general dynamics
Portraits of the War Machine and a Nuclear Submarine Nightmare
On the beauty of art and the terrifying nature of our weapons of mass destruction.
Walk through any art museum and you’re likely to see a mix of the classical and contemporary, impressionist and surrealist, refined and raw, beautiful, eerie, and provocative. Looking at art allows me at least a few moments of relief from the “that’s just the way it is” attitude of our hyper-consumerist, hyper-militarized, hyper-nihilist nation. I can step outside my day-to-day life and accept an invitation, however briefly, to boundlessness! I can experience invention, creation, and re-creation just moments apart. I can see everyday objects with new eyes as they’re repurposed and reframed in extraordinary ways. I can celebrate the relentless power of human vision and imagination. In a museum, I often find that I can actually breathe.
The Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut, where I live, has one floor for its permanent collection, with works from the 1600s to perhaps a decade ago, a mixture of famous names and those that are (at least to me) obscure indeed. That collection on the first floor remains the same, year in and year out, while new exhibits circulate through the upstairs galleries every few months. I try to take in each new exhibit and often find myself surprised, inspired, and even educated by what I see.
Recently, I visited an exhibit I’ve been unable to get out of my mind: Beatrice Cuming: Connecticut Precisionist. Ever heard of her? No? Well, neither had I. Cuming was born in 1903 in Brooklyn and studied painting at the Pratt Institute. She continued her studies in France, traveling extensively to Brittany, Italy, Tunisia, and elsewhere before ending up in New London of all places. Cuming had returned to New York from her travels in 1933 and then decided to move to Boston. On a train with all her belongings, she looked out the window — so the story goes — as it pulled into New London and impulsively got off, drawn by what she later described as the “obviously beautiful, powerful, dramatic, [and] exciting” subject matter in our town.
And she stayed, painting city scenes and diving into the local arts community. To support herself, she got a job as a security guard at the General Dynamics Electric Boat company. I try to imagine her, maybe wearing a green jumpsuit, a flashlight, and a ring of keys at her waist, patrolling Electric Boat’s massive yard and docks in nearby Groton. During World War II, that company must have been a 24/7 operation as it churned out 74 submarines and 398 PT boats from those very docks. Those subs were responsible for fearsome (and stealthy) destruction of Japanese targets. That war ended, of course, with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, in the 1950s, with the Cold War with the Soviet Union ramping up, Electric Boat would start manufacturing nuclear submarines.
Submarines As Still Life
Eventually, realizing the prodigious talent of its security guard, the company commissioned Cuming to begin documenting its contributions to the war effort. As Electric Boat’s artist-in-residence (so to speak), she produced a number of breathtaking works. All too literally. I sat across from her painting Welders at Electric Boat Company unable to breathe.
It’s a dark painting with enormous pieces of metal being transformed by heat and fire, the background crowded with partially built submarine components. Its dominant colors are brown and yellow. At the center, a white-hooded welder bends over his work as plumes of white smoke billow upward. There are four other workers in the painting, all indistinguishable, hooded and jump-suited in layers of protective gear. That’s the detail that stays with me, that stuck in my throat — those workers enshrouded in their safety suits.
However those suits may have protected them, count on one thing: what they and their successors built will not protect us. The power they wielded (and welded) to shape and connect part to part in the last days of World War II has held the world hostage ever since. We, all 8.1 billion of us, are today anything but protected from the nuclear submarines their successors would make. In our flimsy pedestrian garb, we remain so desperately vulnerable. In the background of Cuming’s painting, there are ladders up to a platform and almost out of the painting. Where do the ladders lead? Does Cuming mean to offer an escape from that man-made hell? That might be reading too much into the painting. But what else are you supposed to do in an art museum?
It’s a mesmerizing wartime portrait that draws you in — even though there’s nothing beautiful about it. Another of Cuming’s works from that period, Chubb, is at least set outside, with glimpses of sea and sky through the unfinished hulk of another sub, the USS Chubb, as it towers on that dry dock.
