear arms race at a moment when the lack of regular communication between Washington and Moscow can only increase the risk of a nuclear confrontation.
Kyl does seem to truly believe that building yet more nuclear weapons will indeed bolster this country’s security and he’s hardly alone when it comes to Congress or, for that matter, in the new Trump administration.
Consider that a clear sign that reining in the nuclear arms race will involve not only making the construction of nuclear weapons far less lucrative, but also confronting the distinctly outmoded and unbearably dangerous arguments about their alleged strategic value.
The Advocate
In October 2023, when the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on a report from the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, it had an opportunity for a serious discussion of nuclear strategy and spending, and how best to prevent a nuclear war.
Given the stakes for all of us should a nuclear war between the United States and Russia break out — up to an estimated 90 million of us dead within the first few days of such a conflict and up to five billion lives lost once radiation sickness and reduced food production from the resulting planetary “nuclear winter” kick in — you might have hoped for a wide-ranging debate on the implications of the commission’s proposals.
Unfortunately, much of the discussion during the hearing involved senators touting weapons systems or facilities producing them located in their states, with little or no analysis of what would best protect Americans and our allies.
For example, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) stressed the importance of Raytheon’s SM-6 missile — produced in Arizona, of course — and commended the commission for proposing to spend more on that program.

Kelly, left, with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Sen. Chuck Schumer on Oct. 15, 2023. (U.S. Embassy Jerusalem, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) praised the role of the Nevada National Security Site, formerly known as the Nevada Test Site, for making sure such warheads were reliable and would explode as intended in a nuclear conflict.
You undoubtedly won’t be shocked to learn that she then called for more funding to address what she described as “significant delays” in upgrading that Nevada facility.

Rosen, on right, with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Oct. 15, 2023. (U.S. Embassy Jerusalem, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) proudly pointed to the billions in military work being done in his state: “In Alabama we build submarines, ships, airplanes, missiles. You name it, we build it.”
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) requested that witnesses confirm how absolutely essential the Kansas City Plant, which makes non-nuclear parts for nuclear weapons, remains for American security.
And so it went until Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) asked what the nuclear buildup recommended by the commission would cost.
She suggested that, if past history is any guide, much of the funding proposed by the commission would be wasted: “I’m willing to spend what it takes to keep America safe, but I’m certainly not comfortable with a blank check for programs that already have a history of gross mismanagement.”
The answer from Kyl and his co-chair Madelyn Creedon was that the commission had not even bothered to estimate the costs of any of what it was suggesting and that its recommendations should be considered regardless of the price. This, of course, was good news for nuclear weapons contractors like Northrop Grumman, but bad news for taxpayers.
The Brink of Armageddon?

