Disarmament Times: May 2026

DT (Disarmament Times): With a senseless war in the Middle East that is still unresolved, your new book on the current military-industrial complex is most timely.  What light can you shed on our situation?

WH (William Hartung): Well, when you have a huge war machine, it's easy to go to war quickly, but I think this war is driven as much by ideologues as by profiteers. Donald Trump seemed to think this could be like Venezuela. They'd swoop in, they'd switch leaders, add water, and have a pro-US regime. But within a short time, he had a region-wide war on his hands that he had no idea what to do about. And Iran was using drones worth thousands of dollars, while the US was fighting back with missiles worth millions of dollars. They couldn't possibly defend every possible place Iran might strike, and they miscalculated Iran's capabilities, because, as you remember, Trump had said last year, he completely obliterated Iran's nuclear capabilities. So, a reporter asked him, “Well, if you obliterated them, why did you say they were still threatening us?” And Trump said, well, there might be a bomb buried down there somewhere.

So this is not a well-thought-out war. They didn't even bother to come up with good lies. I mean, in the G. W. Bush administration, you had Cheney leaning on intelligence people. There were cooked up intelligence estimates.  Trump just did it. And every other day there's a different reason. Some people call it operation Epstein Fury as a distraction from Epstein, right? I don't inhabit Trump's brain, so I don't know that that's a primary reason, but I think it's partly his will to power. It's partly his miscalculation of what military force can achieve. And the man is not well. I mean, basically we've got a declining empire lashing out, and we've got somebody at the helm who can't make basic decisions or draw logical conclusions. 

His sidekick Pete Hegseth seems to think the job of the military is to brutally kill people, not to be a defensive organization, right?  And to make it all white, like the Michigan militia but with better guns.  The whole point of Project 2025 was not just policy. It was to cleanse the administration of anybody who might stand up to Trump. Mark Milley said, you may remember, that you can't use police domestically. You shouldn't start World War III with China. Nobody's saying that now. They're all loyalists. They're all equally complicit, and of course, the administration is interpenetrated with the unhinged tech bros of Silicon Valley who care nothing about the lives of other human beings, only about making money from machines, living forever, colonizing space.

So we're at a particularly stark moment.  But I do think that people are starting to rally.  Not just the size of the rallies, but the risks people are willing to take.  And the response is global. Italian dock workers are refusing to load arms to Israel. NATO Allies are not letting the US use bases to attack Iran. So the problem is, it's a transparently illegal, brutal war. People are mobilizing, but time is short and the destruction is quick. Organizing takes longer, so we're up against it, okay?

DT: Thank you, so in summary, you would say that maybe the weapons makers are profiting from this, surely, but they weren't necessarily agitating for it?

WT: Not directly.  As long as they get their money, right? However, at the Quincy Institute, we do research on who funds the DC think tanks and what they advocate.  For example, the Atlantic Council and the Center for New American Security pushed for war with Iran and each received over a million dollars from Pentagon contractors, companies like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.  So these companies indirectly pay people to lobby for war, but it's once removed. If the head of Lockheed Martin gave a speech saying, let's kill people so we can make money, people might recoil in horror, although you never know these days. But if it comes from an alleged expert, it seems to go down easier.  [Editor’s note: for more on this topic see New Research: Think Tank Funding Tracker Provides Insight into Cheerleading of Iran War and How Think Tanks Sell War.]

So indirectly, the weapons makers create the conditions for war. But that decision, I think, was Trump's, thank you. And of course, Netanyahu bombed first, just as he did last year. So they're kind of equally responsible. If anything, sometimes it almost seems like Trump's the junior partner, right?

DT: Thank you, you’ve really clarified this. All right, let's go on to the next question. So, Israel and the US have claimed that their 2025 and 2026 attacks on Iran were justified by the latter's nuclear ambitions, but it appears these attacks have only elevated nuclear hardliners within Iran's elite. What have you learned about the nuclear weapons complex in the US and abroad that our readers need to know in this context?

