War and the Military-Industrial Complex

War and the Military-Industrial Complex

By
Henry C K Liu

This article appeared in AToL on January 31, 2003

The evolving arguments for or against a renewed war by the United States against Iraq have been well presented by now, especially after the State of the Union speech by President George W Bush on Tuesday evening. The purpose of this article is not to repeat these arguments, but to focus on the geopolitical and economic impact of the key official pretext for the pending invasion, which is to facilitate disarmament of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) on a defenseless sovereign nation by the world's sole superpower.

It is immaterial whether a nation actually possesses WMD to warrant attack; it is enough that the sole superpower insists that it does and deems the targeted nation hostile. As US Secretary of State Colin Powell, whom many regard as the sole voice of reason in the Bush administration, said on January 24, "The issue is not inspection; the issue is Iraq."

It is increasingly clear that the real issue on whether a nation faces attack from the world's sole remaining superpower rests not on its possession of WMD, but on whether it possesses a creditable counterstrike force as a deterrence to preemptive attack from a nation which itself has steadfastly refused to adopt a no-first-use doctrine on WMD.

The shift from deterrence to preemption was incorporated into US national security strategy in September 2002, a year after the September 11 terrorist attacks. After the war on Afghanistan, which left its main objective of eliminating Osama bin Laden unfulfilled, coercive disarmament of Iraq has become the centerpiece of the Bush administration's war on terrorism. But Afghanistan and Iraq are merely the opening shots of a broad general shift from deterrence to preemption. Arms control itself now encompasses the unilateral abrogation of the stabilizing Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems (ABM treaty) and the deployment of the destabilizing theater missile defense (TMD) and national missile defense (NMD) systems.

The 1991 war on Iraq has never ended. For over a decade, US and British war planes have enforced a no-fly zone over Iraqi air space. When UN arms inspectors left Iraq in 1998, the US and Britain launched "Operation Desert Fox", bombing suspected weapons sites and anti-aircraft installations. Such bombings have continued. Economic sanctions, generally recognized as acts of war, have caused the death of an estimated 2 million Iraqi civilians, including women and children, which Madeleine Albright, as US secretary of state, declared publicly on television as being "worth it". The pending invasion is merely a new phase in a continuous war. Yet the pretext for the original 1991 war was to reverse the invasion and occupation of Kuwait by Iraq, while the pretext of the pending renewed war is WMD disarmament.

It is predictable that superpower military action to effect a regime change in Iraq will have the opposite result from the proclaimed objectives of the US war on terrorism. Iraq is a country that has not attacked the US, that has no plans to attack the US and that has no capabilities of attacking the US. Iraq's current force projection range is about 150 kilometers via missiles, posing no intercontinental threat to the US. These are obvious facts. Iraq is led by a leader who has emerged as a living symbol of secular Arab nationalism which, with US backing, fought a protracted war against Iran, a neighboring Islamic fundamentalist theocracy.

In February 1982, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department's list of countries supportive of terrorism. In December 1983 and March 1984, the administration sent Donald Rumsfeld, who had served as US defense secretary in the 1970s, and who is again holding that office now, to Baghdad as a special envoy seeking restoration of diplomatic relations. Thus the direct link of Iraq to extremist Islamic terrorism is far from definitive.

Yet the pending US invasion of Iraq will be a rallying point for terrorist cells everywhere to attract newly radicalized recruits willing to die to kill US citizens and others on US soil, whatever their nationalities. The lesson of Iraq is that if a nation plans to acquire WMD, it needs to achieve its aim quickly with counterforce capacity, or be allied with another power with such capability. Thus the net effect of the Iraq crisis is to accelerate the proliferation of WMD, not to retard it.

By the growing size of recent protest rallies and the findings of recent opinion polls, anti-war sentiment appears to be rising both within the US and globally. There is also considerable speculation among economists in the US on the potential adverse economic impact of an uncertain war without an end game in a strategically significant region, such as anticipated increases in terrorist attacks for indefinite periods, further instability of a precarious Middle East, uncertainty over the future of oil prices, and the political fallout of a prolonged US occupation, and the worsening budget deficit from war costs, particularly at this time of global economic stagnation.

