As Jim Mattis advocates for more nuclear weapons, it’s disturbing that the US is talking openly about a kind of military escalation that could end in the whole planet being destroyed, political commentator Lew Rockwell told RT.
US Secretary of Defense James Mattis has urged Congress to increase defense spending.
“In a world awash in change and increasing threats, there is no room for complacency,” Mattis said in his opening statement, naming the threats as “rogue regimes such as North Korea and Iran,” Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) and “long-term strategic competition with China and Russia.”
Last week, the Pentagon issued the Nuclear Posture Review, in which it names North Korea, China and Russia among its main security threats and it states that “it is not possible to delay the modernization of our [US] nuclear forces.”
While the Trump administration is pushing for a $700-billion defense budget for 2018, Rockwell thinks any such increase could have dangerous consequences.
“They want more money because they want more money, this is what the government lives to do, it lives to spend. The Pentagon lives to kill people, that is the job of the military,” he told RT.
“Mr. Mattis was known as ‘Mad Dog Mattis’, he has become ‘Sick Puppy Mattis’ now that he is advocating for the US of more nuclear weapons and he talks about using small weapons, tactical weapons. But even a small nuclear weapon is the size of one of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima or Nagasaki. So, this is an unbelievable outrage that the US is doing this,” he added.
Rockwell said this happens because the neocons entirely control US foreign and nuclear policies. He recalled “the famous neo-con book called ‘Thinking the Unthinkable’ some decades ago about arguing the US should make use of nuclear weapons on a regular, normal basis.”
He also noted that the US is the only country ever to use nuclear weapons “on two undefended civilian filled cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.” Rockwell said he thinks this was a “terrible war crime committed by [President] Harry Truman."
“And now they are advocating to do more, I guess they have Dr. Strangelove writing US military policy. It is an unbelievable outrage. Also, when you start using these weapons, it is all too easy to escalate and we can see the end of the world, this is what people are potentially talking about: ending the world,” he said.
Rockwell pointed out that the US military budget is more than 10 times the size of Russia’s and is by far the largest in the world: “much bigger than China’s, and much bigger than anybody else’s."
“And they want more, they want to spend more money, they want more troops, more weapons, more planes, more everything evil. It is a horrendous thing,” he continued.
“I don’t know what is going to happen, but it is very disturbing that these guys are talking openly about this kind of military escalation that can end in whole countries being destroyed and the whole planet being destroyed,” he claimed.
According to Rockwell, “the US has got…almost a thousand bases in this world, all around these other countries, it is threatening their destruction, it is threatening to destroy Iran, Hezbollah, many other different countries and entities in the world and we are supposed to think that we are defending somebody.”
However, Gregory Copley, the President of the International Strategic Studies Association, argues that this kind of spending “is justified because the US military is substantially out of date.”
“The US has spent the last couple of decades fighting wars, not planning for new wars. So, it actually got a military that has been largely engaged in fighting yesterday’s wars,” he added.
Copley believes that any government, whether it is China, Russia, the US or Australia, has to plan against capabilities, not against intentions.
In his view, “Russia, in particular, does not pose an imminent threat simply because there is too much mutuality of interest with the US and the West to move towards a nuclear confrontation."
“But what you plan for, if you are a military planner, is not intent, you plan against capability and as long as Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, India and Pakistan or Israel, as long as these countries have nuclear weapons, they have to be taken into account when planning one’s own capabilities and defenses – whether it is to defend against incoming ballistic missiles or nuclear weapons or whether to project dominance,” he told RT.