To understand how America is preparing for its nuclear future, follow Melissa Durkee’s fifth-grade students as they shuffle into Room 38 at Preston Veterans’ Memorial School in Preston, Conn. One by one, the children settle in for a six-week course taught by an atypical educator, the defense contractor General Dynamics.
“Does anyone know why we’re here?” a company representative asks. Adalie, 10, shoots her hand into the air. “Um, because you’re building submarines and you, like, need people, and you’re teaching us about it in case we’re interested in working there when we get older,” she ventures.
Adalie is correct. The U.S. Navy has put in an order for General Dynamics to produce 12 nuclear ballistic missile submarines by 2042 — a job that’s projected to cost $130 billion. The industry is struggling to find the tens of thousands of new workers it needs. For the past 18 months, the company has traveled to elementary schools across New England to educate children in the basics of submarine manufacturing and perhaps inspire a student or two to consider one day joining its shipyards.
$1.7T, per the article. The scope of the project is so big that businesses are trying to groom kids into their fields at the elementary school tier, because the demand for future military industry complex jobs will be so huge.
It goes on to note the scope of the project, in terms of human labor demands, ecological impacts, community economic impacts, and brain-drain on neighboring industries.
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In their defense, the article is extremely obnoxious to read (at least on mobile). We shouldn’t have to scroll past dozens of huge images and ‘interactive’ graphics just to get to the actual text… and that’s with an ad blocker installed — I imagine it’s even worse without one.