Build Submarines – Destroy the World!

Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.

Whenever I watch my hometown baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, at Fenway Park I’m told by a message painted along the first and third base lines to “build submarines.” At commercial breaks between innings, sometimes I get another reminder courtesy of the following ad:

The ad features some serious welding, including a comely female welder, showcasing the diversity of the military-industrial complex. Hooray America!

We build giants, the ad says, but there’s no sense of what those giants can do to the world. That’s where Frida Berrigan comes in. Her post today at TomDispatch.com details the awesome destructive power of the Navy’s new class of nuclear-missile-firing submarines. I like her title: The Art of the Submarine, or 5,824 Hiroshimas per Sub.

The new subs are part of the Columbia class, but they really should be called the Armageddon class. Here’s how Berrigan describes them:

Columbia Class nuclear submarines [are what] General Dynamics Electric Boat is building right now. The Navy’s budget for just 12 of those ballistic missile submarines is $126.4 billion. Imagine! If the Navy’s budget for that one weapons system was a country, it would have the third-largest military budget on earth.

The Columbia will be the biggest and most expensive submarine ever built. How perfectly American, right? Even down to the fact that it’s named in honor of the District of Columbia, the disenfranchised, desperately unequal, and remarkably segregatedcapital of the United States of America. I’d love to see an artwork that encapsulates that grim irony.

Those new Columbia subs will dwarf what Beatrice Cuming’s welders were working on when she captured them in 1944. Each will be 560 feet long, or a few feet more than the height of the Washington Monument. And its bulk will displace 20,810 tons of water.

But the size and expensiveness aren’t anywhere near as important as the payload of nuclear weapons it will carry with a power those welders of Cuming’s time could hardly have imagined and that Cuming would have been hard-pressed to render with brushes and paint. Each of those 12 new submarines will be equipped with 16 nuclear missile tubes for Trident II D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). And those tubes will each be able to house up to 12 independently targetable nuclear warheads, known as W88s, costing about $150 million each and packing a mind-boggling 455-kiloton wallop. 

Okay, now do the math with me. What does 12 times 16 times 12 equal? That’s right: 2,304. Now, multiply that by the thermonuclear force of 455 kilotons, and you get more than one million kilotons. An unthinkable power.

America is yet again spending enormous sums of money on weaponry capable of ending life on Earth if those weapons should ever be used. Better dead than red, I suppose.

It’s great that welders are being put to work, but maybe they should be fixing America’s many bridges and buildings that are structurally less than sound. After all, why is it a good thing that our comely welder in the ad above is helping to build a “giant” that could very well destroy us all?

Instead of “build submarines” at my favorite ballpark, what we really need are ads like “repair bridges.” And maybe a message as well that submarines whose missiles are equivalent to thousands of Hiroshima bombs are, to put it mildly, a potential season-ending error, not only for Team America, but for team humanity.

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools. He writes at Bracing Views.