February 5, 2025
4 min learn
Elon Musk Can Discover His $2-Trillion Federal Spending Reduce in Nuclear Weapons
DOGE’s Elon Musk ought to flip his $2-trillion hatchet to wasteful and dangerous U.S. nuclear weapons modernization plans
Famously lucky, Elon Musk now faces a uncommon alternative—delivering on one in every of his signature overblown guarantees. From his newly created White Home cost-cutting desk, all Musk should do is suggest ending one of the crucial misguided, wasteful and harmful packages contemplated by the U.S. authorities, one which Scientific American has pushed for elimination.
Final November Musk set an bold goal for his Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE), the meme-coin-joke identify for his cost-cutting workplace, his reward for bankrolling Trump’s marketing campaign. Below DOGE, Musk stated he would trim $2 trillion from the federal funds. That’s a hefty sum even for the house mogul now considered the $400-billion-worth wealthiest man on Earth. (Musk subsequently downplayed $2 trillion as a “best-case outcome.”)
Fortunately for him, there may be one large, fats goal with simply that price ticket, already sitting in Uncle Sam’s procuring cart, and it’s ripe for reducing: nuclear weapons. In 2010 Trump’s nemesis, then president Barack Obama, first proposed “modernizing” the U.S. triad of land-, sea- and air-based weapons over greater than three a long time. Nearly unnoticed outdoors of nationwide safety circles, the initiative’s $1-trillion sticker worth has almost doubled and, as American College nationwide safety scholar Sharon Weiner wrote final yr, “is likely to escalate even further by 2050—the supposed end date for modernization.”
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Conveniently sufficient for Musk, his new boss, Trump, known as in January for talks on decreasing nuclear weapons with China and Russia, whereas talking to the World Financial Discussion board in Davos, Switzerland. “Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about today, because you don’t want to hear it,” Trump stated. “It’s too depressing.”
Trump is correct. DOGE ought to hearken to him. Have at it, you noble knights of slaying authorities waste. We don’t want greater than $140 billion value of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) planted throughout the Midwest, their total price leaping 37 % final yr, triggering a “critical breach” of federal funds guidelines. Funds-busting worth will increase have additionally dogged the Nationwide Nuclear Safety Administration’s efforts to fabricate extra plutonium “pits,” hole metallic spheres manufactured from plutonium that when compressed, set off nuclear explosions, of which we have already got loads, in previous weapons. Dogged by delays, pit facility prices have jumped to as a lot as $37 billion, roughly quadrupling preliminary estimates. “I know that’s a lot of money,” stated NNSA administrator Jill Hruby, final April. “However, I am much more confident in this estimate than earlier estimates in part, because it is more consistent with other recent similar projects,” she added, citing six over-budget $73.2 billion nuclear reactors in France and three $50-billion-plus freeway tasks within the U.S.
I don’t know why these numbers could be reassuring.
Prices apart, the underside line is that extra nuclear weapons make us much less secure, the chief lesson of the chilly conflict arms race. Amnesia appears to have overtaken consciousness of the menace to humanity of nuclear warfare— lots of of tens of millions of fast deaths, adopted by nuclear winter ravenous billions. Even a restricted nuclear conflict would trigger international famine.
Nonetheless, China is ratcheting up its nuclear forces—to maybe 900 weapons—over fears of a U.S. first strike with its modernized weapons. In the meantime Russia has signaled it desires to head off a nuclear weapons buildup with the approaching expiration of the New START Treaty, which limits each nations to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads. Situations are ripe for the rarest of Trumpian “deals,” one which succeeds, and prevents a three-way rerun of the chilly conflict’s fruitless, perilous warhead race.
Inevitably, standing in the way in which of a smart DOGE name for reducing again on nukes and heading to the treaty desk is Challenge 2025, the far-right-authored blueprint for the Trump presidency. Amongst its calls: “Expand and modernize the U.S. nuclear force so that it has the size, sophistication, and tailoring to deter Russia and China simultaneously.”
In different phrases, begin a brand new arms race.
Amongst its many different horrible concepts, Challenge 2025 requires the Navy to develop an unneeded, undesirable, nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile to additional frighten China; restart nuclear checks whose fallout unfold cancers amongst tens of hundreds of Individuals in the course of the chilly conflict (regardless of the Complete Nuclear Check Ban Treaty) and deploy space-based weapons, one thing we’ve warned the Russians in opposition to for years. “Should these recommendations be implemented, they will result in a sharp decline in the security of Americans and a dramatic increase in the risk of regional and global conflicts,” wrote nationwide safety analyst Joseph Cirincione, in July, for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Solely Richard Nixon might go to China. After putting in an unqualified Fox TV host atop the Division of Protection, absolutely Trump can tackle the nuclear military-industrial complicated. His designated cost-cutter, Musk, has already questioned one U.S. Air Drive (and congressional) sacred cow, the famously overpriced F-35 fighter. By nixing nukes’ modernization, Musk might take that large $2-trillion chew out of the federal funds. That may be far more actual, and smarter, than the imaginary trillions that Trump’s funds director paused in January to smell for “woke gender ideology, and the green new deal,” amongst different targets, on the federal books.
Granted, Musk first promised to make his $2-trillion cuts a one-year discount of the funds, not one taking part in out over a long time like nuclear modernization. Nevertheless it wouldn’t be the primary time one in every of his guarantees suffered some shrinkage. He has cited the danger of “some doomsday event” as a purpose for delivery humanity to Mars. DOGE provides him, and the Trump administration, an opportunity to assist head off a nuclear catastrophe on Earth, one doomsday occasion that sits in plain view for all of us. That simply would possibly give his outsized Mars guarantees just a little further time to pan out.
That is an opinion and evaluation article, and the views expressed by the creator or authors usually are not essentially these of Scientific American.
