Senators, don’t give Trump more nukes

Iappreciate most positions that Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich take in the Senate, but we diverge on a significant issue: your support of “nuclear modernization.”

The Congressional Budget Office says former President Barack Obama’s plan, which is in effect, will cost $1.2 trillion over the next 30 years. Donald Trump wants to spend even more to bolster the nuclear stockpile. The Department of Defense wants to develop a low-yield warhead for a ballistic missile and reintroduce a sealaunched cruise missile.

President Trump is impulsive, unstable and belligerent. I doubt he believes in or understands the concept of nuclear winter. It’s unlikely he’s pondered the consequences of nuclear war, though he’s threatening to start one.

You continue to be instrumental in making nukes available to whomever is president. Trump is who he is. If he precipitates a nuclear war, you are culpable for helping make it possible.

Seventy-seven years after the start of the Manhattan Project, New Mexico remains among the poorest states. Nuclear weapons development is capital intensive. Wealthy contractors skim vast sums of money off the top. The money is then mostly sequestered in Wall Street investments instead of circulating through the economy. If instead, $1.2 trillion were invested in human needs such as child and elder care and more teachers, worker’s earnings would go into the economy.

It’s considered a given that to be part of New Mexico’s congressional delegation, you have to support nuclear weapons development. I don’t believe it. But even if it’s true, is it worth being a senator knowing you helped make these weapons available to a Donald Trump? If he wakes up in the middle of the night, angry at some insult, and decides to blow up the world, blood will be on your hands.

Shel Neymark is a resident of Embudo.