9-11-06, 9:02 am
Now and then behind the barbed wire fence strung along the highway, you can spot the antelope grazing near the concrete ruins of an abandoned missile silo nudging above the surface. Here, at the height of the Cold War, missiles slept waiting for the alarm clock that would ring if nuclear war broke out with Soviet Russia. The antelope pay no mind to the possibility some really indigestible stuff might have leaked up from the silos that might ruin their meal.
The nuclear silos were peopled by two men, so that, in theory, if one went nuts, the other could prevent him from launching the nuclear missile on his own initiative. A U.S. Senator once boasted, 'We can hit the men’s room in the Kremlin' and these silo soldiers were the plumbers at the ready to flush the world’s troubled toilet bowls. In order to fire the missile, though, both operators had to turn the handles of their instruments simultaneously. The only wee problem is someone figured out how one man could disable the other and, by using a rope attached to a spoon, turn the disabled man’s trigger along with his own, thus launching his own private nuclear holocaust.
Much of the country’s nuclear stockpile has been dismembered, and the ranchers in nearby Belle Fourche are no longer collecting a little extra rent from the Pentagon for the use of their meadowlands. They console themselves with a homespun parade and genuine rodeo every July 4th that’s worth a trip to South Dakota. Cowpokes on the floats throw candy at bystanders and the cowgirls racing around the barrels in the arena are among the prettiest.
USA has reduced its stockpile of nuclear warheads to about 10,000, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. 'No Nukes News,' published by Peace Action Education Fund of Washington, D.C., says the arsenal is nevertheless equivalent to 130,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs. 'This is firepower enough to destroy the Earth, and all life on it many times over,' they observe.
Nuclear war-ready America is just one of the several props that sustain the Military- Industrial Complex (MIC). Nuclear warfare began when President Truman sought a way to shorten WWII, in part to save the lives of U.S. fighting men. The bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki did that all right, at the expense of shredding international conventions against bombarding civilians. Another outcome was the costliest arms race in history. If the U.S. could drop the atomic bomb, why couldn’t Soviet Russia make one and drop one? Why not China? Israel? India? Iran? And rather than share the technology with its wartime Soviet allies, the U.S.-U.K. bomb developers kept the secret to themselves, insuring a nuclear arms race that has bled the U.S. of $7-trillion since the Manhattan project. Albert Einstein, looking back, said writing FDR about the possibility of creating an atomic weapon was the worst mistake he ever made in his life. Over the years, the manufacture and testing of A-Bombs and H-bombs would lead directly to many deaths and fill the atmosphere with poisonous fallout liable to cause cancers for centuries to come. As for the cost of a Cold War that might have been averted, General Douglas MacArthur, hardly a pacifist, said, 'The hundreds of billions of dollars now spent in mutual preparedness (by America and the Soviet Union) could conceivably abolish poverty from the face of the earth.'
Unfortunately, there are some American who do not wish to end arms spending, much as they’d deny it if accused of such perfidy. We know, though, because we have their word for it. Named by President Truman as Defense Mobilization Director in World War II, former General Electric chief Charles E. Wilson put it baldly when he called for an alliance of Big Business and the military in a 'permanent war economy.' He got his wish, too. It wasn’t idle talk. A Bureau of the Budget report in 1946 said during the war the Army sought 'total control of the nation, its manpower, its facilities, its economy,' according to author Fred J. Cook in his 'The Warfare State'(Macmillan), published in 1962. That’s not exactly what President George Washington had in mind when he declared in his Farewell Address in 1796, 'Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican liberty.'
Earlier, when FDR’s appointee to run the War Production Board, Donald Nelson, a former Sears’ vice president, had a difference with the Pentagon, FDR told Nelson not to rock the boat. It was General Brehon Somervell, boss of Pentagon procurement, who called the shots. So military contractors built and overbuilt, to the point where the U.S. produced, for instance, more than 130 aircraft carriers during WWII, so many it sent a flotilla of leftovers to ally Winston Churchill.
In 1944, with an Allied victory probable and when humungous stockpiles of ammunition and other war materials were climbing skyward, many small contractors wanted to begin the conversion to peace-time consumer goods. According to author Cook, the big defense contractors quashed this initiative because the nimble small players could convert more quickly, so nothing was done until the top defense contractors were good and ready.
