4th May 2019
THE BULLETIN OF the Atomic Scientists currently has its
Doomsday Clock set to two minutes to midnight — the closest we’ve been to
self-obliteration in nuclear history.
But nuclear weapons are more
than just a terrifying threat to every living thing on earth. For decades,
they’ve been a terrific way to make money.
A new report from PAX, a Dutch peace organization, both
illuminates how profitable it can be for multinational corporations to
manufacture Armageddon and provides a roadmap for taking the money out of mass
death.
The PAX report identifies a
total of $116 billion in current contracts between governments and the private
sector to design, build, and maintain the world’s nuclear arsenals. The actual
amount may be significantly higher, since all nine nuclear powers maintain some
degree of opacity about their nuclear programs. “We know what we can trace,”
says Susi Snyder, the report’s principal author, “but there’s definitely more
out there.”
Many powerful corporations
therefore have incentives to push governments to expand their nuclear
stockpiles. At a recent investor conference, a managing director of the investment
bank Cowen Inc. questioned the CEO of Raytheon, one of the nuclear contractors
listed by PAX. “We’re about to exit the INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
Treaty] with Russia,” the managing director said, and excitedly asked if this
means that “we will really get a defense budget that will really benefit
Raytheon.” (The planet may be destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time,
they will have created a lot of value for shareholders.)
Snyder believes that President
Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the INF Treaty may be paying literal
dividends for Raytheon already. She points out that over a period of three
months after Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal last fall, Raytheon received
an anomalous 44 separate missile contracts worth more than $500 million.
Moreover, corporate lobbying
has already nudged the U.S. to commit to a nuclear “modernization” program —
initiated under former President Barack Obama and expanded under Trump — that
will cost an estimated $1.2 trillion over the next 30 years. And while
modernization sounds good, what’s planned will actually make U.S. nukes much more deadly, something to which Russia is already planning to respond. The final result may be an extremely modern
nuclear war.
PAX, however, does not counsel
despair, but instead sees the intertwining of the private sector and nuclear
weapons as a potential point of leverage.
The five largest known current
beneficiaries of nuclear weapons spending are all U.S.-based multinationals:
Huntington Ingalls Industries ($29.9 billion), Lockheed Martin ($25.2 billion),
Honeywell International ($16.5 billion), General Dynamics ($5.8 billion), and
Jacobs Engineering ($5.3 billion).
The report also identifies
large nuclear contracts with companies elsewhere. Airbus, headquartered in the
Netherlands, develops nuclear-armed missiles for France. A British company
called Serco has a 25-year contract to help manage and operate the U.K. Atomic
Weapons Establishment, the center of the United Kingdom’s nuclear program.
Bharat Dynamics Limited in Hyderabad helps make two of India’s
nuclear-capable missiles.
Among the hundreds of nuclear
contracts are some gems of nuclear insanity. Boeing has received $16 million to
develop a “Flight Termination Receiver” that would theoretically allow nuclear
missiles to be destroyed after a mistaken launch.
This could change the U.S.
nuclear calculus in an extremely dangerous way. There have been many false
alarms in the past that Russian missiles were headed toward the U.S. We’re here
now only because no president responded to the alarms, in part because they
knew such a response would be irrevocable. If future presidents believe that
they have an end of the world “take back,” they may be tempted to launch U.S.
nuclear missiles in response to another false alarm. But of course, no
technology is ever 100 percent effective — especially when it’s built by the
company that brought us the 737 Max. And if just one missile failed to self-destruct,
a full-out nuclear war would soon follow.
That’s the bad news. Here’s the
qualified good news.
PAX is a member of the
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the Nobel Peace
Prize in 2017. ICAN played a key role in the promotion of the Treaty on the
Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, which was adopted that year at the United Nationsand therefore, opened for
ratification by member states.
ICAN’s strategy with the TPNW is a sneaky one. They
do not aim to begin by trying to persuade countries with nuclear weapons to
abandon them. Rather, they aim to start by persuading non-nuclear countries to ratify
the treaty. Such countries will then be prohibited from possessing nuclear
weapons — and from allowing them to transit through them or permitting their
production on their territory.
If all goes according to plan, this will create a slowly
tightening noose around the nuclear weapons states. If the Netherlands were to
ratify TPNW, Airbus could no longer help build France’s nuclear missiles. The
Italian company Leonardo also lends a hand with France’s nuclear program and
likewise could not do so if Italy ratifies the treaty.
But beyond legal restrictions, ICAN hopes that grassroots
organizing for TPNW country by country will eventually create a societal taboo
around nuclear weapons that will put severe pressure on private-sector
corporations and eventually the current nuclear states. If this sounds utopian,
it should be remembered that such taboos have been created around biological
and chemical weapons, as well as land mines and cluster bombs. There are still
holdout countries for each, but they’ve faced greater and greater opprobrium as
time goes by, and it’s not impossible to imagine that there will be eventual
complete compliance in each case.
PAX points out that the TPNW has already helped create
enough stigma surrounding nuclear weapons that two enormous pension funds have
divested from nuclear arms producers. The Norwegian Government Pension Fund,
the second-largest pension fund on earth, has sold its investments in, among
other companies, Huntington Ingalls, Lockheed Martin, Airbus, and Boeing. The
Dutch civil service fund ABP is the world’s fifth-largest and has also divested
from the nuclear arms industry. “Changes in society, also at an international
level,” said an ABP executive, mean that “nuclear
weapons no longer fit in with our sustainable and responsible investment
policy.”
This perspective is now quietly making its way across the
Atlantic. This January, a bill was introduced in the Massachusetts State Legislature that would
require the state’s pension funds to divest from nuclear manufacturers. The
city of Cambridge has already done so. Ojai, California, will not make any future investments in the
makers or funders of nuclear weapons.
“If Lockheed Martin can stop making cluster bombs because
they’re losing investors across Europe,” says Snyder, “we know corporations can
be moved. … It takes a long time with businesses, but you can do it faster than
with governments.”
And that’s the point of Pax’s report: It wasn’t created for passive
consumption, but to put basic information in the hands of activists, so that
they can exert the power of basic sanity.
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