Library:The Russians Are Coming: The Politics of Anti-Sovietism/Chapter 11: The President’s Masters

The Valedictory Speech of President Eisenhower

When in January 1961, Dwight D Eisenhower left his office after two terms as President of the USA it was expected that the old soldier would engage in a bit of sentimental leave-taking and slip quietly away for a game of golf. Much to the surprise of political commentators in Washington he did not do this but instead launched a bitter criticism of the military leaders and arms manufacturers who had shaped his foreign policies.

Although Eisenhower was a Republican President he had been courted by the Democratic Party which would dearly have liked to have him as its presidential candidate in 1948 instead of Harry S Truman. There was, in those days, little difference at least in the foreign policies of the two parties. Eisenhower continued the Cold War policies of Truman though in a more conservative manner. His tenure, though interspersed with dramatic domestic and international events, was not characterized by intelligent, independent political decision-making. He was ranked as average by a group of historians who had been asked to rate Presidents of the USA according to their performances.2

President Eisenhower was sternly anti-communist and in his discussions with his successor, John F Kennedy, he listed “the continuing Communist Threat to the West” as one of the foremost problems facing him.3 He accepted the National Security Council Document 68 produced in 1950 at Truman’s request which portrayed the Soviet Union as an implacably hostile, expansionist military threat which had to be countered by an expanded Western conventional and nuclear military force. More than Truman, he played down conventional arms and treated nuclear weapons as part of the arsenal to be employed wherever they could be militarily and politically useful.4 He had been willing to use covert means to resist the spread of communism in Third World countries. In Iran in 1953, Eisenhower directed the CIA to topple the Premier Mohammed Mossadeq and install the Shah in his place, which it did. The following year, when the CIA informed Eisenhower that the legitimate government of Guatemala was communist in its composition and policies he toppled it by military force and then went on television to tell the American people “that communism’s first foothold in the hemisphere had been halted by an uprising of freedom-loving Guatamalans”.5 The CIA displayed its new found status and power under Eisenhower when it opened its vast new offices in Langley, Virginia in 1959.

The Soviet achievement in launching Sputnik 1 in October 1957 shocked the American people. “Overnight,” it was reported, “there developed a widespread fear that the country lay at the mercy of the Russian military machine and that our own government and its military arm had abruptly lost the power to defend the mainland itself . . .”6 American spending on space and missile research escalated. Already, at the beginning of Eisenhower’s Presidency, following the end of the Korean war, the defence budget had been tripled. In his final budget statement it was announced that US spending on defence had reached a peacetime record.7 He left a considerable legacy: “a substantial military and space programme that would reach fruition under later administrations, and also the foundations of a policy on outer space that would guide future U.S. presidents for many years.

President Eisenhower gave little indication during his tenure of an awareness of problems in the international capitalist power structure. He refused to support Britain’s imperialist venture during the Suez crisis of 1956 but given America’s own role in Latin America and the Far East that was plain hypocrisy. He had had several opportunities during the Congressional debates over defence programmes in his second term to express his concern about the way in which private profit-making exploited the interests of national security but had said nothing apart from an occasional cryptic remark at his news conferences that “obviously something besides the strict military needs of this country are coming to influence decisions”.9

In a variety of ways Eisenhower consolidated the power of American capital. He refrained from publicly criticizing Senator Joseph McCarthy in his witch-hunt of communists and allowed him a free-ride. He permitted the harassment of Robert J Oppenheimer, the scientist most responsible for constructing the first atomic bomb, for his dissenting opinions and past association with communists. And he failed to respond to widespread national and international pressure to grant clemency to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1953, sentenced to death for allegedly passing secret information on the production of atomic bombs to the Soviet Union. In general, President Eisenhower disliked political dissent because, he argued, it provided communists with contentious issues to exploit.

Halfway through his second-term of office, Eisenhower decided to expose the influence of the post-war complex of power-holders in the USA, but to do so in his last major speech when, of course, it was too late for him either to do anything about it or to face the repercussions. Perhaps he wanted to avoid the derogatory treatment of dissenting views by American society at that time. The sociologist, C. Wright Mills, had described the locus of power in American capitalism in 1959 when he wrote: “Within American society, major national power now resides in the economic, the political, and the military domains . . . The economy—once a scatter of small production units in autonomous balance—has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated, which together hold the keys to economic decisions . . . The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government . . ,”'° C. Wright Mills was both distrusted by the establishment and discriminated against in his own University because of his opinions. Yet what he wrote was a mild observation compared to the televised valedictory speech made by President Eisenhower from the White House on 17 January 1961, three days before he finally relinquished office. Quite clearly Eisenhower’s speechwriter, Malcolm Moss, should have been his political advisor. Eisenhower said:

“America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Undoubtedly proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America’s leadership and prestige depend ... on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment. . . .

