Transmitted below is my distinguished recipient Bill Astore's appreciation of the insanity of Donald Trump's delusional but dangerous "golden dome" dream, as well as of Barack Obama's and Joe Biden's trillion-dollar plans to "update" and "renew" the American "nuclear triad", presumably to ensure that it remains reliably capable of destroying life on Earth.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte's current effort to humor or appease Trump by trying to convince other NATO member states to increase their military spending to a massive and massively wasteful 5% of their national GNPs is equally insane.
One may wonder, while strongly suspecting the answer, why the governments of self-styled "democracies" do not ask their people, by referendums or other means, whether they would prefer their country's resources to be spent on weaponry to confront "threats" that are either miniscule or nonexistent and wholly imaginary or to be spent on healthcare, education, infrastructure and climate action improvements that are obviously and often desperately needed and that could significantly improve the quality of their people's lives.
One may conclude that it is all about money -- the money paid to and paid out by politicians who, if not all insane, simply prioritize their personal financial and professional self-interests over all other considerations.
Golden Dome IdiocyA "shield" against nuclear attack makes nuclear war more likely
Donald Trump has a dream: a “golden dome” over America to defend the country against nuclear missiles. It’s a repeat of Ronald Reagan’s dream, the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars” after the movie. The problem is that the dream represents a nightmare. How so? Golden Dome would be dangerously escalatory, wildly expensive, and unlikely to work as a "shield" to America. It is worse than a mistake: it is a crime. It represents a massive theft from those who hunger and suffer in America. As Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1953, wasting enormous resources on weapons systems is no way of life at all. It is humanity crucifying itself on a cross of iron. Crucifixion is not made more pleasant when the cross is golden. Put differently, the Golden Dome is a golden idol, a false god, one that by making a massive nuclear strike more likely endangers all of us and God's creation. Golden Dome is a grotesque example of makework militarism and warfare as welfare for weapons makers. Though it's unlikely to work, if it did (partially) it would make a massive nuclear strike more likely, not less, endangering the world with the ecocidal terror of nuclear winter. Golden Dome and the so-called investment in America’s nuclear triad are both examples of socio-technological madness--America’s leaders are like the mutants in "Beneath the Planet of the Apes," worshipping the bombs that twisted them and which can only destroy what's left of civilization. Some Christians today await the apocalypse when Christ is supposed to return--but the most likely apocalypse features not the second coming of a God-man but a third world war featuring bomb-gods of thermonuclear destruction. As Daniel Ellsberg once noted, U.S. nuclear attack plans in the early 1960s envisioned 600 million killed, or 100 Holocausts (before we knew such an attack would lead to nuclear winter). We're lucky this insanity never came to pass. The only sane policy is to cancel Golden Dome and end "investment" in a new nuclear triad. Disarmament, not rearmament, is what's needed. ***** The Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space has released a statement against Golden Dome that you can read here. You can add your name to the statement, as I have. Here are some bullet points released along with the statement:
In short, Golden Dome is a massive, dangerous, and futile vanity project, cloaked in patriotism but driven by profit, politics, and illusion.
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2025 YP Retired Airman |