How Much Will The Trump-Putin Arms Race Cost American (And Russian) Taxpayers?

I've never been a fan of Hillary Clinton's-- never. At least her husband's neo-liberal agenda was couched in a pleasant personality. Each time I've met her was-- literally-- disgusting. I was stuck with a monster. Once her whole retinue-- one by one-- abandoned her backstage before a speech and I was the only left to deal with her and it was excruciating. Once at a White House state banquet she was like the big downer in the otherwise festive event, bad vibing everyone. That said, there was never one moment of one day that I harbored any doubts that she would make a better president than Donald Trump. She was never going to be my idea of a great president, but any least she would break through the political glass ceiling for far better women politicians to come and at least she would not be the kind of politically-destructive and ignorant animal that there could never have been any doubt Trump would be.

David Sanger broke the story in the NY Times yesterday that the nuclear arms race is on again, compliments of Trump and Putin. Is that what the American people want? Is that what even the idiots who voted for him wanted when they voted for him? Sanger reported that Trump and Pompeo are "suspending one of the last major nuclear arms control treaties with Russia after heated conversations between the two powers recently failed to resolve a long-running accusation that Moscow is violating the Reagan-era treaty." ... [W]hile the United States has insisted Russia’s actions sank the treaty, the Trump administration’s real aim is to broaden its prohibitions to include China."

Constrained by the treaty’s provisions, the United States has been prevented from deploying new weapons to counter China’s efforts to cement a dominant position in the Western Pacific and keep American aircraft carriers at bay. China was still a small and unsophisticated military power in the mid-1980s, and not a signatory to the treaty that was negotiated between the United States and a rapidly weakening Soviet Union.

By contrast, much of Beijing’s growing nuclear arsenal currently consists of missiles that fall into the distance ranges that are prohibited by the treaty that applies only to Russia and the United States.

“The issue now is whether the administration has a plan for what comes next,” said Pranay Vaddi, a fellow in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former State Department official until 2017 who worked on nuclear arms control issues. “There is no question that the Russians committed a violation. But it is not militarily significant because it doesn’t change the balance of power in Europe.”

With the treaty on its last legs, the question is whether Mr. Pompeo’s announcement will result in a flurry of last-minute negotiations with Moscow-- which seems unlikely-- or whether it will accelerate the Cold War-like behavior among the United States, Russia and China.

Complicating that question is the American intelligence agencies’ warning this week that Russia and China are “more aligned than at any point since the mid-1950s.”

The fate of the treaty has quickly become a test of the continuing struggle inside the Trump administration, and with its allies, over how to handle an increasingly aggressive Russia.

Mr. Trump campaigned on remaking Washington’s relationship with Moscow; the open investigation by the Justice Department’s special counsel is, at its core, about whether he and his campaign aides promised to relieve sanctions and other impediments to Russia in return for financial or electoral benefits from Mr. Putin’s government.

But Mr. Trump has surrounded himself in the White House with hawkish advisers, including John R. Bolton, the national security adviser, who has been a major critic of treaties that he believes impinge the United States’ ability to counter new or rising foreign threats.

The decision to leave the nuclear arms treaty took American allies by surprise when word of the decision first leaked out in October and was quickly confirmed by Mr. Trump.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the military alliance that was created to counter the Soviet threat 70 years ago, acknowledged that Russia had violated the I.N.F. treaty and called on Moscow in December “to return urgently to full and verifiable compliance.”

But the alliance stopped short of agreeing that the United States should withdraw, declaring then that the “allies are firmly committed to the preservation of effective international arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation.”

The announcement by Mr. Pompeo came just ahead of the expiration, on Saturday, of a 60-day deadline he gave Moscow to come into compliance with the treaty. He had no expectation that the Russians would heed his warning.

Mr. Pompeo’s formal announcement begins a six-month clock that Trump administration officials believe will end with a full American withdrawal from the treaty. Starting on Saturday, the United States would be free to begin to test or deploy its own weapons.

It is not clear whether that will happen; there are no weapons in the American arsenal that could be quickly deployed. That was the point of the treaty: It banned an entire category of weapons-- land-based missiles with a range of 300 to 3,400 miles-- that both the United States and the Soviet Union had deployed in the 1980s, and which at the time terrorized Europe.

For many years, the I.N.F. was considered a model arms control treaty. It allowed for on-site inspections and extensive exchanges of information-- exactly what the Trump administration now seeks from North Korea and other states.

But in 2014, the Obama administration accused Russia of turning out a missile that violated the treaty, and last fall, Dan Coats, the national intelligence director, published a detailed history of the Russian violations.

Experts cited Russian unhappiness with the treaty, going back at least 10 years, before Moscow focused on new generations of missiles that would extend its reach without costing it much money. Russian officials have charged that American missile defense interceptors in Eastern Europe could be easily refashioned into offensive weapons, and that the rise of armed drones, which had not been invented when the treaty was signed, now threaten to provide the United States with similar intermediate-range ability without violating the precise wording of the treaty.

Ahead of Friday’s announcement, Russia had aggressively used social media accounts to portray the United States as the treaty-breaker and the aggressor. That argument has won some sympathy in Europe, where many critics portray the treaty’s demise as an example of the Trump administration putting its own agenda before Europe’s.

But the real action is likely to be in Asia. The Pentagon has already been developing nuclear weapons to match, and counter, what the Chinese have deployed.