Breathless at Billions and Kilotons
What took my breath away? I kept thinking about all the labor and money invested in constructing submarines — from the relatively crude and uncomfortable boats of the 1940s and 1950s to the brand new Columbia Class nuclear submarine that General Dynamics Electric Boat is building right now. The Navy’s budget for just 12 of those ballistic missile submarines is $126.4 billion. Imagine! If the Navy’s budget for that one weapons system was a country, it would have the third-largest military budget on earth.
The Columbia will be the biggest and most expensive submarine ever built. How perfectly American, right? Even down to the fact that it’s named in honor of the District of Columbia, the disenfranchised, desperately unequal, and remarkably segregated capital of the United States of America. I’d love to see an artwork that encapsulates that grim irony.
Those new Columbia subs will dwarf what Beatrice Cuming’s welders were working on when she captured them in 1944. Each will be 560 feet long, or a few feet more than the height of the Washington Monument. And its bulk will displace 20,810 tons of water.
But the size and expensiveness aren’t anywhere near as important as the payload of nuclear weapons it will carry with a power those welders of Cuming’s time could hardly have imagined and that Cuming would have been hard-pressed to render with brushes and paint. Each of those 12 new submarines will be equipped with 16 nuclear missile tubes for Trident II D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). And those tubes will each be able to house up to 12 independently targetable nuclear warheads, known as W88s, costing about $150 million each and packing a mind-boggling 455-kiloton wallop.
Okay, now do the math with me. What does 12 times 16 times 12 equal? That’s right: 2,304. Now, multiply that by the thermonuclear force of 455 kilotons, and you get more than one million kilotons. An unthinkable power.
Now, look back into history and recall the utter devastation of the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and of Nagasaki three days later by “Fat Man” and “Little Boy,” two comparatively crude and small atomic bombs by today’s standards. They leveled two cities, caused more than 200,000 deaths (mostly of Japanese civilians), and spread radioactive material responsible for cancer and birth defects for years to come while poisoning landscapes.
And Fat Man was a 21 kiloton weapon; Little Boy, just 15 kilotons.
In short, the firepower of the future Columbia class submarine fleet will be nearly 30,000 times the combined power of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What would a canvas depicting that devastation look like? I have no idea. I can’t imagine, and I wonder whether a visual artist would even be able to represent or capture that sort of — if you don’t mind the invention of a term — dis-creation.
Of course, not all of those Columbia-class submarines will be deployed at once and they could be outfitted with fewer than 12 warheads, and some of those warheads could be the “smaller” W76 variety. Those qualifications and caveats aside, the math is the math and it’s catastrophic. Each of those future billion-dollar behemoths could menace the world with the equivalent of 5,824 Hiroshimas.
In the words of the Congressional Research Service, the “basic mission” of such new nuclear-armed subs would be “to remain hidden at sea with their SLBMs, so as to deter a nuclear attack on the United States by another country by demonstrating to other countries that the United States has an assured second-strike capability, meaning a survivable system for carrying out a retaliatory nuclear attack.”
What a mission! How anything but basic! To accept such logic is to invest all those billions of taxpayer dollars in the possibility of destroying even the last gasp of life on Planet Earth.
Exploring New London and Groton, you might happen upon a brightly painted, chubby “submarine” in a park or public square. There are 20 of these mini-subs around our community, almost a decade after the region celebrated Connecticut’s Submarine Century. When they were smaller, my kids loved to climb on the one down by the train station, riding it like a carousel horse. There’s another inside my daughter’s school. The creativity and collaboration are delightful, but the reduction of submarines to kitschy local icons is downright insidious. Those shiny fiberglass mini-subs have no connection to the sleek, metallic nuclear-armed leviathans that carry about 70% of this country’s nuclear arsenal. You can’t enjoy those public art objects and think about the Biden administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, which asserted the right of the United States to use nuclear weapons unilaterally and offensively. The cognitive dissonance is just too loud.