In Ernst Cassirer's The Myth of the State there is a sentence in the chapter on Hegel: "Hegelianism has had to pay the penalty of its triumph," which is very applicable to superpower statism. In the US, the state apparatus of the New Deal, as constructed under President Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1930s, evolved seamlessly into the post-war military-industrial complex. Hans J Morgenthau of the University of Chicago (Politics Among Nations) developed the theme that post-war US foreign policy was "imperialistic" in the non-pejorative sense of the word, because it was expansionist and empire-building for the post-war Pax Americana.

Of course, both an interventionist government and a military-industrial complex were necessary for an "imperialistic" foreign policy. The hawks or doves and the guns or butter debates touched on another key issue in US foreign policy: arms control and its scholastics, within the Cold War framework of a bipolar ideological struggle and superpower confrontation. Since the end of the Cold War, the US, as the triumphant superpower, has embarked on empire building in earnest through globalized "free" trade, and since September 11 has imposed WMD disarmament on arbitrarily identified foes through overwhelming force, with little fear of direct counterattack retribution.

Comments justifying the need for a benign superpower empire as a desirable and sensible post-Cold War world order are heard with increasing frequency in the US mass media. It is a trend not easily ignored by all other nations. France, Germany, Russia and China, through different perspectives, to different degrees, with different diplomatic styles and for different geopolitical reasons, all oppose US preemptive military plans on Iraq. There is a danger that Afghanistan, Iraq or North Korea, or any future flash points, may turn into the kindling for a World War III inferno, just as Sarajevo did for World War I and Czechoslovakia did for World War II. Unilateral preemption inevitably solicits multilateral counterresponses in global politics.

Arms control is a fall-back regime from peaceful disarmament which by definition must be universal. Unilateral disarmament can only by imposed by war. The post-World War II arms control regime was an exclusive game between the two superpowers that focused mainly on nuclear arms, leaving conventional arms largely unregulated though not unaffected as "balance of forces" factors in nuclear arms control negotiations. This is because the separate logic governing conventional arms and nuclear arms are as different as those governing Newtonian mechanics and Einstein relativity.

To the nuclear category of WMD are now added chemical and biological weapons, which have a long history of international convention but which have taken on a new technological imperative in recent times. All three WMD types, nuclear, chemical and biological, have been used both on the battlefield and on civilians in previous wars.

Between 1754 and 1767, the British distributed smallpox-infested blankets to unsuspecting native Americans during the French and Indian wars. In 1932, the Japanese began a series of horrific experiments on human beings at "Unit 731" outside Harbin in Manchuria, China. Some 11 Chinese cities were attacked with the agents of anthrax, cholera, shigellosis, salmonella and plague, and at least 10,000 people died during the gruesome experiments.

Declassified US government documentation on the controlled use of biological warfare by US forces in the Korean War has been found by researchers, and the indiscriminate use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War is well documented. On nuclear weapons, the US still enjoys the dubious distinction of being the sole deployer, not once but twice, although it is controversial whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted one or two events, much like the controversy on whether the September 11 attacks on the two World Trade Center towers constituted one or two events, a dispute with serious implications for insurance claims.

Until the Age of Manifest Destiny, marked by the Mexican War in 1845, which combined massive land grabbing (annexing Texas and California, depriving Mexico of half of its territory), with self-serving idealism of extending the "benefits" of US values and institutions beyond its borders, the US had been a relatively peaceful nation, with the exception of continuous wars on native Americans and the failed war of 1812 to annex Canada from Britain. It is historically inaccurate to think that a military-industrial complex always existed in the US, or that it is inseparable from capitalism. Captains of US industry like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford were consistently vocal in their anti-armament and anti-war sentiments. The military was relatively small for the size of the nation or the economy up to the eve of World War I, and defense contracts were negligible and less than prestigious. Respectable businesses were not particularly interested in government defense contracts. Even navy shipbuilding was mostly done only in government yards, not by private contractors.

Nevertheless, Jane Addam (1860-1935), woman suffrage leader and peace activist, recipient of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize, led the Woman's International League for Peace to protest at the Hague in 1915, asserting private profit from armament to be a hindrance to the abolition of war, but US entrance into World War I stopped further protests and the post-war rapid and extensive demobilization in the US made disarmament a non-issue until the mid-1930s. The peace movement has been robust throughout much of US history.