Completing that effort would take years. Until then, officials said the United States is preparing to modify existing weapons, including its non-nuclear Tomahawk missiles, and is likely to deploy them in Guam, where the military maintains a large base and they would face little political opposition.

Lewis Fry Richardson (1881-1953) was an English mathematician, physicist, meteorologist and psychologist, who pioneered the scientific analysis of conflict, applying modern mathematical techniques he developed for weather forecasting to systematically study the causes of wars and how to prevent them. In 2003 David Bigelow wrote a paper, An Analysis of the Richardson Arms Race Model, pointing out that according to Richardson "the likelihood of two nations engaging in conflict can be determined by a set of differential equations. Richardson conjectured that a nation’s probability of entering into an aggressive war is based upon its stockpiles of available weaponry, and tempered by the resistance of the citizenry. In the Richardson model, the likelihood of a small dispute erupting into a full war is based upon these variables, and the current conditions. The model has three basic cases: both nations tending towards disarmament, both nations tending towards a runaway arms race, and both nations tending towards a stable equilibrium point.

”X” represents the amount of weaponry that country one has at time t. ”Y” is the same for the second country. Each constant has a specific meaning, and vary from system to system.

The constants ”a” and ”b” are known alternatively as ”fear” or ”reaction” constants. They represent the desire of a country to increase arms at a rate proportional to the amount of arms that their opponent possesses. The con- stants ”m” and ”n” are known as either the ”restraint” or ”fatigue” factors. They represent the desire of a nation to reduce arms stockpiles at a rate di- rectly proportional to what they possess. Finally, ”r” and ”s” are the grievance constants, and represent the ”leftovers.” These constants can contain ambition, external pressure, a revenge motive, and other factors not directly related to arms stockpiles.

William Hartung made noticed that the revolving door between the Pentagon and the arms industry is spinning faster inside the Trump Regime than ever before, particularly since Patrick Shanahan was appointed acting Secretary of Defense. "No secretary of defense in recent memory," wrote Hartung, "has had such a long career in the arms industry and so little experience in government or the military. For most of that career, in fact, his main focus was winning defense contracts for Boeing, not crafting effective defense policies. While the Pentagon should be focused on protecting the country, the arms industry operates in the pursuit of profit, even when that means selling weapons systems to countries working against American national security interests... Shanahan’s new role raises questions about whether what is in the best interest of Boeing-- bigger defense budgets and giant contracts for unaffordable and ineffective weaponry or aircraft-- is what’s in the best interest of the public."

His former company is one of two finalists to build a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Critics of such weapons systems like Clinton administration Secretary of Defense William Perry point out that ICBMs are the most dangerous and unnecessary leg of the U.S. nuclear triad, since in a potential war they might need to be launched on only minutes’ notice, lest they be lost to incoming enemy nukes. Even some of their supporters have questioned the need for a brand-new ICBM when older ones could be upgraded. Nuclear hawks might eventually be persuaded to adopt such a position, too, since the cost of the Pentagon’s across-the-board $1.5 trillion “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal (including the production of new nuclear bombers, missiles, and warheads) will otherwise begin to impinge on department priorities elsewhere. But how likely is Shanahan to seriously entertain even such modest critiques when they threaten to eliminate a huge potential payday for Boeing?

Former Florida Congressman Alan Grayson mentioned to me this morning that "The Trump Administration has budgeted $494 billion on nuclear weapon 'modernization,' which is $100 million per nuke. Those nukes are burning a hole in Trump’s pocket; let’s hope they don’t explode... Trump should have tried to enforce the deal, not suspend it. If you breached a contract with me, my reaction wouldn’t be, 'well, then, I’ll just tear it up.'"

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI)-- who serves on both the Armed Services Committee and on the subcommittee for National Security of the House Financial Services Committee-- took a minute out of her presidential campaign to tell us that she feels the "heightened tensions with Russia and China are sending us into a new Cold War. We need to be stepping up nuclear nonproliferation agreements, not rolling them back. Trump's actions threaten our national security and the future of our planet."

Early this morning, the BBC reported, exactly what everyone expected: Putin said Russia would start developing new missiles. Another gift from Trump. "Our American partners announced that they are suspending their participation in the treaty, and we are suspending it too," Mr Putin said on Saturday. Meanwhile, the worldwide merchants of death and popping champagne bottles everywhere. The half dozen American companies that have spent the most in bribing members of Congress last year and their stocks' performance on Friday:

• Boeing- $4,011,579- (up 0.5%)
• Northrop Grumman- $3,943,199 (down 0.9%)
• Lockhead Martin- $3,422,998- (up 0.38%)
• General Dynamics- $2,279,136- (down 1.25%)
• Raytheon- $2,217,783- (up 0.73%)
• United Technologies- $1,182,114 (up 0.77%)

And who got the biggest slices of the pie from the weapons manufacturers? These are the half dozen worst who are still in Congress (just from the last cycle-- and keep in mind not one of them had a serious reelection race, although McSally ran for the Senate in a very heavily contested race-- and lost):

• Mac Thornberry (R-TX)- $339,250
• Kay Granger (R-TX)- $322,840
• Tim Kaine (D-VA)- $290,742
• Adam Smith (D-WA)- $276,550
• Rob Wittman (R-VA)- $274,500
• Martha McSally (R-AZ)- $266,241