The military wasn’t supposed to run the USA. Alexander Hamilton warned us about it long ago: 'The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the free citizen. The military state becomes elevated above the civil.' The Declaration of Independence indicted Britain’s King George for making 'the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.' The military's lavish spending goes back even to Colonial times. As 'Yankee Doodle' himself recalled in the famous song, 'And what they wasted every day I wish it could be saved.'
Starting with WWII, according to Cook, permanent revolving doors were built linking the Pentagon and Corporate America. There were 1,400 executives from the rank of major and up employed by the top 100 defense contractors, he said. General Dynamics alone had 27 generals and admirals on its payroll. That practice continues to this day, and at the highest levels. The MIC crowd also occupies top slots in Washington. As John Perkins noted in 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man' (Plume), George Shultz, Nixon’s Treasury secretary, served as a Bechtel president and Caspar Weinberger, Defense Secretary under President Reagan, had been a Bechtel vice president. Bechtel, of course, is one of the Pentagon’s leading business partners.
During the Fifties, many generals and their business buddies fanned out across the country preaching the gospel of preparedness and, at times, even the lunacy of preventive war. Government contributed to the hysteria by urging Americans to build fallout shelters. In an uncharacteristic but prescient remark, General MacArthur declared: 'Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear --- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor – with the cry of a grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded.'
So it was that another general, President Dwight Eisenhower said upon leaving the White House, 'In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.'
In words that now seem prophetic written in 1962, Cook predicted Vietnam: 'If we are dragged into another (after Korea) limited war in Southeast Asia, we shall bleed ourselves of our finest youth and our future leadership in a blind endeavor to halt and contain by force an ideology we detest. The battle, if it is fought on these terms can only succeed in bleeding us white in endless ‘police actions.’'
'America has been changed without any popular recognition of the fact, from a peace-loving and isolationist democracy into a Warfare State whose real intent…is not the preservation of peace and law and order in the world, but the extension of our own capitalist system throughout the world…' Cook concluded, adding '…insanity has become our way of life.'
The CIA spread the insanity by creating revolutions the world over, just the sort of violent action it liked to blame on Communists such as Cuba’s Che Guevera, who invaded Bolivia. Did the American people ever vote to overthrow all the governments the CIA toppled from power? Did they even know what was being done in their name? A partial list of countries overthrown by the CIA includes Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; Dominican Republic, 1963; Ecuador, 1963; Indonesia, 1965; Cambodia, 1970; Chile, 1973; Portugal, 1975; Chad, 1982; Bolivia, 1982.
As a result of the CIA’s breeding so much hatred around the world, if we’re not scared out of our wits over possible reprisals, maybe we should be. Today, leftover Cold War era nukes can be smuggled into the U.S. and detonated. How does an industrialized nation with so much to lose respond to a desert kingdom or a stateless gang of thugs having access to a nuclear trigger? What good are all the Star Wars anti-missile defense shields (still being built, naturally, at great cost to the taxpayers,) against incoming missiles, when the nuclear strike can be imported for cheap on a cargo ship? It is nations such as the U.S. and Great Britain, whose leaders decided 60 years ago to build atomic weapons, that stand in the gravest peril today as a result of that decision.
Speaking of the Star Wars defense, the New York Times reported a senior Congressional investigator has accused the Government Accounting Office of covering up a scientific fraud among builders of the $26-billion system designed as an anti-nuclear missile shield. The contractors are off to a poor start, he said, on a system that will eventually cost the taxpayers $250-billion. The investigator, Subrata Ghoshroy, said GAO ignored evidence the two main contractors 'had doctored data, skewed test results and made false statements' to the government. Ten years ago like charges were made by a senior engineer who then charged contractor TRW in 1995-96 'had falsified research findings' about the project. (By the way, how many public schools can you build for $250-billion? How much low- and moderate-income housing? How much mass transit? How many diseases could you wipe out around the globe?)
As the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in UK’s 'The Guardian' on July 15, 2004: 'In 2003, close to half the total US government discretionary expenditure was used for military purposes. A large part was for weapons procurement or development. Nuclear-powered submarines run to billions of dollars, individual planes to tens of millions each.'
