Massive Overkill Brought to You By the Nuclear-Industrial Complex

Massive Overkill
Brought to You By the Nuclear-Industrial Complex
By William D. Hartung
[This piece has been updated and adapted from William D. Hartung’s “Nuclear Politics” in Sleepwalking to Armageddon: The Threat of Nuclear Annihilation, edited by Helen Caldicott and just published by the New Press.]
Until recently, few of us woke up worrying about the threat of nuclear war. Such dangers seemed like Cold War relics, associated with outmoded practices like building fallout shelters and “duck and cover” drills.
But give Donald Trump credit.  When it comes to nukes, he’s gotten our attention. He’s prompted renewed concern, if not outright alarm, about the possibility that such weaponry could actually be used for the first time since the 6th and 9th of August 1945. That’s what happens when the man in the Oval Office begins threatening to rain “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on another country or, as he did in his presidential campaign, claiming cryptically that, when it comes to nuclear weapons, “the devastation is very important to me.”
Click here to read more of this dispatch.http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176351/tomgram%3A_william_hartung%2C_how_to_wield_influence_and_sell_weaponry_in_washington/#more