The Atlas Network’s primary junktank is not content with promoting the potential collapse of “civilisation” through climate change. It has long been pivotal in constructing the kind of society that is now making memes celebrating the murder of a health “care” CEO.(1) Through Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation has made explicit its commitment to culture war of the kind that produces civic bloodshed. It is also pursuing the world’s return to nuclear stockpiling, with America first of course.
The Heritage Foundation is pursuing US “strength” through a build-up of nuclear weapons.
This recent conversation about the history of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with the man, Richard Butler, who worked so hard to create the permanent extension to the treaty is educative. Without his efforts, it is likely that many states would have had nuclear weapons by now.
The more countries with nuclear weapons, the more chance for mistakes or poor judgement.
There is no “safe” use of nuclear weapons.
This conversation with Joe Cirincione, leading nuclear weapons policy expert, underlines the reckless stupidity of the Heritage arguments promoting stockpiling. His interlocutor, security analyst Jon Wolfsthal, spoke to people at Heritage behind the scenes about their new white paper. He questioned them about his assessment of the logistical nonsense underlying the recommendations. Wolfsthal was aghast at the sense that this was primarily about pouring “hundreds of billions of dollars” into nuclear weapons merely to signal “strength, masculinity and power.” (From the 12 minute mark of the podcast.)
As with Australian Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s willingness to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to build a nuclear power industry that the market will not fund, Heritage intends eye-watering quantities of public money to be spent to boost research for weapons that do not currently work, as well as production.
These free market heroes are in fact very keen to spend public money, as long as it is in a way that enriches their backers.
Neoliberalism is necropolitics: a constant calculus of who can die in exchange for profit. Nafeez Ahmed’s new book Alt Reich explores the eugenics interwoven into the heart of neoliberalism and the Atlas Network: its roots are embedded in the classism and racism that says our deaths makes the remnant gene pool better. Disaster capitalism can find profit in any catastrophe. The Heritage Foundation has been the primary “business Republican” junktank in Washington pursuing lethal oligarch policy.
Heritage was also, however, born out of the Religious Right movement that has grown to take over the Republican Party. Its co-founder was Catholic Paul Weyrich, one of the key operatives behind the creation of the Moral Majority, and one of the handful of men who literally selected the fringe issue of abortion to galvanise religious America to pursue political power. Heritage is also a pivotal organisation within the theocratic Council for National Policy. Find the Bad Faith (2024) documentary to understand.
The extreme variant of Christianity that is dominating crucial parts of the American Right is apocalyptic. End Times are coming, whether it is by plague, natural disaster or war.
There is no consideration of the future that can constrain people who adhere to this ideology. End Times is the goal, not catastrophic conditions to be avoided.
Neither the oligarchs nor the theocrats consider themselves obliged to tell the truth to the masses.
We cannot afford to ignore the implications of this deadly intermingling of religion and unstinting exploitation.
Postscript: Check 40.28 of the Cirincione conversation for the speakers’ brief commentary on how vulnerable Australia is because of our subservience to American foreign policy goals. I transcribed the passage below.
Considering nuclear proliferation provoked by Heritage and Trump, and the breakdown of the non-proliferation era, these experts project Australia might need join countries who “need” nuclear weapons, as a response to our foreign policy subservience to America. They were speaking with sadness about the end of an era of restraint, but the tone discussing Australia became mildly hysterical, with horrified laughter at Australia’s self-inflicted wounds.
Joe: “If you’re looking at Australia, you’re in a very vulnerable position. You’ve already pissed the Chinese off because the US has started building bomber bases in Australia.”
Jon: “And we’re jointly building submarines.”
Joe: “Right? This has been an anti-China alliance. And Australia is all into it. And [laughs slightly hysterically] suddenly…”
Jon: “USA is like “I’m out.”
(1) One of the jobs that Heritage devised for itself was to construct brief dot-point voting guides for Republican politicians to catch up on oligarchs’ voting instructions in the corridors on the way to the chambers. Congresspeople spend days each week on the telephone panhandling for donations. They are both time poor, and desperate for substantial donations.
Also by Lucy Hamilton: The Atlas Network has eugenicist roots
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Australia’s reliance on having a ‘big brother protector’ is part of our history. We had the might of Britain ‘protecting us’, so long as we could provide cannon fodder in defence of the Empire in WWI but when Singapore fell in WWII the ‘big brother protector’ retreated, leaving us to defend ourselves…. and then along came McArthur and the might of the USA.
Will they protect us or will they abandon us as the Brits did in WWII?
The close link with the USA and the animosity stirred up by the last LNP government showed how much we have to pay for that ‘big brother protection’, trade with China was jeopardised, Finally, after 4 years, Rock Lobsters are being sent to China, the freeze on those exports almost crippled that industry, as did the embargo on wine sales to China.
The ‘fear’ we are asked to have with China is part of the bullshit of US superiority.
Our big brother wants us to build nuclear submarines as support for their protecting us. Yet they will put our economic strength at risk as part of the loyalty they demand.
When we look objectively at the ‘threat’ China poses, the ‘militarisation’ of the South China Sea, but ignore the encirclement of that sea with US naval and military bases, China probably has good reason to build up their defence capability, and to seek to influence south pacific nations against the world’s only superpower which flexes its muscles in the face of China.
Do we need a ‘big brother’? What has history taught us?
Agreed Bert; appreciate your common sense, greatly needed elsewhere.
It’s all very well to complain about the Right having an interest in nuclear weapons, but if that’s as far as the analysis goes then it’s almost pointless.
It’s not the Right that has the power to stop the West Asia genocide spiralling out of control into a nuclear exchange.
It’s the liberal democracies that are standing by and allowing the murder to continue, and in the case of the US and UK, assisting in the horror.
By focusing on the potential for the Right to flex nuclear muscle, this article diverts attention from the actual cause of most of the problems that beset the world today — the determination of the former colonial powers to retain control of global affairs. Because that’s what Gaza is about.
And who are these former colonial powers?
The Western liberal democracies who preach to the world about their superior values even as their hands drip with blood.
The article is pointed and purposeful. Thanks Lucy
I don’t agree with SD that it is pointless. Nevertheless I do agree with the additional point SD made. And with Bert’s observation.
It’s wild times, rapidly changing mainly because of the failure of the ‘fourth estate’, and resort to the extremities of USA ethno-religous fascist absolutism taken up and manipulated by ignoramus oligarchs. It’s been coming for years via liberalism and neo-liberal / neo-conservative opportunism and peddling of paranoia for commercial / strategic gain (corruption embedded by omission or expetionalism in the statutes).
Collectively, the lunatics are in the house, and no-one knows what universal price will be paid until they are brought by their own devices to eat each other in their sieges.
The lessons of history mean nothing to these intellectually lazy morons.