The Washington Conference of 1912-22 sanctioned parity for the US and British navies. The lack of popular resistance on the navy buildup was partly due to the navy, unlike the army (excepting the National Guards), having a more defensive role, given the long US coastlines on two oceans, and partly because the navy had always been more professional and less dependent on conscription than the army, thus insulating it from general demobilization pressures and effects.

War planning in World War I caused a radical restructuring of the US economy. Yet the aggregate profits of US industry were lower in the war years of 1917-18 than in pre-war 1916. While wages increased generally, lower wages increased more than the cost of living, thus raising the living standard of the working poor. Labor benefited from wartime full employment and from government regulations on minimum wages, working hours and working conditions in defense contracts. Farmers became better off financially during the war, but agriculture fell further behind industry on the macro developmental level. The railroads gained spectacular efficiency from centralized government control. Shipping became a super efficient industry through transport and logistics support for a large US armed forces in Europe. Air transportation received a boost from war support for aviation. Transportation in general was rescued by the war from the disastrous pre-war effects of market failure.

The most significant factor was that about 10 million men, 25 percent of the workforce, were taken out of productive work and had to be supported at a high level of military consumption. The lesson was that by a deliberate collective effort, an enormous expansion of production was effected through a planned war economy of full employment. The return to normalcy after the war abruptly dismantled the US war production machine and prevented it from making any contribution to sustainable economic expansion in peace time. This contributed to an excessively speculative boom and bust cycle the ended with the Great Depression, which led to another world war.

In the spring of 1934, Fortune magazine ran an article entitled "Arms and Man", a cheap expose unworthy of its lofty title. Among other things, it claimed that while it cost $25,000 to kill an enemy soldier, Chicago gangsters were doing it for $100 a head. Senator Gerald Nye (Republican, North Dakota), chairman of a special committee to investigate illegal links between business and armament, entered the article into the Congressional Records, remarking that "there has not been published in ages anything so enlightening". The Nye investigation exposed a few well-known "surprises" about the international arms trade: that bribery occurred in Latin America and Asia - without linking the observation to the fact that most arms purchasers were located in those two regions, that home governments were enlisted to secure foreign sales, that arms manufacturers always sold to any customer paying cash or with good credit regardless of morals or politics, and often to both sides of the same conflict, and that arms embargoes were universally opposed by the arms industry as ineffective and only resulting in smuggling. The investigation did reveal that DuPont's plant near Nashville had grossed a profit of 40,000 percent on its capital, soliciting a response from Pierre DuPont that since his company was selling explosive technology rather than a commodity (gunpowder) to the government, looking at return on capital was misleading. Microsoft uses essentially the same rationalization on spectacular profits derived from intellectual property a century later.

War planning by the War Production Board (WPB) in World War II learned from the dismal experience of the War Industries Board of World War I in its inability to quickly marshal the economy for war. Immediately on its establishment, the WPB conducted a complete national inventory of material and capacity for setting priorities and allocations. Its advantage over its predecessor was its final authority not only over industries but also over all production, including consumer goods. As such, it had the power to halt civilian automobiles in favor of munition production. A second and more important advantage was that war planning could immediately be executed by existing institutions already manned by in-place trained personnel of the New Deal.

The economic benefits of war were substantial: full employment, price stability through control and rationing, insatiable war demand that translated into guaranteed markets for the private sector, priority allocation of resources to support the spectacular miracle of war production. The US economy quickly became addicted to these euphoric vitamins from war, at least until market fundamentalism started to take over Washington, beginning in the 1970s. Since then, high-tech warfare can happily coexist with high unemployment and stagnant demand, as its demand on labor and production is narrowly concentrated. Following the Gulf War, the US economy contracted by 0.5 percent in 1991, its only shrinkage in two decades. The only visible economic spin-off from the 1991 Gulf War to civilian consumption was the introduction of the Hummer as a luxury special utility vehicle.

