Drug Overdoses, ICBMs as "Nuclear Sponges," and Military Might as National Religion

 I. Drug Overdoses By the Numbers

93K - Estimated number of Americans who died of  drug overdoses in 2020, a 30 percent increase over 2019.

4x - Number of times more likely a Black man in Missouri is to die of a drug overdose than a white person.

70% - Approximate increase in drug overdose deaths in 2020 among Black men in Massachusetts.

50x - Number of times more potent the prescription painkiller fentanyl is than heroin. 

$4.5B - Minimum amount that Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, is required to pay out in the most recently settled cases of the opioid crisis.

8 - Number of states that allow the sale of naloxone, a medication of OxyContin, a medication that reverses opioid overdoses, without a prescription. (Source: Gloria Oladipo, The Nation, July 2021).

II. ICBMs as "Nuclear Sponge" in Five States

Most people probably have not heard the term "nuclear sponge" before. It refers to Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, and North Dakota, where U.S. land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) sit in underground silos, serving as a "sponge" for nuclear attacks by Russia, China or another adversary armed with nuclear weapons. "The idea is [that] the missiles in these states would be targeted, since the adversary knows exactly where they are, and would seek to destroy them before they could be launched in a nuclear war.

Largely forgotten but not gone, 400 ICBMs have been in their silos since 1959, despite the Cold War having ended nearly 30 years ago. Now comes the Strangelovian plan to replace these missiles with new ones, in a program dubbed the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GNSD), or more properly, the Money Pit Missile.

The projected cost of our tax dollars for these new missies is $264 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The overall cost of upgrading the entire US nuclear weapons complex is projected by the CBO at $1.7 trillion over 30 years. Congress and three successive administrations, including one seem unconcerned about the opportunity cost of this folly. 

Surely, were there a national referendum on priorities, people would choose addressing climate chaos and pandemics, remedying racial and economic inequality, and creating green jobs by sustainably rebuilding the country's crumbling infrastructure, over new nuclear weapons. Said weapons are supposedly only for deterrence, designed never to be used, to rust in peace." (Paul Olson and Kevin Martin, "Midlands Voices: Nebraska a 'nuclear sponge'? Let's move away from this Cold War thinking," 'Omaha World-Herald,' no date supplied).

III. Military Might is Our National Religion

# "We believe in wars. From Korea to Vietnam, Afghanistan to Iraq, the Cold War on Terror, and so many military interventions, in between, including Grenada, Panama, and Somalia, Americans are always fighting somewhere.

#We believe in weaponry, the more expensive the better. The under-performing F-35 stealth fighter may cost $1.45 trillion over its lifetime. An updated nuclear triad... may cost [a minimum of $1.7 trillion]. New (and malfunctioning) aircraft carriers cost us more than $10 billion each ... despite a  history of  their redundancy, ridiculously high price, regular cost overruns and mediocre performance. Meanwhile, Americans squabble over a few hundred million dollars for the arts and humanities.

#We believe in weapons of mass destruction. ... We work overtime to ensure 'infidels' and 'atheists' (the Iranians and North Koreans, etc.) don't get them. Historically, no country has devoted more research or money to deadly nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry than the United States."

# "We believe military spending brings wealth and jobs galore even when it measurably doesn't. Military production is both increasingly automated and increasingly outsourced, leading to far fewer good-paying American jobs compared to spending on education, infrastructure repairs of and improvements in roads, bridges, levees, and the like..."

#"A more likely ending (than apocalyptic worldwide destruction) is a slow-motion collapse of American's imperial empire and the church of the military that goes with it, the resulting chaos possibly leading to a Second Coming, not of Christ, but of medieval levels of meanness and misery." (Source: An edited account of William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). Astore's writing originally appeared in TomDispatch.com, 8/13/19.)