Imagining The New
Beatrice Cuming painted her Electric Boat canvases nearly 80 years ago. As I sat in the quiet of the Lyman Allyn museum staring at her welder painting, the Israeli Defense Forces were undoubtedly dropping American-manufactured bombs on Gaza, killing civilians, including women and children. The chief financial officer of General Dynamics, Cuming’s old employer and muse, responded to that new wave of warfare (and high stock prices) with a prediction that “the Israel situation is only going to put upward pressure on [the] demand” for the company’s artillery. Nearer to home, New London’s city council is raising taxes on residents to close gaps in the school budget, among other things. Meanwhile, General Dynamics recently petitioned to have its New London property values reassessed and won, giving the country’s fifth-largest weapons manufacturer tens of thousands of dollars in tax relief (money our community could really use).
Sitting in the Lyman Allyn gallery pondering all of this, I concluded that the military-industrial complex should more often be a subject for painters. What, I wondered, would Cuming capture today? The work has changed so much. Would she paint a test engineer stuck in her car as peace activists blockaded the main entrance to the General Dynamics complex? A configuration management analyst hunched over a computer terminal, his mind numbed by data, while he worried about his mortgage?
The story of Beatrice Cuming arriving in New London, working for Electric Boat, being hired to paint their products… it all now sounds to me like the potential set-up for a spy movie. And when you add in that Cuming had traveled the world, spoke French and Arabic, had relationships with women, and was investigated by the FBI for supposedly spying on Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory, hers would certainly be an alluring tale today: a lesbian artist working undercover as a security guard, waiting for her moment, plotting to gain access to the sensitive heart of the matter?
No such luck, of course! Beatrice Cuming doesn’t appear to have been motivated in any way by anti-militarism or an anti-modernist critique. In fact, in a 1946 interview with the Brooklyn Eagle, she remarked, “There is beauty in the growth of America. We are busy going forward. We can’t go back.”
The inevitability of progress, at all costs, is deeply ingrained in American thinking. Unfortunately, it’s exactly the wrong answer. We can, in fact, go back. We have to. Of course, we can’t uninvent the atomic bomb, but we can begin to control nuclear weapons. We can begin arms-controlling the heck out of them on the way to disarmament, opening up the possibility of nuclear abolition. And in all of this, artists could indeed lead the way. The power of creativity and imagination is — if you don’t mind my inventing an apt word for this moment — kilotonic. At least in our imagination, we can recall all our weapons of mass destruction from around the world: creating the biggest weapons buyback program in history. After all, there simply is no way forward through the military-industrial complex and no possibility of peace lurking there.
Last week, I ran across the Gold Star Memorial Bridge, a mile-long span over the Thames River—no, not in London, but right in my neighborhood of New London, Connecticut—on the narrow, cramped bike lane with views up the river. When I was almost at the top of the bridge, nearly 155 feet above the water, I saw a submarine headed up the river, escorted by tugboats and moving smoothly. There, high above the water, I was struck by how a vessel so massive and fearsome could look so small and toylike down below.
I was grateful then for the implacability of that river, the height I was above it, and the huge expanse of sky above me. For a moment, I could breathe. For a moment, I wasn’t afraid.
Maine Protest Urges General Dynamics to 'Stop Arming Israel's Genocide'
"Why do we tolerate this massive bomb factory here in Maine, exploiting the toils of local workers to aid with the intentional mass murder and displacement of innocent children and families in Palestine?"
Defenders of Palestinian rights on Wednesday organized a campout protest at a General Dynamics factory in the city of Saco, Maine to pressure the weapons giant to "stop arming Israel's genocide in Gaza."
The demonstrators, led by the Maine Coalition for Palestine, arrived at the roadway leading into the factory before dawn in an effort to prevent workers from entering the facility.
"Genocide in Gaza is currently supported by General Dynamics," said organizer Lisa Savage of Solon in a statement. "It supplies Israel with the artillery ammunition and bombs used to kill and maim civilians and children in Gaza—which is illegal collective punishment."
