Nuclear weapons have been U.S. society’s plumb line for seven decades. Even when other issues capture our attention and the atomic threat fades in and out of public consciousness, nuclear arms and their sprawling reach — physical, political, cultural, economic, psychological — endure. They are always somewhere in the picture, even if we happen to be looking elsewhere.

It’s this constant but unseen presence that makes a story like one theWashington Post ran recently so jolting, if also so utterly predictable. “The B61 bomb: A case study in cost and needs” sets out the Pentagon’s plans to refurbish the 500 or so B61s in its arsenal. But more importantly it goes on to detail how the U.S. government plans to overhaul the nation’s vast nuclear weapons complex over the next decade, with a minimum price tag of $352 billion. If history is any gauge, it is likely to cost much more.

This news, so far as I can tell, hasn’t nudged its way into the speeches of the presidential candidates. The citizenry isn’t being asked to weigh in on this projected re-run of nuclear politics and all that it implies. While this would be a perfect time to have a reasoned and spirited debate about these plans, this hasn’t been scheduled. Assessing what being a nuclear state for nearly seventy years has meant, mulling on its consequences for us now, and envisioning what it might mean going forward — none of this is in the works. Instead we are put on notice, fleetingly, by the Washington Post.

Democracy is purportedly on display on many fronts, but rarely on the nuclear one. Since the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, nuclearism has shaped our culture and society in ...

When my daughter was little and I read to her regularly, one illustrated book was a favorite of ours.  In a series of scenes, it described frustrating incidents in the life of a young girl, each ending with the line -- which my tiny daughter would boom out with remarkable force -- “that makes me mad!”  It was the book’s title and a repetitively cathartic moment in our reading lives.  And it came to mind recently as, in my daily reading, I stumbled across repetitively mind-boggling numbers from the everyday life of our National Security Complex.

For our present national security moment, however, I might amend the book’s punch line slightly to:That makes no sense!

Now, think of something you learned about the Complex that fried your brain, try the line yourself... and we’ll get started.

Are you, for instance, worried about the safety of America’s “secrets”?  Then you should ...

Americans may feel more distant from war than at any time since World War II began.  Certainly, a smaller percentage of us -- less than 1% -- serves in the military in this all-volunteer era of ours and, on the face of it, Washington’s constant warring in distant lands seems barely to touch the lives of most Americans. 

And yet the militarization of the United States and the strengthening of the National Security Complex continues to accelerate.  The Pentagon is, by now, a world unto itself, with a staggering budget at a moment when no other power or combination of powers comes near to challenging this country’s might. 

In the post-9/11 era, the military-industrial  READ FULL POST 7 COMMENTS

I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth. On March 22nd, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Jr. signed off on new guidelines allowing the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a post-9/11 creation, to hold on to information about Americans in no way known to be connected to terrorism -- about you and me, that is -- for up to five years. (Its previous outer limit was 180 days.) This, Clapper claimed, “will enable NCTC to accomplish its mission more practically and effectively.”

Joseph K., that icon of single-lettered anonymity from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, would undoubtedly have felt right at home in Clapper’s Washington. George Orwell would surely have had a few pungent words to say about those anodyne words “practically and effectively,” not to speak of “mission.”

For most Americans, though, it was just life as we’ve known it since September 11, 2001, since we scared ourselves to death and accepted that just about anything goes, as long as it supposedly involves protecting us from terrorists. Basic information or misinformation, possibly about you, is to be stored away for five ...

Think of Iraq as the AIG of wars -- the only difference being that the bailout there didn’t involve just three payouts.  More than eight years after the Bush administration invaded that country, the bailout is, unbelievably enough, still going.  Even as the U.S. military withdraws, the State Department is planning to spend billions more in taxpayer dollars to field an army of hired-gun contractors to replace it.  Afghanistan?  It could have been the Lehman Brothers of conflicts, but when Barack Obama entered the Oval Office he chose the Citigroup model instead, and surged troops in twice in 2009.  In other words, he double-TARPed that war, and ever since, the bailout money has been flooding in.

Until now -- as the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations make clear -- “too big to fail” has meant only one set of institutions: the plundering financial outfits that played such a role in driving the U.S. economy off a cliff in 2008, looked like they might themselves collapse in a heap of bad deals and indebtedness, and were bailed out by Washington.  Isn’t it finally time to expand the too-big-to-fail category to include the Pentagon, the U.S. Intelligence Community, and more generally the National Security Complex?

There is, of course, one major difference between those bailed-out financial institutions and the Complex: however powerful ...