We face a hostile ideology - global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose and insidious in method .... But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. Of them I mention only two. A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment . . . Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry . . . We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal Government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of Government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, of the military - industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic process. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machine of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military fortune has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution research has become central. It also becomes more formalized, complex and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of the Federal Government . . . The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovering in respect ... we must be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite . .”11

President Eisenhower’s warning went unheeded. It was in any event too late. His statement was about a special case of the power of monopoly capital which in one vital respect was a deviation from the norm. For the first time in American history, government had become the executive not merely of a bourgeois class which was motivated by personal profit-making but by one which sought profit from war. More importantly, as conventional arms were displaced as prime weapons by nuclear missiles the profits were sought from means which could lead to the annihilation of the world. This process had begun with the Manhattan Project in 1945 but was leisurely until the Soviet Union had tested its first bomb in 1949. As the Soviet Union had no means of launching an atomic bomb for another decade the pressure on the US to accumulate nuclear weapons was not great.

The Rhetoric of Presidents

The mood of America, changed by the launching of Sputnik I, was heightened by the Cuban crisis in 1962. After his inauguration in January 1961, immediately following Eisenhower’s speech, John Kennedy started a rapid acceleration of nuclear arms production. The feasibility of a limited nuclear war was discussed. And although the balance of nuclear military power lay overwhelmingly with the USA in 1962, the Cuban crisis caused the President to accelerate even further the production of space and nuclear missiles. This arms building spree was in the services of a rampant imperialism. The USA, by 1959, had a total of 275 major base complexes in 31 countries and more than 1,400 foreign bases, counting all sites where Americans were then stationed and sites designed for emergency occupation. The bases were manned by approximately a million American troops.12 The USA was a member of NATO and the South-East Asia Treaty Organization and had bilateral treaties with dozens of countries as a means of isolating and containing communism. It was increasingly implicated in trying to prevent the Vietnamese from obtaining independence. As the conflict with Vietnam unfolded the armaments manufacturers were given a real war to exploit. The rate of consumption of US ammunition during a peak month of the Vietnam War was greater than for a comparable period in the Second World War or the Korean War.13 The 1973 Yom Kippur War in the Middle East prompted a further expansion in the US ammunition base as the Americans speeded up supplies to the Israelis. From 1970 to 1978 the army alone spent $1.8 billion on an unprecedented programme of ammunition plant modernization.

The rhetoric of the Presidents varied. President Kennedy paled Eisenhower into insignificance, describing Eisenhower’s mushroomed defence expenditure as complacent, passive and inadequate. He advocated a global anti-communist role for the US which re-affirmed the image of the Soviet Union contained in Truman’s National Security Document 68.14 Kennedy expoused a “flexible response” tactic with an increase in ground forces, intercontinental ballistic missiles, Polaris and tactical nuclear weapons. However, he moderated his approach to the Soviet Union before he was assassinated. This re-appraisal continued throughout President Johnson’s period of office during which time there were agreements with the Soviet Union on the ‘hot line’, grain sales to the Soviet Union, the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, plans for strategic arms talks and ‘bridge-building’ efforts through trade and communications with Eastern European socialist countries. Detente was counterbalanced by the Vietnam War for Presidents Johnson and Nixon. The rhetoric was placatory. Nixon reaffirmed treaty commitments and the nuclear deterrence but destabilized whenever he could, as in Chile, and sought to strengthen the position of the USA through links with China. President Ford, who filled in after President Nixon had been impeached, relied wholly on Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and continued Nixon’s balancing act. President Carter started his tenure in 1976 in a conciliatory mood, trying to gain the acceptance of the second Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement, SALT-2, by the US Congress. The agreement was never submitted to the US Senate for ratification and Carter asked for it to be taken off the Senate’s calendar after Soviet troops had moved into Afghanistan in December, 1979. By that time US opinion had begun to harden against the Soviet Union and along with it went President Carter. The US administration, still following Trumen’s NSC Document 68, saw the Soviet hand in the national liberation movements which were spreading in Africa and Latin America. President Carter, trying to match the stridently anti-Soviet rhetoric of Ronald Reagan in his Presidential campaign, signed Directive 59 in July 1980, which marked the abandonment of deterrence and gave priority to a first-strike capability. By the time of the Presidential Election in 1980 there was little to distinguish between the policies of the two main candidates. However, the winner’s rhetorical belligerence, his public preference for increased expenditure on arms, his hostility towards national liberation movements, his predilection for ignoring treaties and his endeavour to take the arms race into space, marked him off from his predecessors. President Reagan reflected an accumulation of the most bellicose phases of post-war Presidents.