Since the Hamas-led attack that set off the war on October 7, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have killed more than 22,000 Palestinians in Gaza, injured over 57,000 more, and devastated civilian infrastructure including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques. A growing number of world leaders and legal scholars have accused Israel of genocide.
General Dynamics—which is headquartered in Virginia but has locations across the United States and around the world—is among a few dozen companies identified in an American Friends Service Committee database as aiding the U.S.-backed Israeli war effort with 155mm caliber artillery shells and the metal bodies of the MK-80 bomb series.
"Since October, more than 5,000 of the 500-lb MK-82 bombs—some made in Saco—have been given to Israel by the U.S.," said Yusuf Ebrahim, an Iraqi American physician who participated in the protest. "These munitions play a particularly direct role in the ongoing criminal genocide of Palestinians by the IDF, targeting densely populated areas such as the Jabalia refugee camp."
"Why do we tolerate this massive bomb factory here in Maine, exploiting the toils of local workers to aid with the intentional mass murder and displacement of innocent children and families in Palestine?" Ebrahim continued. "Meanwhile, many local community members suffer from hunger and housing insecurity and cannot afford medical care."
Members of the Maine Coalition for Palestine include the groups Healthcare Workers for Palestine, the Maine Natural Guard, the Maine Party for Socialism & Liberation, Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights, Portland CONFRONT, and Students for Justice in Palestine from college campuses in the state.
The coalition's Wednesday action came after a demonstration last month that drew more than 100 protesters to Bath Iron Works, a General Dynamics subsidiary that builds ships for the U.S. military.
The Bangor Daily Newsreported that Cecil Carey of Skowhegan, a teacher who spoke at the December event, said the group was protesting in Bath because the U.S. government has "got money for war but can't feed the poor."
"I do not want my tax dollars going to bomb people in the Middle East," Carey said. "I want my tax dollars helping my students and their families."
The United States gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military aid each year and U.S. President Joe Biden has responded to the Israeli assault on Gaza by asking federal lawmakers for an additional $14.3 billion package that is still under consideration. Since the war began, the Biden administration has also twice bypassed Congress to enable arms sales to Israel.
Reports Expose US Billionaires and Corporate Profiteers Enabling Israel's War on Gaza
"As the Biden administration attempts to deny the death toll of Israel's campaign of mass murder in Gaza and sell genocide as a stimulus for the U.S. economy, these are the death merchants profiting from the war machine."
With more than 7,300 Palestinians killed so far in Israel's three-week bombardment of Gaza, a series of reports this week have exposed how U.S. weapon-makers and billionaire donors are enabling what legal scholars say could amount to genocide.
After Israel declared war in response to Hamas killing over 1,400 Israelis and taking around 200 hostages, the stocks of major American and European war profiteers soared. A Thursday report from Eyes on the Ties—the news site of LittleSis and Public Accountability Initiative—targets five U.S. firms with a record of providing weaponry to Israel.
The outlet stressed that while announcing a supplemental funding request that includes $14.3 billion for Israel, U.S. President Joe Biden last week "invoked 'patriotic American workers' who are 'building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom,' but it's the defense company CEOs who rake in tens of millions a year, and Wall Street shareholders, who are the real beneficiaries of warmongering."
The five targeted industry giants collectively recorded $196.5 billion in military-related revenue last year, Eyes on the Tiesreported. They are Boeing ($30.8 billion), General Dynamics ($30.4 billion), Lockheed Martin ($63.3 billion), Northrop Grumman ($32.4 billion), and RTX, formerly Raytheon ($39.6 billion).
"The top shareholders in these five defense companies largely consist of big asset managers, or big banks with asset management wings, that include BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, Capital Group, Wellington, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Newport Trust Company, Longview Asset Management, Massachusetts Financial Services Company, Geode Capital, and Bank of America," the news outlet noted.
Eyes on the Ties also highlighted how chief executives are handsomely compensated—and the CEOs' ties to Big Pharma, the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street, and foreign policy think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations and Center for Strategic and International Studies.
