Again, America’s enemies are arming and modernizing while America wants to continue suicidally disarming. This brings into play serious doubts what side the previous administrations (as well as current) are working for, as this is beyond incompetence or ignorance.
This is the same defense secretary who worked under the Clinton administration. This is the same Clinton administration who purposely sold American supercomputers to China via the U.S. Department of Commerce and is largely responsible for the Asian giant’s threatening rise. One can only wonder what has been given to Russia since then.
Former Defense Secretary William Perry on Thursday called for the Pentagon to skip replacing its aging stockpile of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), arguing that U.S. nuclear-armed submarines and a new long-range bomber program would provide sufficient deterrent value.
Perry, a close friend and mentor of the current defense secretary, Ash Carter, said the United States was on “the brink of a new nuclear arms race,” that would be extremely expensive, and the ICBMs were not necessary as a deterrent force.
He said they also posed the greatest threat of an accidental nuclear war since they were easy to launch.
But he said he was skeptical that his recommendation would ever become reality, given political pressures to maintain parity with Russia in the area of nuclear weapons. Russia is in the process of retiring its Soviet-era ICBMs and replacing them with new weapons systems.
Perry’s comments came a day after the Pentagon’s chief arms buyer said the Defense Department viewed all three legs of the so-called nuclear “triad” – nuclear-armed submarines, a next-generation long-range bomber, and replacement of the current ICBMs – as priorities in its fiscal 2017 budget proposal.
Full article: Former U.S. official urges Pentagon to skip buying new ICBMs (Reuters)
Global Geopolitics 