Are American ICBMs Really Still on a 2-Minute Alert?

The American Conservative publisher and my Cato Institute-associated friend John Basil Utley looks at the prospects for avoiding accidental nuclear war.

Our wasteful military budget is overloaded with incredibly expensive aircraft carriers, F-35 fighters, and now another bomber.

Surprisingly, U.S. ICBMs, the Minuteman III, are still kept on two-minute hair-trigger alert still seemingly run by old computers with floppy disks.

Think too of all the new enemies American wars have created in the Muslim World. For some hackers the ultimate dream would be setting off Russia and America to destroy each other!

I dwell on these subjects because I once saw a great city, East Berlin in 1952, flat as far as the eye could see. I know that such destruction can happen again, and that is why I have written in support of civil-defense programs.

It is fitting to hear the howling of the Israeli lobby on Fox News defending its peace-busting settlements. Let’s remember that 30 percent of the aggressive settlers in Gaza were Americans with an American passport in their back pocket. The Lobby, as I have written, is much more related to the military-industrial complex than to the interests of most Jews.

In hours and hours of coverage on Fox and CNN, it was almost impossible to learn that most American Jews oppose the settlements and many supported the (recent) US vote abstention.

Not only J Street, a Jewish group promoting a two-state solution, supported the UN vote. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote on Twitter that most of the world and Israel agreed with Secretary of State John Kerry. As the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman wrote, “what a true friend of Israel would do today is just what Obama and Kerry tried … tell our dear ally that it is driving drunk and needs to stop the settlements.”