The Atlas Network and the threat of nuclear war

The Heritage Foundation is promoting a surge in nuclear arms production in America. When an expert contacted the people involved, it seemed the primary appeal of "nukes" was that they were manly.

[Edit. Since writing this essay, I have heard that the Heritage Foundation claims to have left the Atlas Network. The fact that the Atlas Network chose to make its partner list secret in 2021 makes it impossible to confirm this.]

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. 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.

Disaster capitalism can find profit in any catastrophe. The Heritage Foundation has been the primary “business Republican” junktank in Washington pursuing 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.

(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.