Barney Frank’s thoughtful March 8 column, “Pentagon budget due for a trim,” compellingly exposes the blatant inconsistency between unsustainable increases in the military budget for more enormously expensive nuclear weapons on the one hand, and the need to reduce the budget deficit on the other.

He points out that it is wishful thinking to expect that more nuclear submarines will defeat fanatic Islamist terrorists just “because they don’t have any.”

They seem not to need them to cause wide-scale havoc.

It is, thus, dangerously irrational that in the proposed 2016 military budget, increases for new nuclear weapons outpace by a factor of four or five times the increases for nuclear nonproliferation efforts. Keeping unsecured nuclear weapons and stockpiles of nuclear components out of the hands of suicidal terrorists should be a far higher priority.

The military experts beseeching the Senate Armed Services Committee to spend many hundreds of billions on more subs, missiles and bombers appear to be ignoring a disturbing new report from Physicians for Social Responsibility and other studies, which make clear that a “nuclear winter” and widespread famine could result from the detonation of as few as 100 nuclear weapons in a regional conflict, perhaps between Pakistan and India.

Given this grim reality, does racing to produce more matches than our enemies make any sense if we’re all standing hip deep in a room full of gasoline?

We strongly urge Maine Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King and Reps. Chellie Pingree and Bruce Poliquin, as well as President Obama, to carefully examine and more aggressively challenge all expenditures for weapons that we cannot afford and that provide no meaningful added deterrence in today’s world.

James H. Maier, M.D.

vice president, Maine Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility

Scarborough

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