Tuberville with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in June 2012, during a military budget authorization review. (U.S. Secretary of Defense, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
Nuclear hardliners frequently suggest that anyone advocating the reduction or elimination of nuclear arsenals is outrageously naive and thoroughly out of touch with the realities of great power politics.
As it happens though, the truly naive ones are the nuclear hawks who insist on clinging to the dubious notion that vast (and still spreading) stores of nuclear weaponry can be kept around indefinitely without ever being used again, by accident or design.
There is another way. Even as Washington, Moscow, and Beijing continue the production of a new generation of nuclear weapons — such weaponry is also possessed by France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom — a growing number of nations have gone on record against any further nuclear arms race and in favor of eliminating such weapons altogether.
In fact, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has now been ratified by 73 countries.
As Beatrice Fihn, former director of the Nobel-prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, pointed out in a recent essay in The New York Times, there are numerous examples of how collective action has transformed “seemingly impossible situations.”
She cited the impact of the antinuclear movement of the 1980s in reversing a superpower nuclear arms race and setting the stage for sharp reductions in the numbers of such weapons, as well as a successful international effort to bring the nuclear ban treaty into existence.
She noted that a crucial first step in bringing the potentially catastrophic nuclear arms race under control would involve changing the way we talk about such weapons, especially debunking the myth that they are somehow “magical tools” that make us all more secure.
She also emphasized the importance of driving home that this planet’s growing nuclear arsenals are evidence that all too many of those in power are acquiescing in a reckless strategy “based on threatening to commit global collective suicide.”
The next few years will be crucial in determining whether ever growing numbers of nuclear weapons remain entrenched in this country’s budgets and its global strategy for decades to come or whether common sense can carry the day and spark the reduction and eventual elimination of such instruments of mass devastation.
A vigorous public debate on the risks of an accelerated nuclear arms race would be a necessary first step toward pulling the world back from the brink of Armageddon.
William D. Hurting, a TomDispatch regular, is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.
This article is from TomDispatch.com.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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I am not at all surprised that right-wing conservatives like John Kyl and Tommy Tuberville would be all for building more nuclear and other weapons. However I am very disgusted that that would be the case with supposedly progressive Democrats like Mark Kelly and Jacky Rosen. They are even pictured meeting with the thoroughly evil and despicable war criminal Yoav Gallant.
Mark Kelly, along with his wife Gabby Giffords, who was a victim of the 2011 shooting attempt on her life in Tucson, is an advocate and activist for promoting solutions to gun violence (which activism I fully agree with). According to Gabby Giffords’ website, the gun lobby’s radical and profit-driven agenda is what stands in the way of a safer country.
hxxps://giffords.org/issues/the-gun-lobby/
However Mark Kelly is obviously not willing to work to promote solutions to the risk of nuclear war. The profit-driven weapons industry, which includes Raytheon producing the SM-6 missile in Arizona, Mark Kelly’s state, stands in the way of a safer world (!) Mark Kelly is supposedly being brave by going against the gun lobby and gun industry, but is totally unwilling to go against the much larger weapons industry, in the name of providing jobs for people in his state. (Jobs to produce what? Is it really good for people to work at jobs producing weapons which make the world unsafe?)
And Jacky Rosen is very concerned about supposed “anti-semitism”, really meaning being against Israel even when Israel is committing genocide.
In the past I have gotten fundraising emails from Mark Kelly and Jacky Rosen, and have even at times contributed money to Mark Kelly, which I will never do again. I have unsubscribed to fundraising emails from both, and from other less than progressive Democrats and Democratic organizations. (I did once see Mark’s twin brother Scott Kelly give a talk at the performing arts center of the university located in the town where I live, about his year long mission with the International Space Station.)
Oh, and Tommy Tuberville sounds like the name of a cartoon character, but he is obviously a real-life villain, and a former football coach, and there is nothing cartoonish about him.
Using present ‘hawkish’ logic, I should fill my house with rattlesnakes to guard against burglars!
Nuclear weapons do not ‘point at the other’; no matter where they are intended to land, the consequences of their use will include the whole biosphere….and since humanity has used every major technological development in our history, it is a near certainty that, if we have such weapons, they will be used.
Further, the statements that 90 million would be killed outright and that 5 billion would die of radiation and related consequences leaves out the destruction of physical and social infrastructure. There wouldn’t remain 3 billion to carry on the human enterprise in any understandable way (though that could well be in the minds of some in power). Not only would the direct devastation have enduring effects, but environmental collapse would be greatly exacerbated. It remains a mystery why a clear understanding of both our history and the simple physics/chemistry of weaponry and environment so thoroughly elude a particular form of our fellow species members.
The ancients had a good security strategy: exchange hostages. Family members of key US politicians could live in Russia as “honored guests” and afforded every comfort and courtesy. It would be accepted that in the event of war they would be the first to die. Russian “guests” in the US would get the same immediate death sentence. It would be nice to see these war hawk creeps forced to have skin in the game. Too barbaric, you say? What about politicians and members of the MIC who build an arsenal of weapons that will likely see half the planet destroyed? This is a fantasy world of greed and self-indulgence for these murderous lunatics with innocent members of the public on the line with their lives. Criminal and obscene at every level.
Some US leaders want to make our country the most powerfully armed nation in the world. Meanwhile they don’t seem to mind very much that the actual place is going to rot.
I wonder what the elites are thinking about our future, if at all.
There is no future in “collective suicide”.
It’s all short term brag and no long term survival, that is, selfish, narcissistic aggrandizment.
My Mother used to call it “pushing and vulgar”, bless her patience..
will the new US aministration with their nuclear power talks be toned down by THE SUPER RICH (adding to trillions?)which do not support their sweet life to be turned to life in a bunker?
If only the fallout (pun intended) of a nuclear conflict or accident could be confined to the states in which all those nuclear war hawks reside, and leave the rest of the world unharmed.
These people are reckless in the extreme, driven by all sorts of ghastly ideas, thoughts and feelings – with an almost total absence of common sense, logic, or understanding of their actions.
They will kill us all, eventually!
Thanks for this detailed account of the political complexities surrounding the debates over nuclear weapons. US citizens should be alarmed! As an Australian citizen my concerns are currently centred on 2 facts:
1. The US military already has several “action ready” bases located in Australia including the strategic intelligence gathering facility located at Pine Gap, Northern Territory; the latter facility being permanently off limits for Australian military and intelligence personnel. Australia is also a signatory to the 5I’s intelligence sharing alliance (USA, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ) and is negotiating the purchase of US made nuclear powered submarines. Currently, Australia does not have a comprehensive nuclear waste disposal facility
2. The current federal parliamentary Opposition Leader, The Hon Peter Dutton, possibly in anticipation of a forthcoming federal election, is continually extolling the virtues of establishing a comprehensive nation wide nuclear energy system in preference to the furtherance of current renewable energy projects. Currently there is a “small” nuclear reactor located at Lucas Heights near to Sydney. This reactor (established in the 1960’s) produces isotopes for medical purposes but is otherwise only research oriented. The Australian citizenry repudiated the proliferation of military and industrial nuclear industries during the 1950-60’s and this remains a strongly held opinion.
My current concern is that if the oligarch oriented media continues to promote a change of Australian government to the conservative idiom then this will be the wedge in public opinion that enables the development of nuclear energy based industries that currently do not exist. Coincidently, such local industries will eventually justify the location of nuclear weapons on US bases in Australia making us prime targets should WW3 degenerate to a nuclear weapon exchange. Currently the US military “neither confirms nor denies” the existence of nuclear weapons located in US bases on Australian soil.
By the look of it Australia has made itself a prime target.US Bases likely with Nukes and a major world Surveillance station guarantees a first strike status.
Its adoption of Nuclear powered Subs with capacity for potential nuclear armed missiles seems very close to breaking its own undertaking of repudiating all nuclear technology.
Also as Indonesia / Australia relations are delicately poised so its likely Australia’s action of getting NK Subs will inevitably challenge lndonesia to rethink its Nuclear position.
Hard to understand why Australia would act in this manner
Hopefully we have time for another round of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
I suppose it won’t have to swing so low if we are all suspended and interspersed through the stratosphere. A vacuum cleaner with a filter might be of use, though I suppose it may still take God a bit of time to sort us all out on the other end.
I still like people. But the longer this goes on, the wiser seem my chickens.
LOL bardamu. you are right about the chickens. and a great book to illustrate this is “jonathan segal chicken” by sol weinstein and howard albrecht.