Galbraith went on to write, 'Such expenditure is not the result of detached analysis. From the relevant industrial firms come proposed designs for new weapons, and to them are awarded production and profit. In an impressive flow of influence and command, the weapons industry accords valued employment, management pay and profit in its political constituency, and indirectly it is a treasured source of political funds. The gratitude and the promise of political help go to Washington and to the defense budget. And to foreign policy or, as in Vietnam and Iraq, to war. That the private sector moves to a dominant public-sector role is apparent.'
Today, the MIC is operating full-blast. For example, President Bush is determined to keep the Texas factories that make the F-18 fighter-bombers humming by selling the planes to India and Pakistan. No matter these planes can deliver nuclear warheads and will only escalate tensions between the touchy neighbors. America today has the unenviable distinction of being the world’s No. One arms peddler. Uncle Sam, the hardware king!
What’s more, under Bush, military spending climbed from $290-billion in 2001 to $437-billion in 2004 and, counting the separate appropriations for the Iraq War and the tens of billions spent on the intelligence agencies, it could top $600-billion this year.
Arms makers are becoming millionaires overnight. United for Fair Economy and Institute for Policy Studies reported in 2004 the Iraq War is leading to 'huge average raises (for CEOs) at the biggest defense contractors. One CEO of a bulletproof vest firm increased his salary from $525,000 in 2001 to $70-million in 2004, the report said. As for 'free enterprise,' so cherished by Republican lawgivers, only one of the top 10 defense contractors 'won a majority of its contracts through ‘full and open’ competition,' according to the Center for Public Integrity, of Washington. 'All the rest collected most of their contract dollars through sole source contracts or other no-bid procedures.'
The exception was SAIC. The other contractors who cashed in largely without competing are Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, United Technologies, General Electric Carlyle Group, and Newport News, CPI said.
Taxpayers typically do not know of the lack of competitive bidding or recognize that much of what is spent is lavished on obsolete technology. William D. Hartung, co-author of a World Policy Institute Special Report at the New School University, found 'Contracts for the top 10 weapons contracts were up 75% in the first three years of the Bush Administration alone,' --- much of it apparently wasted on obsolete technologies.
When the Pentagon is informed of wasteful practices, it commonly ignores them. As Knight-Ridder reported last January 24, Congressman Walter Jones, (R-N.C.) is quoted as understating, 'We’ve got an agency that is not doing its job of being a watchdog for the taxpayers.' Retired Army Reserve officer Paul Fellencer Sr. complained to the Pentagon’s fraud hot line last year about $200-million worth of outrageous overpayments for ordinary supplies. Pentagon investigators never bothered to call him and dismissed his tip as 'unsubstantiated,' the news service said.
The failure to perform by contractor Halliburton, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, has been well documented. Now it appears, according to the Los Angeles Times, President Bush’s uncle, William H.T. Bush, better known as 'Uncle Bucky,' collected just under $1.9-million in cash plus stock valued at more than $800,000 from the sale of Engineered Support Systems Inc. The Times said ESSI 'experienced record growth as a result of expanded U.S. military contracts --- many to supply U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.' The paper also noted some of the contracts were awarded on a no-bid basis, including a $77-million deal to refit military vehicles with armor for use in Iraq and the firm is under investigation because equipment it was supposed to supply didn’t work properly.
Author Johnson quotes Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute, of Oakland, Calif., as describing the MIC as 'a vast cesspool of mismanagement, waste, and transgressions not only bordering on but often entering deeply into criminal conduct… The great arms firs have managed to slough off much of the normal risks of doing business in a genuine market, passing on many of their excessive costs to the taxpayers while still realizing extraordinary rates of return on investment.'
Meanwhile, President Bush chops away at the domestic budget, even cutting back funds for cancer research, veterans, and education. Several million Americans are homeless. Forty million do not have medical insurance. Thirty million slave at jobs that do not pay them enough to afford decent housing. Millions of potentially valuable young people cannot afford to start college. And the man responsible for much of today’s record $8-trillion national debt, as part of his plan to gut Social Security, has the temerity to warn the country this solvent and self-sustaining system will be in trouble 25 years from now!
Let us recall Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein were told during their Watergate probe to 'follow the money.' Apparently, that’s what government in America is all about. It surely is what the MIC is all about. Of the estimated $1-trillion wrung from taxpayers on April 17th, about half will find its way into the coffers of the MIC. The American public is being victimized by defense spending while its domestic needs for affordable housing, fair wages, medical care, and social justice are unmet. As Charlie Wilson knew long ago, MIC can be a perpetual money machine. To keep the military cauldron boiling, the Pentagon is plowing $1.5-trillion dollars into research to create a witches’ brew of 80 new advanced warfare systems.