At the end of World War II, the New Dealers, now operationally powerful and ideologically unapologetic, were determined to extend war planning into peace time. The economic tools developed in war by the War Production Board, such as data on national income and production, were readily applicable to peace time management of the economy. The National Bureau of Economic Research had made significant advances in understanding the phenomenon of business cycles in industrial capitalism, monetary and fiscal policy implications on growth and the credit economics of the regulated banking system. Employment and unemployment data were readily available through national registration of worker insurance and social security, and payroll tax withholding. The lessons of the post World War I demobilization and the abrupt return to "business as usual" of the New Era which led to the calamitous depression in 1929 were fresh in the minds of the public leaders and government officials after World War II. The need for a planned mixed economy that was neither pure market capitalism nor command socialism became mainstream conventional wisdom until the 1970s, when supply-side emphasis began to overshadow demand management in a religious revival of market worship.

Post-World War II demobilization affected the economy differently than that of post-World War I, due to the availability of a host of social programs: unemployment insurance; a system of public employment agencies; government guaranteed bank loans for low and middle income home buyers, farmers and small entrepreneurs; federal assistance in urban renewal, an interstate highway system and federal aid to higher education, a GI bill for education; veteran medical benefits and hospitals, and housing subsidies, etc. Even price control continued until the fall of 1946 for fighting inflation and speculation. War-time saving by the public fueled a pent-up demand for big ticket consumer items: homes and furnishings, automobiles, major appliances, etc. Congress passed the Employment Act of 1946 which required an annual economic report to Congress and a formal administration program for implementing the policy aims of the act. It also created the Council of Economic Advisors.

Post-war economists devised the infamous concept of "structural unemployment" which for the US economy was then defined at 4 percent of the work force. Three "scientific" factors behind structural unemployment were identified by the economic advisors to the president:
1) Post war baby boomers causing a population jump;
2) Racial discrimination, and
3) The existence of severely depressed areas.

The solution for these structural factors was considered to require a different time frame than conventional business cycles, as they were really social problems with economic dimensions. The baby boom problem was to be solved by a lengthening of the period of education and by enlarging enrollment, thus reducing the number of first time job seekers and delaying their entrance into the job market. The racial issue would have to wait decades (until Kennedy and Johnson and in large measure still unresolved today despite widespread tokenism which is now being misused as a twisted argument against affirmative action). And the Area Development Act tackled the third issue with rural development programs. This "scientific truth" condemns 4 percent of the American workforce, mostly minorities facing institutional discrimination, into permanent exile from the economy and allows the economic establishment and policymakers to close their eyes to this man-made "natural" evil without feeling guilty of derelict of duty. As the economy expands in size, the natural rate now is considered to be over 6 percent, adding up to 8.5 million unemployed workers.

If even cancer is expected to be conquerable, and a man was placed on the moon three decades ago, it is unbelievable that the problem of structural unemployment cannot be solved. The real reason it has not been solved is because mainstream economics has accepted this condition in a man-made economy as scientifically "natural" and necessary, thus depriving vital financial oxygen to all necessary research into seeking a solution. There is no greater institutional terrorism than policy-induced unemployment and poverty as foundations of an economic system.

Even then, two alternative economic scenarios for post-World War II were generally accepted as unavoidable. One expected a return to high unemployment and depression and deflation, while the other anticipated high inflation as a natural price for keeping unemployment low. International geopolitical developments soon provided a third scenario which was quickly seized on by a convenient coalition of diverse domestic interests: the ideological anti-communist right; academia and think tanks which thirsted after war-related research funds, big business which wanted to continue the security of war contracts in peace time over the uncertainty of market forces, demobilized military officers who joined the private sector and who sought to maximize the value of their war time experience in the private sector, government planners who saw a way to militarize the peace for economic purposes. The Cold War was not only good politics, it was good economics, and even good social and physical science. And it was infinitely more preferable to any hot war.

But the nature of armament was fundamentally changed with the arrival of the age of nuclear weapons. Initial calculations concluded that the cost effectiveness of nuclear destruction was geometrically superior to conventional bombs in terms of TNT per dollar. The problem was that only the US had the bomb, thus there was no need for a large stockpile and also no need for even conventional arms under conditions of absolute nuclear monopoly. It is reasonable to surmise that of the various interests that helped the Soviets to quickly develop a nuclear capability, ideology was not the only consideration.

