Think Student Debt is Bad? We Might Have to Pay For a Bunch of New Nukes.
By Meghan McCall and Annika Erickson-Pearson
We’ve entered into a modern nuclear weapons competition with Russia. The U.S. is expected to pay $1.7 trillion on new and improved nuclear weapons over the next 30 years, an insane dollar amount on par with the current student loan debt. Russia has already undertaken efforts to modernize and construct new nuclear weapons that threaten U.S. mainland. Who will pay for these ridiculous decisions? We will. Millennials.
President Donald Trump is meeting with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin next week, but why should we care? The two leaders have an opportunity to extend the bilateral arms control agreements that have guided our nuclear disarmament since the end of Cold War in the 1990s. Essentially, these agreements are one of the major things that has kept the peace and hiatus of nuclear threats between the U.S. and Russia. They have also required both nations to decrease their nuclear arsenals. This is huge. If they decide not to discuss these agreements or extend them, the tax dollars we will contribute to this madness will make our college debt look like one night of a Washington, D.C. happy hour in comparison. It also means that generations that have not experienced the destruction of a nuclear weapon could, especially under this administration.
Probably the most important piece of information to know is that the U.S. and Russia make up 92 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, both with about 6,500 in their arsenal. To make matters worse, these doomsday weapons are at the fingertips of unpredictable men.
The current relationship between the United States and Russia is tense. Trump already rejected Putin’s first proposal to extend a major arms control treaty on a February 2017 phone call. Russia expert Olga Oliker explains that “there’s a lot of distrust and belief that the other side is actively trying to destabilise the situation.”
The risk of nuclear war is at its highest point since the 1960s. “We are starting a new Cold War,” former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry says. “We seem to be sleepwalking into this new nuclear arms race. … We and the Russians and others don’t understand what we are doing.”
The extension of these arms control agreements could help change the destructive path we are on. If we are going to be held responsible for footing the bill for these new weapons systems, let’s make our voices heard and make sure we have a say in what we’re paying for.
To prevent the continuation of this spiral into new and unnecessary nuclear weapons, we need agreements like the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START).
New START is an arms reduction agreement between the U.S. and Russia. It requires both countries to gradually reduce their number of nuclear warheads and missiles, and ensures that both sides are complying through verification requirements, inspections, and information sharing. The bad part? It expires in three years. The good part? It’s working. President Barack Obama and then-President Dmitry Medvedev signed it into law in 2011. It’s been a successful agreement since. Both the U.S. and Russia are meeting their obligations.
The key to New START is that it requires an open channel of communication between the otherwise stubborn leaders. While we weren’t alive to experience the height of the Cold War, we don’t need to make the same mistakes our predecessors did, allowing our lack of information to spiral into unreasonable military spending.
A major part of the solution is transparency. When we commit to sharing information and allow inspections between the two countries, we are less likely to fall into the trap of believing fantastical conspiracy theories about mega-weapons that the other side could be building. And when we don’t believe the other side is building crazy weapons, we are less likely to build them ourselves.
We, and you, have an opportunity to create stability, reduce the chances of a nuclear war, and stop the waste of money on these unnecessary weapons.
If the aftermath of the 2016 election has taught us anything, it’s that voting matters. Politics matters. Our voice matters. And if you think that reducing the chance that two presidents could kill us all in the midst of a temper tantrum is important, now is the time to say so. It’s up to us to make noise, speak up, and pressure our elected leaders to make wise choices with the planet we will soon inherit.
Meghan McCall is the policy associate at Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation, and Annika Erickson-Pearson a research assistant.
