Seven hundred and fifty billion dollars. That’s roughly how much the United States is spending annually on weapons and war. About $35 billion of that is for nuclear weapons, which, in a best-case scenario, sit in holes in the ground and never get used.
But the most advanced and powerful military in the world didn’t deter the coronavirus. It didn’t provide us with the tools to prevent, treat, or cure COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus. The Pentagon can’t even save its own personnel from succumbing to the virus.
Someday the COVID-19 pandemic will be seared into our memories much the way 9/11 was. By the middle of April, COVID-19 had claimed more than 10 times as many American lives as the 9/11 attacks. This year it is expected to kill more Americans than all the wars since World War II combined.
If nothing else, this global catastrophe should illustrate the waste, futility, and immorality of spending so much on ways to destroy life when we are spending too little on ways to preserve it. How is it that the richest country on earth can’t seem to find the test kits, ventilators, and face masks to protect its own people? No other industrialized nation has so profoundly failed its population.
You can read more of this article, and the rest of the March/April Washington Newsletter, below.