The background to the rhetoric, however, no matter how shrill, was similar for all the Presidents. Frequently their rhetoric was not matched by corresponding policies. The conciliatory tones did not halt the research, planning and development of nuclear, chemical and conventional weapons, nor did implacably hostile attitudes necessarily indicate that preparations were underway to wage war. Presidents were pragmatic in their responses, changing them like the wind and rarely getting their acts together. Under President Reagan, for example, there was a greatly increased arms programme but without a consistent strategy so that he opposed the Siberian oil pipeline yet promoted grain sales to the Soviet Union.

US Expenditure on Arms

The backcloth to this background was the extent to which military expenditure cut into the US gross national product. The USA consistently diverted more of its resources to military uses than any other Western capitalist country. In 1983, the US expended at least twice as much of its GNP on military production as any other capitalist country, apart from the UK, Greece and Portugal. The variations in the proportion of the GNP devoted to arms generally reflected America’s imperialist activities. It was high under John F Kennedy because of the fear generated by the launching of Sputnik I, the Cuban crisis and heightening international tension. It remained high during the years of detente with the Soviet Union because of the Vietnam War and fell sharply once the Americans began to pull out. The proportion was at its lowest point in the brief period between the end of the Vietnam War in 1974 and end of detente 3 or 4 years later. Then it began to climb as more resources went for nuclear arms in general and space research in particular. Table XI shows first how the U.S. reacted to the launching of Sputnik I with a sevenfold increase in the amount devoted to space research in a period of 4 years. Quite clearly the relaxation of tension during detente enabled the Americans to soft peddle on space research and to focus their minds on Vietnam and the Middle East. During the Yom Kippur War in 1973 the USA sent considerable supplies of arms to Israel and assumed a continuing high level presence in that area. The change in emphasis came during President Carter’s period of office but with little publicity. The table shows the phenomenal increase in space research and development after Ronald Reagan was elected as President.

TABLE X

ARMS EXPENDITURE IN THE USA AS A PERCENTAGEOF THE GROSS NATIONAL PRODUCT, 1963-198315

(1) Year	(2) Arms expenditure as Percentage of GNP	(3) Percentage changes in col(2)	(4) Encumbent16 President
1963	8.86		John F Kennedy
1964	8.1	-8.6	Lyndon Johnson17
1968	9.3	+ 14.8	Lyndon Johnson
1972	6.6	-29.0	Richard Nixon
1976	5.3	-19.7	Gerald Ford18
1980	5.5	+3.8	Jimmy Carter
1984	6.9(^19)	+25.5	Ronald Reagan

The military-industrial complex, whose interests are served by the increases in defence expenditure, has been exercising greater influence over Presidential and, therefore, government, decisionmaking. It has set the hidden agendas of post-war US governments, establishing their priorities so that issues affecting the welfare of the people, such as jobs, education, health-care facilities and social security have been pushed to the bottom of the list. Its influence, moreover, has not been exercised through secret breakfast meetings with the President, though these undoubtedly have had some significance, but through the manner in which defence expenditure has become pivotal in the economies of local communities throughout the USA, often determining their economic survival.

TABLE XI

SPACE EXPENDITURE BY THE US GOVERNMENT,1963-198420

(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)
	Total Space
	Expenditure	Percentage	Encumbent21
Year	(Millions of dollars)	changes in col (2)	President
1959	784.7		Dwight Eisenhower
1963	5434.5	+592.6	John F Kennedy
1964	6831.4	+25.7	Lyndon Johnson
1968	6528.9	-4.4	Lyndon Johnson
1972	4574.7	-29.9	Richard Nixon
1976	5319.9	+ 16.3	Gerald Ford
1980	8688.8	+63.3	Jimmy Carter
1984	17477.3	+ 101.1	Ronald Reagan

Each President is served by a network of advisory bodies. When he has a problem or when he wants clarification of an issue, perhaps even when he wants information, there is always a study group or departmental committee ready to serve him. The advice he gets, say on the choice of weapons systems, may be important for the fortunes of particular manufacturers but it is not vital for the military-industrial complex as a whole. In general it is a ritual which gives an acceptable image to the process of private profitmaking.