Arms control scholars in US strategic think tanks actively promoted the need to let the Soviets have the bomb and an effective delivery system, being confident at the same time that the US could stay technologically and quantitatively ahead enough of the Soviets to not compromise national security. By 1971, total offensive force loading (nuclear warheads) stood at: US 4,600 and the USSR 2,000. MIRV (multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles) technology and SLBM (submarine-launched ballistic missiles) were urged on the Soviets by US arms control experts to maintain "stability". Moreover, the US system of relying on private defense contractors was in a better position to reap economic benefits from nuclear armament than the Soviet system of state enterprises. This strategy to bankrupt the USSR with arms spending was essentially the one which Ronald Reagan employed to win the Cold War.

The military on both sides soon embraced arms control with religious fervor, having understood that arms control is the deadly enemy of disarmament, which all military leaders detest like the plague. Within the verity of arms control was the need to make it easy for the opponent to reach a normative state of parity to play the game but not any overwhelming advantage to win it. That state of parity is known as stability. If either side achieves destabilizing advantage, the incentive for surprise attack is enhanced. So giving the Soviets nuclear secrets up to a point was to enhance the protection of US security. This fact created a Byzantine complexity in the game of Cold War espionage.

The problem with a single superpower world order is the disappearance of a military parity state, thus reducing incentives for political solutions on the part of an unrestrained superpower. Afghanistan and Iraq are the early victims of this new world order. Overwhelming military power on one side transforms terrorism into a viable option as resistance of last resort.

President Dwight D Eisenhower, a conventional war warrior who had an old soldier's distaste for the unheroic new kill technology and the perversity of the new scholastics, who built his entire career on his inability to complete a whole sentence, had Malcolm C Moos, his speechwriter, come up with the eloquent and catchy term "military-industrial complex" for his farewell speech from the White House. Throughout his presidency, Eisenhower was confronted with a new and dangerous phase of the arms race that significantly curbed the policy options available to the highest office of the land, and that quietly eroded the traditional independent authority of the president on foreign policy.

Technological imperative pushed weaponry toward intercontinental missiles that had been openly demonstrated by Sputnik in 1957, and the prospect of missile-launching nuclear submarines was becoming real. Not being able to tell the US public about military "secrets" that US enemies already knew - that there was really no "missile gap" - and not being able to overcome a soldier's adversity to giving an enemy military secrets, Eisenhower naively thought that by alerting the public to the unsavory link between business and the military he would slow down the arms buildup. There is truth to the saying that generals always re-fight the previous war in the current one. Eisenhower, too old to fight the next war, was trying to frame its rules by slowing the development of its armament technology. Eisenhower knew that Sputnik was a stunt rather than a real feat. It was a showcase for big booster rockets at the time when the US was achieving radical size and weight reduction of her hydrogen bombs, making big booster missiles irrelevant as a delivery system, just as US President George W Bush knows that terrorist attacks are the handiwork of groups outside of government, never the result of direct government action, thus there is no more logic in attacking a nation to effect a regime change in a war on terrorism than in bombing a school to prevent radicalism in the young.

As it turned out, big booster rockets provided the technological imperative for the development of MIRV technology more than a decade later. Yet public and press hysteria forced both Eisenhower and Kennedy to lose control of their defense budgets to include large amounts of waste and redundancy to remove the nonexistent "missile gap". So Sputnik actually did more to hurt the less developed Soviet economy down the road than any other factor. It was a fact that the hawkish advisors to Reagan understood and they urged on him a strategy of a heightened level of conventional arms race in the name of nuclear arms control progress that eventually bankrupted the Soviet economy, and thereafter the Soviet political system as well. The Cold War was not won by US democratic ideals. It was won by a US arms control strategy that was sustainable only by a capitalistic system that depended on the private sector to produce weapons systems for profit.

The US now is seeking a replacement of the economic role of the Cold War. The attacks on Iraq and Yugoslavia were part of that search - it is a convenient way to burn off fast technical obsolescence to make room for the next generation of smart bombs and cruise missiles. The economies of Massachusetts, California, Texas and North Carolina are closely tied to smart-bomb production, at a cost of $2 million a pop. The Pentagon announced that in the pending invasion of Iraq, up to 400 cruise missiles a day would be launched, more than all fired in the 1991 war. With 4-6 percent unemployment being now accepted as a scientific necessity for long-term economic growth, and the prospect of total mobilization for a massive troop confrontation with another superpower being unrealistic in the foreseeable future, the economic impact of regional wars needed for empire building is expected to concentrate on high-tech innovation and tele-application, to maximize kill-ratio advantage, and on superior long-distance command and control of battlefield tactics via satellites, and not on the general economy.