According to the report:
- Boeing CEO David Calhoun took in over $64 million in total compensation from 2020-22 and as of February held 193,247 shares;
- General Dynamics CEO Phebe N. Novakovic took in over $64 million in total compensation from 202-22 and as of March held 1,616,279 shares;
- Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet took in over $66 million in total compensation from 2020-22 and as of February held 56,054 shares;
- Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy J. Warden took in over $61 million in total compensation from 2020-22 and as of March held 161,231 shares; and
- RTX CEO Gregory J. Hayes took in over $63 million in total compensation from 2020-22 and as of February held 801,339 shares.
Other reporting this week has taken aim at those CEOs for their suggestions that Israel's assault on Gaza is good for business.
During Lockheed Martin's latest earnings call, Taiclet correctly predicted Biden's request last week, saying that "there continues to be the option... for supplemental requests related to support Ukraine, Israel, and potentially Taiwan."
In addition to the request for Israel—which already gets nearly $4 billion in annual U.S. military aid—Biden asked for $4 billion to counter Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific region and $61.4 billion more for
Ukraine, which is battling a Russian invasion.
"We are all witnessing significant geopolitical tensions across the globe, including the ongoing war in Ukraine and the horrific attacks in Israel," Warden said during Northrop Grumman's Thursday earnings call, according toVICE. "As we saw last week, the [Biden] administration continues to make supplemental requests for urgent needs, including those in Ukraine and Israel, to include investments in weapons systems and defense industrial base readiness."
As The Leverreported:
"The Israel situation obviously is a terrible one, frankly, and one that's just evolving as we speak," said Jason Aiken, chief financial officer and executive vice president at General Dynamics, on Wednesday. "But I think if you look at the incremental demand potential coming out of that, the biggest one to highlight and that really sticks out is probably on the artillery side."
He continued: "Obviously that's been a big pressure point up to now with Ukraine, one that we've been doing everything we can to support our Army customer. We've gone from 14,000 rounds per month to 20,000 very quickly. We're working ahead of schedule to accelerate that production capacity up to 85,000, even as high as 100,000 rounds per month, and I think the Israel situation is only going to put upward pressure on that demand."
Last week, roughly 100 activists gathered outside of General Dynamics' weapons plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to protest the Israeli war, holding signs with slogans like, "Genocide: Brought To You By General Dynamics."
Both The Lever and VICE also pointed out that during RTX's Tuesday call, Hayes started by "acknowledging the tragic situation playing out in Israel" before turning to "an update on our end markets."
If Congress approves Biden's request for Israel, VICE explained, "some of the money would be used to restock Israel's Iron Dome rocket defense system, which RTX manufactured." Hayes said: "I think really across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you're going to see a benefit of this restocking. On top of what we think is going to be an increase in [U.S. Department of Defense] top line."
It's not just defense executives enabling Israel's mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza. As Eyes on the Ties reported, "Lobbying groups including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Democratic Majority for Israel have been active in Washington, calling on lawmakers to send money and weapons to Israel."
The report names some billionaire donors to the lobbying groups, including New England Patriots and the Kraft Group CEO Robert Kraft, private equity investor Marc Rowan, venture capitalist Gary Lauder, hedge fund managers Daniel Loeb and Paul Singer, and Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, who is also the founding president of the Israel Democracy Institute.
U.S. Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) said Wednesday that Americans "know that funneling billions more dollars into arms dealers' pockets won't keep our children safe from weapons of war at home or across the world. It won't keep our loved ones safe from toxins in our air and drinking water. They know that lining the pockets of weapons manufacturers won't help families struggling to afford housing, medicine, or grocery costs. They know defense contractors won't safeguard Medicare and Social Security or shield our communities against the climate crisis."
Unlike the CEOs of firms like Lockheed Martin and RTX, "moms who can't afford childcare, young folks who can't pay off their debt, veterans who can't keep up with housing costs, and children who go to school hungry don't have million-dollar lobbying budgets," added Lee, one of the few members of Congress pushing for a cease-fire in Gaza. "So it's up to us to stand up for their needs."