WH: Well, it's interesting, Donald Trump trashed the Iran Nuclear Deal, which was working. He called it Obama's deal, but it was not.  We had European allies, China, and Russia. When in recent history have all those countries been on the same page, and when has there been a deal with that much inspection, so even the opponents were saying, “Well, what about 15 years from now?”  They didn't have a leg to stand on. So Trump said, “Oh, I'll get you a better deal.”  So we end up with a region-wide war in the Middle East, which is decidedly not a better deal. 

And yet he has the nerve to go on television and say “Well, if we hadn't done this, they would have had a bomb already.” This is just more of the nuclear double standard, where the big players don't fulfill their obligations to disarm under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and yet they attack other countries for trying to get nuclear weapons.  Which, if I were a non-nuclear power in the crosshairs of United States, I think my answer would be, well, Kim Jong Un has nukes and they haven't been attacked. It could be a spur to proliferation, right? Exactly. All the major powers—the US, China, Russia—are “modernizing” their nuclear weapons, making them more accurate. The current missile that they're building will be functional until 2075.  We shouldn't be contemplating still having those things in 2075.

And they have this thing called “lifetime extension programs” for the warheads, to make sure they go off should there be a war. What about our lifetimes? Let's extend our lifetimes. Let's get rid of those things, right? And, of course, there's money to be made, and there's the Senate ICBM Coalition—senators from Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Utah. Three of these states have ICBM bases. The fourth, Utah, is the base of Northrop Grumman’s main operations to build the new ICBM, the Sentinel, which is 81% over cost already, because they somehow forgot to figure out that they had to build new silos for the new missiles. They promised jobs to the state of Utah in exchange for tax breaks. Taylor Barnes and intrepid journalists trying to get the details on that had to sue, had to get pro bono lawyers. Finally, the state of Utah said it could not tell people how many jobs were promised because it would compromise the interests of Northrop Grumman.

So with so much of your tax money going to this company, they say it's more important to protect the company than to protect your money.  Much less to protect you, since, as former defense secretary William Perry pointed out, ICBMs are the most likely weapon to cause an accidental nuclear exchange. And because the costs were so high, it should have been reviewed under a procedure called Nunn McCurdy, which could have resulted in cancelation. If you go over 25% of estimated cost, there's supposed to be a serious review. Well, that review took only three weeks, and the conclusion of the review was, “Oh, this is too important. Let's go full speed ahead.”

To be sure, every part of the country gets some of those jobs, not just those four states. But it's remarkable that the senators from those few small states can establish a policy saying the United States cannot go below its current level of ICBMs and cannot study whether refurbishing existing ones would be better than building new ones. Under this policy, the United States cannot get rid of silos that were empty after the New START agreement in case they want to refill them in a future arms race. So that little group is basically wagging the dog of our nuclear policy.

But of course, other people bought in, because some of them go to work for the nuclear industry when they leave the laboratories, place their people on the Hill as staffers, etc., people who are hardly objective to give advice about these things. And of course, the warhead complex is his own beast in New Mexico, California, Texas, Kansas City, Tennessee, and South Carolina, not to mention the waste they've left behind in Colorado, Washington State and elsewhere, and the damage they've done to downwinders in Utah and New Mexico.

So these bombs are killing people, whether we detonate them or not, because of the testing, because of the waste, because of accidents in production. And one of the more hopeful developments was the push by downwinders to expand compensation under the law called RECA (the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act). Finally, New Mexico is covered. But as Tina Cordova (the leader of the movement there) said, it's not nearly sufficient, but it’s a beginning. Josh Hawley, not exactly a bleeding heart, supported this, because the Manhattan Project left radioactive materials in St Louis, which were causing damage to his constituents. So he is talking to the activists on this one issue. He's not really been helpful with almost anything else, so you know that that's not disarmament, it's not sufficient.