With the public acceptance of the "missile gap" after Sputnik in 1957, internecine warfare within the Department of Defense - known respectably as inter-service rivalry - broke out in earnest and in public. The newly independent air force proposed to rename itself as the Aerospace Force to close the irrelevant and basically non-existent missile gap. The navy harked back to science fiction to point out that spaceships were the province of the navy because ships had always been naval vehicles, whether they sailed on a sea of water or in the air. The army, having lost control of the Army Air Corps, fearful of becoming obsolete in a strategic nuclear age, promoted the concept of limited nuclear wars with tactical nuclear weapons where the foot soldier remained key. The term "wish list" became Pentagon budget parlance to denote serious fantasy. This mentality eventually led to Star Wars during the Reagan administration and the current national missile defense and theater missile defense anti-ballistic missile defense systems.

Response time became a major factor in strategic nuclear defense. Response time to enemy attack by long-range bombers carrying nuclear bombs had been shortened to hours, as compared to weeks by the airlift movement of conventional troops and tanks. With the on-coming missile age, response time was further reduced to minutes. Kennedy was the first president who had "the button". Kennedy's political deal with the US right was that while he would be liberal in domestic economic policy and civil rights politics, he would be a fervent Cold War warrior in foreign relations. That inverse relationship between domestic and foreign policies, as engineered by Kennedy, is still visible today. Bill Clinton, on entering the White House, served notice to all that his first term was going to be devoted entirely to domestic issues, with foreign policy taking a back seat, meaning no change from the Reagan/Bush foreign policy. Starting with Kennedy and notwithstanding the Eisenhower warning, defense expenditure rose. The defense budget of eight years of Kennedy/Johnson exceeded the pervious 15 post-war years, even not counting Apollo, which was disguised as a civilian project to reach the moon for scientific purposes instead of the heavy payload missile research program that it really was.

Richard Barnet in his The Economy of Death published in 1969 detailed the rise of the new super-rich like David Packard, who parlayed an electronic hobby in his garage into a $300 million personal fortune by the mid 1960s; Simon Ramo and Dean E Wooldridge of TRW, which catapulted from a $6,000 operation in auto parts into a $120 million defense contractor by 1967. Since these companies were involved in selling "threat reducers", it was necessary for them to first sell "threats". James Ling, the founder of LTV, who with a $3,000 investment built a $3.2 billion business, declared to the press, "One must believe in the long term threat."

Believing in security threats, unlike believing in God, has secular rewards. The two-way revolving door for business executives and military officers between the Pentagon and the private sector nurtures a common culture in which fundamental assumptions are accepted as givens. Robert McNamara and the whiz kids, fresh from turning the Ford Motor Company back into profit by making cars cheap in both price and quality, not to mention safety, brought the same systems analysis approach they borrowed from war planning to apply to Ford back to the Pentagon where it had begun, but where it had since been largely forgotten by the postwar generals. With mission-oriented cost/effectiveness analysis, concepts of kill-ratio; flexible response etc, McNamara de-politicized the military, and in the process militarized politics. Foreign relations became exceedingly complex and dominated by nuclear strategic scholastics. It fell mostly beyond the grasp of non-specialists because of the special logic of arms control scholastics, and its unique parlance defies common sense.

The post-Cold War, post-Vietnam anti-war movement of the new century is different. Increasingly, the radical left and the extreme right are becoming uneasy allies against war, with the liberal middle assuming an unprecedented hawkish posture of moral imperialism and humanitarian intervention.

The logic of nuclear arms control evolved into a modern scholasticism that gave new meaning to the language of war. Deterrence, rather than victory, became the sacred aim. Since political accommodation was ruled unrealistic with an opponent possessing the power of instant massive destruction, peace could no longer be achieved through diplomacy until nuclear war was eliminated as a possibility. The doctrine of deterrence was based on a balance of terror, to make war so mutually destructive that the very thought of it was enough to terrorize potential opponents into maintaining peace. The doctrine of massive mutual assured destruction became enshrined in every think tank engaged in nuclear strategy.