When the Reagan administration was formed early in 1981 it gave no indication of its policy on space issues. In August, President Reagan directed the National Security Council to review space policy. As he had no knowledge of such matters and was inexperienced in foreign affairs this seemed a sensible step to take. The NSC set up an inter-agency working group consisting of representatives of the Departments of State, Defense and Commerce, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces and of a number of government agencies like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The military was well represented but not the private armaments manufacturers.

The advice given to Reagan, as to his predecessors, came from the professionals in government departments and economic agencies. The different Presidential encumbents varied in the ways in which they sought this advice, by overplaying or underplaying the role of the National Security Council in relation to the Departments of State and Defence, by preferring informal meetings, as did Kennedy, or secret cabals, as did Nixon, often including only himself and Henry Kissinger. Whichever method was used there was competition between the players, private and public arguments about alternative courses of action; there were doves and hawks often negating each other but essentially playing the same game, as with Casper Weinberger the inveterate hawk and George Shultz the uncertain dove in the Reagan administration.

It was a year before Reagan received advice from the space review study group but long before then the parameters of government policy had been pronounced by Casper Weinberger, the new Secretary of Defense, when, in October 1981, he said that the USA would “continue to pursue an operational antisatellite system” in pursuit of the government’s declared policy of being able to fight and prevail in a nuclear war.22 In a step which gave a practical twist to Weinberger’s statement, and in the same month as he made his speech, the government awarded contracts worth $418.8 million to the giant armaments firm, Vought and Boeing, to continue with research into an antisatellite system. This put the space review into perspective. It was to provide operational details for an already articulated policy.

SDI Contracts

The Strategic Defense Initiative provides a similar example. President Reagan made his “Star Wars” speech on 23rd March, 1983 which purported to initiate research into a major ballistic missile defence system. It was described as a speech from the top.23 Apparently even the Secretary of State, George Schultz, and the Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger, knew of it only in its final states. But which top? The effect was to accelerate the transfer of US resources to defence expenditure and, within that, to gain space research priority over other defence items. From 1980 until 1984 the expenditure on space activities more than doubled. During 1983 and 1984 it rose from $12,440.7 million to $17,477.3 million an increase of 40.48 per cent. There were many beneficiaries. On the day of the summit meeting on 19th November 1985 between President Reagan and Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev The New York Times published the following two tables:

TABLE XII

‘STAR WAR' CONTRACTS AND CONTRACTORS24

The largest prime contractors ranked by total 1985 Strategic Defense Initiative Awards. Listed in millions of dollars, excluding government agencies.

COMPANY	CONTRACTS AWARDED	PRIMARY RESEARCH AREA
Boeing	$112.2	Airborne infra red sensor
TRW	84.3	Mirad ground based laser; Alpha space based laser
Hughes Aircraft	60.1	Airborne sensors, kinetic energy weapons
M.I.T.’s Lincoln Labs.	59.7	Processing sensor data
Avco	53.4	Laser research, optical tracking
Lockheed	45.7	Laser research, kinetic energy weapons
Rockwell	42.0	Gallium arsenide semi-conductors, space surveillance and tracking
Teledyne Brown Eng.	40.1	Systems engineering
LTV Aerospace	25.1	Radar interceptors, homing devices
Aerojet-General	22.6	Sensor experiments, space boosters

The above tables show only the most lucrative contracts. At that time the top ten SDI contractors commanded more than 60 per cent of the contract money. The firms most preferred by the government were those which were well established in the nuclear missile business and which had built Minuteman Missiles, MX missiles and military satellites. The Pentagon had already spent more than $2 billion on space defence research spread over more than 1,500 contractors. Indeed in October 1985, the

TABLE XIII

'STAR WAR' CONTRACTS AND CONTRACTORS25

Total awards to date to prime contractors for all projects, in millions of dollars.