But I think it's a demonstration that people on the front lines who've suffered the damage from this, be it uranium mining, testing in the Pacific, building these things—have a special role to play in organizing, strategizing, fighting back against nuclearism. And Mary Dickson, who's a downwinder from Utah, gave a searing speech at a meeting in Washington on the anniversary of the Trinity test, where she talked about losing friends from growing up, because they used to take the snow, which was radioactive, pour sugar on it, and eat it like a snow cone. And so they were killed. And she said, we're all downwinders now. As Arjun Makhijani  has pointed out, there's a whole radioactive archipelago left over from our nuclear program, starting in the Congo and spreading throughout the world. So the idea that we can sit pat, that these things are only for deterrence, that there's no harm in building a sort of the insurance policy of nuclear weapons, denies the point that these things are killing us now through their health impacts.

So I think there's the spark for a new movement, but when the three largest member states of the P5 are running a nuclear arms race and not talking to one another, we have a huge job to do, and it's got to be on an international scale, which was done before. I mean, the Pugwash movement between US and Soviet scientists was a spark for some important changes. But we have so much to do on so many fronts—nuclear abolition, the current wars, etc.—that it's got to be all hands on deck. Yeah, thank you.

DT: Well, nuclear weapons are obviously a big topic that we could talk about for a lot longer. But let’s turn now to the permanent war economy more broadly.

WH: Yes, well in the 70s I went to Columbia College, where I took a course on the permanent war economy with Seymour Melman; he later published this material in a book with that title. Then I got my first think tank job at the Council on Economic Priorities, where I worked with Gordon Adams (now Abby Ross) who wrote The Iron Triangle on the same topic.  I was very much influenced by those books.  And of course Eisenhower had warned about this in his Farewell Address and called it the “Military-Industrial Complex.”  Well, seven decades after the Eisenhower administration, the war machine is twice as big, adjusted for inflation. He didn't have these gigantic companies like Lockheed Martin, which in some years get more money than the entire State Department. We didn't have this tech infusion where they're trying to sell themselves as our saviors, saying they're going to restore US military dominance; the weapons makers are more nimble today, but also greedy, unhinged and deceitful.

And they have basically launched a takeover of the Trump government. J.D. Vance was groomed in Silicon Valley by Peter Thiel. Elon Musk was allowed to dismantle our only economic development agency with a global scope. 25-year-olds from his little team were ripping up agencies in the name of so-called efficiency. But of course, efficiency assumes you understand what you're dealing with, which would mean looking at what works and what doesn't work. This was a sledgehammer, and the Pentagon was barely touched, because that's where Musk and company want to get their money.

There's a lot of competition now between the tech companies like Anduril, Palantir, and SpaceX, and the Lockheed Martins and Boeings of the world. But if you're going to spend a trillion or 1.5 trillion dollars, if you're going to build a boneheaded system like Golden Dome, there's plenty for all of them. They don't even have to compete with each other. They'll just rake in the money. And some of these things like Golden Dome, we know it's not going to work as a leak proof defense, and a $500 billion increase in one year cannot be spent. They might as well just hand the money over to Lockheed Martin and let them bid up their stock prices. They don't have the factories, they don't have the workers, so it's kind of surreal.

It's pork barrel politics, it's militarism, but it's also got this air of unreality, part of which comes from Trump and his mental acuity, or lack thereof, and part of it comes from the fantasies of Silicon Valley’s tech bros, who also think they're going to live forever and colonize space. There's a new book by Jill Lepore coming out this summer, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.  She points out that their agenda—which is basically that machines will rule themselves and rule us—was first broached in a science fiction story 100 years ago. So basically, they're taking science fiction and trying to turn it into a brutal reality at our expense, and we're going to pay for it.

We're supposed to thank them while they become billionaires or trillionaires and destroy the planet and our humanity. So they’re a new species of villain, and I think it's becoming clear to people that these are not normal leaders and shouldn't be shaping our foreign policy. On the flip side, some people just love tech. Well, hey, they put rockets in space, and isn't that nifty? I mean, Palmer Luckey of Anduril, his first creation was the Oculus virtual reality headset that you could play around with at home. And Peter Thiel said, why don't you get into weapons, and gave him some money.  Now he's still a gamer, but he also makes deadly weapons. He also presumes to tell us what our foreign policy should be. That is so wrong, I mean, my head spins just thinking about it.