The originator of this type of theory was Herman Kahn in his famous Thinking About The Unthinkable, which defines stages of escalation of terror so that the final stage of nuclear war will never come. These stages are to be so well understood by both opponents that the first sign of escalation was enough to induce de-escalation back to normal. DECON1 and DECON2 became common strategic terms that spilled over to the movies. Under this theory, stability is achieved only by parity of military nuclear capability. Nuclear weapons that kill people are stabilizing (good, because they reinforce terror as a deterrent to nuclear war), weapons that destroy nuclear weapons are destabilizing (bad, because they reduce terror by providing protection against incoming destruction). This is the context in which the proposed Star Wars, ABM, NMD and TMD were debated originally. Civil defense is bad because it implies a preparation to neutralize an enemy counterattack after mounting a first attack, in order to launch a second attack.

It is ironic that the post-Cold War, near-universal opposition to terrorism on a localized scale is promoted by the same government that had employed massive global nuclear terrorism as the basic tool for constructing an arms control regime that enabled it to win the Cold War. Clausewitz's concept of total war, the aim of which is not merely to rob the enemy of military capability but to destroy the enemy's will to resist, was revived as gospel by nuclear war scholars. War, according to Clausewitz, was merely a continuation of diplomacy by other means. Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), in his influential book: On War, insightfully identified war as merely an extension of diplomacy, which is a tailor-made dogma that the modern nuclear war regime needs.

Prior to the onset of the Clausewitzian view, traditional military doctrine always considered diplomacy as an instrument of peace, while war was the result of failed diplomacy. Clausewitz, being a realist of the age of Napoleonic wars, viewed war as a natural condition in human affairs. His ideas enjoyed renewed attention in the post-World War II era of superpower Cold War military doctrine in which, due to technological imperative and ideological irreconcilability, war by nuclear weapons, though unthinkable, let alone desirable, is considered as an inherent and imminent possibility and its deterrence achievable only by making its projected outcome utterly unbearable, even to the surviving winner. It is a war prevention theory based on the politics of terror and fear.

Should the US now invade Iraq, preceded by massive bombing or, as reported in the US press, even tactical nuclear attack, it would dilute deterrence of war or terrorism by fear. It would be a message to terrorists that their handiwork will elicit blind punitive attacks on whomever happens to be on the US's enemy list at the moment. It would also be a message to all governments that counter-terrorism punitive attacks lack focus, or worse, that the war on terrorism is merely a pretext for unrelated geopolitical objectives on the part of the sole superpower. Under such circumstances, terrorist attacks would not cease. Far from it, such attacks would escalate from being threats of potential mayhem to address particular grievances, to realities of pandemonium to bring down the whole system, as counter-measures would degenerate into state actions of arbitrary self interest. When two hijacked civilian airliners can cause the sudden death and casualty of more than 3,000 civilians and the sudden collapse of a nation's tallest skyscrapers, it is proof that potential WMD are commonplace and everywhere, not just within the organized military. It is a problem that cannot be solved by attacking one or two "rogue" states that happen to fall outside the US code of acceptable conduct at the moment. When the police are intoxicated with unlimited power without accountability, law enforcement effectiveness suffers.

Under the Cold War doctrine of deterrence by fear, prevention of nuclear war rested on the unacceptability of the horror of mass destruction threatening both opponents, an end-state terror that would justify a permanent militarization of peace as the price for survival. Diplomatic options in Cold War superpower relations escalated from a relatively fluid scenario of if-then (if you transgress with action - then we will attack), to the impasse of either-or (either you desist in intention or we will escalate) and finally to the locked position of neither-nor (neither you start - nor will we start), all based on the doctrine of "Massive Mutually Assured Destruction", known among nuclear warfare scholars by its perceptive acronym: MAD. The war on terror has yet to reach such levels of sophistication.