In so many ways, the invasion of Iraq is all about money. WMD was just the lie to bring it about. Not only is the MIC cashing in big time but oil companies, such as Exxon-Mobil are gorging themselves on record high profits. Other Anglo-American oil companies are waiting in the wings for regimes friendly to the U.S. to push through pipeline deals the Taliban government in Afghanistan and the Hussein regime in Iraq refused to permit. As war-related damage to Iraq’s oil infrastructure has reduced its oil output below pre-war levels, thus tightening supplies, the price of gas charged at the pump to American motorists goes up and up.
In sum, Americans have a problem. What Hamilton and the other Founders feared long ago is now reality. The MIC has thrived for nearly a half century thanks to a compliant Congress, but never so much as today when Republican congressmen and lobbyists are being jailed wholesale for greed. The MIC has transformed an isolationist nation that didn’t want to get involved in WWII into a global bully with 725 acknowledged military bases in 130 foreign nations. (That’s in addition to nearly 1,000 bases in the USA.) Actually, writes historian Chalmers Johnson in his best-seller 'The Sorrows of Empire'(Henry Holt), 'there are many more, since some bases exist under leaseholds, informal agreements, or disguises of various kinds.' On Okinawa alone, he writes the Pentagon operates 38 separate bases on the choicest 20 percent of the island.' In South Korea, there are more than 100 bases. Johnson says Okinawa is typical: 'The conditions there --- expropriation of the island’s most valuable land for bases, extraterritorial status for American troops who committed crimes against local civilians, bars and brothels crowding around the main gates of the bases, endless accidents, noise, sexual violence, drunk driving crashes, drug use, and environmental pollution---are replicated anywhere there are American garrisons.' That Okinawa’s people, and others unhappy with the American presence, would like the U.S. 'gone' is irrelevant to the Pentagon. As Johnson notes, 'After more than fifty years, the air force shows no signs of leaving (Greenland) despite continuous protests by the Inuit of Greenland and numerous lawsuits filed in the Danish Supreme Court.' 'Our country deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations and just under a dozen carrier task forces in all the oceans and seas of the world,' Johnson writes. 'We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another. Our globe-girding military and intelligence installations bring profits to civilian industries, which design and manufacture weapons for the armed forces or undertake contract services to build and maintain our far-flung outposts.' What’s more, the State Department’s International Military Education and Training Program has been providing instruction to the armies of 133 out of 189 countries around the globe. Johnson writes, 'The Pentagon finds it convenient to train foreign military forces and police to carry out secret programs of state terrorism, including the assassination of foreign leaders, without being charged with war crimes and violations of the Geneva Convention.' Unfortunately, Americans seem as indifferent to military control as antelope grazing on the South Dakota prairie. The question is: Will Americans take action to rein in the MIC? As President Bush was deaf to the cries of the UN’s Hans Blix that Iraq had no WMD, as he did not listen to the UN Secretary-General and the Pope when they pleaded with him not to invade Iraq, as he paid no heed to the millions of common folk around the world who demonstrated against his Iraq invasion, he is not likely to listen to any critics now. He is threatening Iran with 'the nuclear option' because Iran, with its paltry $3.5-billion military budget, might be capable of making one atomic bomb five to ten years from now. All the while President Bush sits on an obscene nuclear stockpile of 10,000 bombs, repudiating nuclear arms control treaties on his own and reigniting the arms race! Not surprisingly, people the world over, as historian Johnson writes, have caught on to the fact that the U.S. is 'something other than what it professed to be, that it was, in fact, a military juggernaut intent on world domination.' What can people do? One effective response each individual can take is to boycott American-made cars and other manufactured goods, cancel vacations and business travel in USA, refuse to educate children in America, and stop patronizing American fast food restaurants and buying Hollywood films. By following the nonviolent path shown by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, peace-seeking people in every nation can send President Bush a message even he can read.
--Sherwood Ross, a former executive in the U.S. civil rights movement, reporter for the Chicago Daily News, and wire service columnist, is founder of the League for Nonviolent Solutions, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. Contact him at