DT: Thank you, yes.  All right, let me ask now about the influence of these weapons makers on culture. In their book, Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky explored the myriad ways in which power holders shape and manipulate public opinion.  The Trillion Dollar War Machine updates this picture and homes in on the influence of weapons makers over think tanks, academics, the media, Hollywood and the gaming industry. Can you comment further about these things?

WH: OK, let’s start with this concept in foreign policy called soft power.  The cultural influence you are asking about is like their soft power, and it's not being used for good. There's a Pentagon liaison office in Hollywood that can vet the script of any movie that uses a weapon. So not just Top Gun, but all the Marvel movies. There's one where the hero is a woman pilot—Captain Marvel—which is one of the biggest recruiting binges for getting women into the Air Force.  The actress, Bree Larson, actually did recruiting ads for the Air Force.  Now in the real world, a weapon might be a dysfunctional dog, but in the movies, it's brilliant. So it's also propaganda in that sense, and it just puts more war stories in front of the public.  There aren’t a lot of diplomacy stories, and the ones that we do get have to be somewhat unrealistic to keep people's attention. 

Then there’s gaming, which is a bigger industry than Hollywood.  After 9/11, the Pentagon did a study of American youth.  Everybody was saying, oh, they're slackers, they stay in a room playing games all the time. The military was like, we love these people.  They can sit at a console and multitask.  So the military actually consulted gamers on how to design the controls for drones. The Army has an esports team that competes with civilians, one of their biggest recruiting tools.

And then the media. This has long been a problem, not just with the Pentagon, but where journalists who explore topics that the corporate elites don’t like are at risk of losing their jobs.  And on top of that, the media companies are not even hiring people to keep track of the Pentagon, they use industry sources instead.  We had a look at press coverage around the 20-year anniversary of the second Iraq war.  And Peter Beinart, who had supported the war, is one of the only people I know who admitted he was wrong.  

Meanwhile, Jonathan Landay, one of two reporters who got it right, was working for Knight Ridder (now McClatchy), which served medium sized cities. Their editor said, the big papers speak to the people who send other people’s kids to war. We write for the families whose kids get sent to war. And what they did was basic journalism. They didn't just take whatever the president or Pentagon spokespeople said, they talked to independent people in the field who told them part of the real story. They got multiple sources, not like Judith Miller writing for the New York Times, who used a self-serving Iraqi dissident as her primary source for all kinds of misleading stories.  And they were persistent. Then on the right there was Kelly Vlahos, who was writing anti-war material for The American Conservative.

And the conclusion of the discussion was, “is the mainstream media reformable?” I would say, no but we have to push them to do better. But if we want the real story, we need independent media, like Democracy Now.  We need podcasts, substacks, etc. but then you have to curate that. You have to separate the wheat from the chaff, reality from the nonsense and conspiracy theories. So there's a big public education job to be done. In the mainstream, let’s say there’s a Times article that’s pro-war.  Maybe I’ll be quoted in paragraph 32 that says this other guy thinks differently, and that's supposed to be some sort of accomplishment.  The real accomplishment would be getting the whole story out, but that’s not going to happen through those channels most of the time.  Many of the reporters would like to dig deeper, but their editors won't let them do it. Or, for example, when Reuters was excluded from the White House briefing room, I asked a reporter why that mattered. She said, well if we come in with the story two minutes after our adversary puts it up, we get yelled at, so speed is the essence. You can't do any kind of analysis or get other sources if it's just about clicks. So there are all kinds of weaknesses, some are ideological, some are the nature of the business. But as a result we have this flourishing of independent media. Many folks are doing it on their own out of passion, but the information is there. It needs to be consolidated. And people think I'm an expert, but I'm just a translator. I just take in this material, and I try to put it together in a way that's useful.