This was the point when the terms hawks and doves appeared in Cold War politics. Doves wanted weapons that killed populations, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM); hawks wanted weapons that destroyed other weapons, such as anti-ballistic missiles (ABM - a bullet to shoot an incoming bullet, known also to skeptics as a solution in search of a problem since stability preempts first attacks.) Doves wanted to expose the population of both sides to defenseless attack, as hostage to peace. Hawks wanted civil defense to protect populations. Doves wanted unprotected missiles for both sides, exposed to enemy attack, to remove the possibility of a second strike by either side. Hawks wanted mobile missiles that were hard to target and deep protective silos for missiles that would survive a first attack. Doves wanted B-52 bombers (470 bombers) that were slow enough for a recall; Hawks wanted missile-launching nuclear submarines (600 Polaris missiles and 64 Poseidon SLBMs each with 10 50-kiloton warheads) under the North Pole that could still launch after Washington had been obliterated, a doomsday machine. Technological imperative gives the world MIRVs, named Minuteman III, each carrying three 20-kiloton warheads (100 Minuteman III, plus 900 Minuteman I&II). Doves wanted to deny the defense system (54 Titan IIs with 10 megatons, 10 times Minuteman's kill power) of any second-strike capability. Yet the characteristics between stabilizing and destabilizing weapons often overlapped, depending on the scenario of escalation, with some weapons systems claimed by both hawks and doves as contributing to maintaining the peace.

The agreement with the Russians not to aim ICBM warheads on US cities was in fact a victory for the hawks. Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) negotiations between the US and the USSR resulted in two treaties and several less formal agreements. SALT I, begun in 1969 and ended in 1972, with agreement on the Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems (ABM Treaty) and the Interim Agreement on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. The ABM Treaty limited the number of weapons and radar equipment allowed each country and regulated their type and location, while allowing for continued development of weapons. The treaty also established commissions for monitoring violations and considering further arms-control proposals. Under the interim agreement, the parties agreed to limit their supply of strategic missile launchers to the numbers and types then existing or under construction, but they allowed for the improvement of those existing types. Installation of both NMD and TMD systems required the abrogation of the ABM Treaty.

SALT II began in 1972 and was signed in 1979 and set precise limits on the numbers of each type of strategic launcher. SALT II permitted the testing and development of certain kinds of launchers. Although SALT II never entered into force, both the US and the USSR did pledge to abide by its limits. In 1982, Ronald Reagan advanced his proposal for a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). Direct talks between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev led to the signing of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987. In 1991, President George H Bush and Gorbachev signed the START I Treaty, by which the two countries agreed to reduce the number of nuclear warheads by about 25 percent. After the breakup of the USSR in 1991, negotiations on START I began between the US, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. All five countries eventually ratified START I, which became effective in November 1994. The START II Treaty, which called for the elimination of almost three quarters of the nuclear warheads held by the five countries, was signed in 1993. START III limits the number of deployed strategic warheads to about 2,000 on each side, still enough to wipe out civilization many times over with a single first strike.

Donald Rumsfeld, while out of office during the Clinton administration, spelled out his hawkish views in the "Report of the Rumsfeld Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States", dated July 15, 1998, with the following conclusion: "Concerted efforts by a number of overtly or potentially hostile nations to acquire ballistic missiles with biological or nuclear payloads pose a growing threat to the United States, its deployed forces and its friends and allies. These newer, developing threats in North Korea, Iran and Iraq are in addition to those still posed by the existing ballistic missile arsenals of Russia and China, nations with which we are not now in conflict but which remain in uncertain transitions. The newer ballistic missile-equipped nations' capabilities will not match those of US systems for accuracy or reliability. However, they would be able to inflict major destruction on the US within about five years of a decision to acquire such a capability (10 years in the case of Iraq). During several of those years, the US might not be aware that such a decision had been made.

"Iraq has maintained the skills and industrial capabilities needed to reconstitute its long range ballistic missile program. Its plant and equipment are less developed than those of North Korea or Iran as a result of actions forced by UN resolutions and monitoring. However, Iraq has actively continued work on the short range (under 150 kilometers) liquid and solid-fueled missile programs that are allowed by the resolutions. Once UN-imposed controls are lifted, Iraq could mount a determined effort to acquire needed plant and equipment, whether directly or indirectly. Such an effort would allow Iraq to pose an ICBM threat to the United States within 10 years. Iraq could develop a shorter range, covert, ship-launched missile threat that could threaten the United States in a very short time.

"Iraq had a large, intense ballistic missile development and production program prior to the Gulf War. The Iraqis produced Scuds, and then modified Scud missiles to produce the 600 kilometer range Al Hussein and 900 kilometer range Al Abbas missiles. The expertise, as well as some of the equipment and materials from this program remain in Iraq and provide a strong foundation for a revived ballistic missile program.

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