To understand how America is preparing for its nuclear future, follow Melissa Durkee’s fifth-grade students as they shuffle into Room 38 at Preston Veterans’ Memorial School in Preston, Conn. One by one, the children settle in for a six-week course taught by an atypical educator, the defense contractor General Dynamics.
“Does anyone know why we’re here?” a company representative asks. Adalie, 10, shoots her hand into the air. “Um, because you’re building submarines and you, like, need people, and you’re teaching us about it in case we’re interested in working there when we get older,” she ventures.
Adalie is correct. The U.S. Navy has put in an order for General Dynamics to produce 12 nuclear ballistic missile submarines by 2042 — a job that’s projected to cost $130 billion. The industry is struggling to find the tens of thousands of new workers it needs. For the past 18 months, the company has traveled to elementary schools across New England to educate children in the basics of submarine manufacturing and perhaps inspire a student or two to consider one day joining its shipyards.
Don’t spend this enormous sum of resources and manpower on a system we will - in the best case scenario - never use.
Instead, invest the effort in building domestic surpluses of clean energy, transportation, and housing, recycling the existing surplus of consumer waste, and repairing damage to the domestic ecology so as to increase the survivability of the human species into the next century.
Oh no but the world is so dangerous and they hate our freedom dontchaknow. /s
A handful of hydrogen bombs could wipe all live off the face of the earth, but we need to have 100x that in our arsenal set to a hair’s trigger, just in case.