DT: Thank you. You mentioned Knight Ridder’s coverage of the 2003 Iraq War. There was a fabulous documentary film about that called Shock and Awe.  OK, I want to come back to what you said earlier about Seymour Melman and his book The Permanent War Economy.  Can you say more about this?

WH: Yeah, well, Seymour was an amazing person and a unique thinker.  He spoke with the students during the Columbia strike. He attended City College during the radical period of the 30s.  Melman viewed the war economy as parasitic on the productive economy, because it sucked up so many resources and so much public capital that could be used for better purposes.  He talked about how cost-plus contracting for the DOD corrupted US engineering and management cultures that had been focused on producing efficiently for civilian markets.  At that time, the US was losing out to Germany and Japan, who focused most of their capital and engineering competence on productive investment. He also talked about how to fix the problem, including a national commission and a system of workplace and community-based planning in which “alternative use committees” would facilitate economic conversion of enterprises and industries that had become addicted to military contracts.  Congressman Ted Weiss and UAW leader Walter Reuther promoted Melman’s proposals for economic conversion of the war machine.

It was a species of planning, which is a dirty word in America, of course.  We have socialism for the military contractors and laissez faire for the rest of us, you know. Meanwhile, as Taylor Barnes has pointed out, jobs in the military sector are diminishing. Even the industry trade association said 30 years ago there were three million jobs directly making weapons in United States, and now there are one million. And with the tech revolution, there’ll be some construction jobs building the data centers, but then they can be run by a handful of people. So, you know, the tech sector can't offer jobs either.

What is needed is an alternative public investment scheme that creates tangible jobs that people could imagine working in, otherwise we’ll continue to have resistance to economic conversion of the war economy.  [Editor’s note: for a well-researched outline of just such a public investment proposal, see Jon Rynn, “What a Green New Deal Should Look Like: Filling in the Details.”]

But there are some positive developments.  The UAW not only passed a ceasefire resolution about Gaza, but also a study of how they could restructure the economy so that fewer of their workers had to make their livings from weapons; that was very much in the Walter Reuther tradition.  And the machinists and aerospace union, following in the tradition of William Winpisinger, has a long history of supporting economic conversion. 

Of course, the union movement as a whole is at a weak point now. But there are sparks of renewal in the Amazon organizing, the fight for a fifteen dollar minimum wage, organizing at Starbucks, the March 2026 “Tax the Rich” rally of labor groups, and more.  There's going to be a resurgence of unionization of some sort. One challenge is that decentralized production systems have largely replaced big factories.  Another is the breakdown of solidarity, where workers think “I'm in tech, or I'm this, or I'm that,” and some workers identify with the higher status of their jobs. So there is work to be done pulling folks together.

DT: Thank you.  Let’s turn now to the international picture. Your book is an empirical study of the workings of the permanent war economy in the United States, which is the world's largest exporter of military weapons. What observations and questions do you have about war machines in China, Russia, Europe and elsewhere.

WH: Well, they're all able to do damage, but the United States is head and shoulders above the others. The US accounts for about 40% of global military spending, and a similar percentage of the global arms trade. The US share of the arms trade is about four times the next closest country, France. However, it's not all about what things cost in the age of drones and of non-state actors fighting with small arms. The fact that you're spending a trillion dollars doesn't always mean you're going to win wars, as we see today and as we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the US had superior aircraft and precision guided munitions, but lost to forces that were using improvised explosive devices. Which side knew the local terrain? The US was viewed as an occupier. Morale was sagging among our own troops, there were profiteers siphoning off money and also doing a botched-up job of reconstruction in the war zones.

So, one version of the story is that the United has the most powerful military in the world, the most powerful machine for destroying things. But it's not the most powerful military in terms of achieving objectives, right?  So when they ask for 1.5 trillion dollars, and call it peace through strength, I look at the history of this century and say, what peace and what strength? They haven't won conflicts. They've caused disasters in the Middle East and South Asia.  Our troops have come home, hundreds of thousands of them with physical wounds and PTSD.  We've sapped our economy, spent $8 trillion that could have gotten us off of a carbon economy, canceled school debt, increased environmental investments with money left over for a tax cut. However, we didn't do that. That money is already squandered. So the question is, are we going to continue down that same road? And of course, the Big, Ugly Bill contains some of the deepest cuts ever to social programs, and the first week of the war on Iran cost about $12 billion, which is more than Trump wants to spend on the entire annual budget for the Environmental Protection Agency and Centers for Disease Control combined.

