Several days after its absurd endorsement of renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War and calling for a more aggressive posture against Russia’s war with Ukraine, the Washington Post stated that signing a follow-on to the New START Treaty was “reckless.”  New START is actually the last remaining nuclear arms-control treaty between the United State and Russia and it is due to expire in February 2026. 

Washington Post Targets Disarmament in Its March to the Right

MELVIN GOODMAN

New START is the only stepping stone to pursuing deeper cuts in the U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals as well as to pursuing serious arms control negotiations with China, which is currently growing its strategy arsenal at a record pace.

Robert Peters, a senior fellow at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, falsely states in a Post oped (A new New START would only help adversaries”) that the growth of the Chinese arsenal portends that the United States will no longer have operationally deployed warheads to “cover—and therefore deter—both Russia and China simultaneously.”  Peters ignores two major facets of our nuclear inventory—our strategic submarines and our strategic nuclear bombers.  He argues that only a “more robust and credible nuclear deterrent” could “incentivize broth Russia and China to come to the negotiation table…to negotiate a more meaningful and effective agreement.”  It is more likely that continued expansion of the U.S. strategic arsenal would only lead to expansion of the Russian and Chinese arsenals as well. 

One of the best-kept defense secrets of the past seven decades hs been the high cost of producing and maintaining nuclear weapons (between $5 to $6 trillion—which represents one-fourth to one-third of overall defense spending.  Additional sums of money are in the budget for the Department of Energy, including huge investments in nuclear projects such as a nuclear-powered airplane, the Midgetman missile, and the Safeguard anti-ballistic missile system.  (Both the Midgetman and Safeguard systems have been retired.)  The military-industrial complex has argued that the huge investment in nuclear systems would be an overall saving because it would allow a smaller army and navy.  In actual fact, our army and navy have gotten larger and costlier.

Peters’ oped ignores the fact that our 14 Ohio-class strategic submarines that serve as the sea-based leg of the U.S. nuclear triad contains 875 nuclear warheads at sea, which represents a sufficient strategic deterrent.  Ten years ago, two U.S. Air Force officers wrote an authoritative essay that pointed specifically to 331 nuclear weapons as an assured deterrence capability.  Peters ignores the fact that the United States and NATO have a nuclear sharing arrangement that allows for U.S. strategic nuclear weapons to be stored in at least five European countries (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey).  In return, Russia has begun storing tactical nuclear missiles in Belarus.

Nor did Peters mention that the U.S. fleet of more than 100 strategic bombers, including the B-52 and B-2 that are dual-capable for conventional and nuclear missions.  The B-21 is designed to replace both the B-1 and B-2 bombers, but there have been huge delays in the program.  The United States maintains a huge network of strategic bases that are closer to possible targets in both Russia and China, which have no comparable bases, let alone networks.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump has revived President Ronald Reagan’s belief in a national missile defense (the Strategic Defense Initiative or Star Wars) with a Golden Dome system that will force Russia and China to pursue additional offensive systems to overwhelm the U.S. defense.  The Golden Dome project would entail probably thousands of armed satellites that most likely would be a violation of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.

The idea of the perfect defense that Reagan and now Trump are pursuing is a myth.  Anti-missile testing has always been rigged to hide the flaws in the system.  There is no bigger budget sink-hole than the pursuit of national missile defense.  Only Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid require more funding than the Pentagon.

The notion that hundreds of nuclear warheads are needed to provide strategic deterrence is particularly specious.  In actual fact, there are far more strategic weapons in the large inventories of Russia and the United States than there are strategic targets.  Moreover, the central aspect of deterrence is the threat to destroy the adversary’s urban areas.  Perhaps, we need to reread John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” to refresh our memories on the utter destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with weapons far less lethal than the ones in current inventories.  President Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed to reduce the strategic nuclear arsenal because he understood it created the possibility of annihilating the human race.

National missile defense, which is largely supported by the mainstream media, is an unlimited budget drain that repudiates the use of diplomacy and negotiation.  It will lead to placing nuclear arsenals on hair-trigger systems, and returns us to the earlier stage of the threat of thermonuclear war.  Anti-nuclear organizations must wake up to the current danger.

Returning the name of the Defense Department to the Department of War in this nuclear age, which finds the three major nuclear powers (China, Russia and the United States) unnecessarily bolstering their nuclear inventories, creates a far more threatening situation.  We have had nuclear close calls in the past, although the U.S. public is aware of few of them.  And we have the increasingly dangerous situation of artificial intelligence that could create false evidence of nuclear activity.  We need to return to the premise of a Defense Department to defend and deter, not to initiate offensive war.  The ability of Donald Trump to initiate war on his own as well as the bellicose and inexperienced nature of his national security team creates additional alarm.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/12/washington-post-targets-disarmament-in-its-march-to-the-right/

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