So we've got to deal with the climate crisis and pandemics, which are more dangerous or to kill more Americans than anything China can do short of a nuclear conflict. They're not even pretending to invest in those priorities. They're hurting Americans by the day, not to mention people are going to die for lack of medicine, lack of food, etc.  It's almost like our leaders are running a death cult, and they want us to go along with them, and we can't. We can't accept that. And I think people are fighting back—the Poor People's Campaign and all kinds of groups that are working at the local level, who haven't even fully connected yet, the No Kings marches, and more.  

But we're going to need every person, every creative skill, every bit of solidarity. We have to turn this thing back, what is our choice? We have to do it, and I think more people who are sitting on the fence need to join in, because there's never going to be a perfect strategy. You can't wait. You just have to wade in and do what you're willing to do. Some people will take greater risks than others, but the point is to do something using whatever expertise and contacts we have, because it's not going to be a few experts that solve this. It's going to be a collective undertaking of a mass movement committed to humanity, not technology, materialism and war.

DT: Thank you, well we've covered pretty much what I had hoped to in this interview.  Is there anything more that you want to add?

WH: Well, I think we need a peace party, and don't have it. There's a peace party within the Democratic Party, but it's a minority, and some of them, like Jamal Bowman and Corey Bush were taken out by a PAC. Others like Ilhan Omar have gotten death threats in their own districts. So, we need better candidates in the primaries. Many in the Democratic leadership continue to support the policy of arming repressive regimes, including Israel in the midst of a genocide and war of aggression.  The only way to stop this is to pull that money out and invest in something constructive.  People are starting to see that now.  It may take unconventional forms, like Texas Senate nominee James Talarico, who is running on progressive Democratic values in a way that appeals to religious voters. There are some interesting local things going on.

The other thing is, we can't be bickering about small matters. We’ve got big fights ahead of us. For example, if one person wants to defund nuclear weapons and someone else wants to abolish them altogether, they need to forge a united front. We don’t have time to debate the perfect strategy, we have to fight the demon that's in front of us now.  Maybe we'll disagree down the road, but for the moment, we have to find common ground and be tolerant and supportive and welcome a diverse coalition. The agenda of demilitarization is not some special thing for experts, it’s for everybody, and each person can make their own contribution, be it organizing, be it influencing their neighbors, working in their religious community, whatever.  My contribution is research; I can follow the money and the crevices of the power structure, but there are people who can organize on the ground, and they're the most important ones in this equation. And there's more of them, and we need even more.

DT: Yes, thank you. You know, apropos this idea of building a peace party, or at least a peace coalition, what do you make of the idea that there are people in the so-called right wing like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene who could conceivably be part of it? Would you agree with that?

WH: I don't know if we could fit into the same party because of their toxic views on other things, but there could be strange bedfellows on a broad peace agenda. When Trump said he was ready to end Iranian civilization, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene all said that was unspeakable, right? I have friends on the right who say we can work in parallel. If I dropped into some right-wing meeting, they're not going to listen to me, but if we're on the same page, let's set some common objectives and exert power in the political arena, working in parallel. And I think that is going to happen because some on the right are isolationists. And some of them have a humanitarian instinct that takes the form of charity. Like Republican Senator Jim Inhofe, who was a right winger from Oklahoma.  He worked with a group called Action Corps to free up more money from the international banks for poor countries, because he had done work in Africa through his church, and one of his staffers even spoke at one of their meetings. So there are these possibilities.  We can work together on certain things and still disagree about race and public investment, and other things.  We're in an existential crisis, so if we can make common cause on peace, that would be fabulous.