COMPANY	TOTAL AWARDED TO DATE
TRW	$323.9
Boeing	217.4
Lockheed	192.0
Teledyne Brown	180.0
Rockwell	165.7
Hughes Aircraft	155.7
LTV Aerospace	98.6
McDonnel Douglas	75.9
Avco Corporation	72.7
BDM International	62.4

government had published a 28 page list of SDI related contracts, many of which had gone to small enterprises. The amount of money spent on space research was miniscule by Defense Department standards but the programme’s potential was not, for the estimates for a fully deployed system varied between $400 billion and $1.5 trillion. The firms were still in the paper phase of research and the real profits were due when they engaged in technology demonstrations of specific hardware systems from laser weapons to advanced radar systems. Nonetheless an industry had already risen around SDI during the previous 18 months in California’s aerospace and electronic industries centre.

President Reagan s televised speech mapped out his goal. It was to “embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive’’ but he was vague about the scope of the protection to be provided and the means to achieve it. Was he, for example, contemplating a single system? Would it provide a complete population defence? Was it, in any event, feasible? Two days after the speech Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 85, entitled “Eliminating the Threat from Ballistic Missiles” which directed the bureaucracy to conduct “an intensive effort to define a long-term research and development programme aimed at an ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by nuclear ballistic missiles”. To facilitate this effort he ordered a study to be undertaken “to assess the roles that ballistic missile defence would play in future security strategy of the United States and our allies”.26 Casper Weinberger established study groups which were organized on the basis of subgroups to carry out these instructions. The first group reported by October with eight volumes of evidence giving a generally optimistic assessment of the long-term feasibility of achieving a ballistic missile defence system. A second report, out at the same time, was also enthusiastic. The reports were passed through the bureaucratic process which led to the President. They were combined and processed until they formed a simple set of recommendations confirming the practicability of the President’s original aim.

The SDI contractors had good reason to be pleased with this intellectual exercise. Their future profits were assured, unless of course the USA and the Soviet Union reached an agreement which would cause the USA to abandon SDI. They were afraid lest the Soviet Union introduced new compelling peace initiatives. When Mr Gorbachev announced the Soviet Union’s comprehensive plan for the abolition of all nuclear weapons by the year 2000 they were appalled. According to the Washington Post they even viewed as ominous the Soviet proposal for a quick 50 per cent reduction in the number of weapons. It reported that “many U.S. contractors fear that weapons they have researched and developed for years will become objects of superpower bargaining before entering the lucrative stage of full production”.27 This spectre arose when the summit meeting took place between President Reagan and Mr Gorbachev in November, 1985. The contractors were apprehensive lest Soviet concessions persuaded Congress to try to pare the programme down. They were unsure about committing their own capital to a programme which could be scuttled at any time. It was clear that the conventional defence budget would be relatively stable in the near future so, The New York Times reported, “every company is on notice that, if they want to be a long-term player, they can’t let S.D.I. get away”.28

Arms and the Community

In reality the US contractors had little cause to worry. Already, on 31 March 1984, President Reagan had assured them that “no arrangements or arguments beyond those already governing military activities in outer space have been found to date that are judged to be in the overall interest of the United States and its allies”.29 They were part of the fastest growing industry in the USA. Their share value had increased almost 40-fold since the 1970s. They were in a no-risks business. The state guaranteed the credits, the outlets and profits. Whatever the amount of the bill it was always met by the tax payers. But the greatest guarantee of profitable survival was the manner in which defence contracts had permeated the whole of American society. In previous periods of military mobilization the American public was hostile to those who profited from war. Those days have long since gone. Since the first years of the Reagan administration hostility “has given way to the notion that defense industry profit is as American as new china for the First Lady”.30 Everyone wanted to share in it. The research workers from the Highlander Research and Education Centre in Tennessee, USA, who investigated the impact of military production in eight states in the upper south in the 1980s commented that “The Pentagon’s state-by-state printouts of prime contracts helped us understand that defense dollars permeate nearly every town or county in the region rather than a few centres of weapons production and that much of that money does not go for the tanks, guns and planes we imagined it did. A little bit of research revealed that the Defense Department’s version of a public works program exerts an enormous influence over our region’s economy - through all its well publicized ways and by propping up countless marginal institutions and enterprises from small town sheriff departments to doughnut makers to strip miners. We learned that despite all the money and influence, and despite the national mythology, the South . . . actually doesn’t differ from the rest of the country in the extent of its dependence upon and its politicians’ hankering for military contracts”.31

The SDI is an issue concerning jobs as well as military strategy. The New York Times reported that “some in Congress argue that strategic defense, like nuclear missile and aircraft contruction programmes, will create a host of highly skilled and unskilled jobs . . .”32 This is borne out by the way in which state governments “have elevated military construction and payroll to the most coveted form of federal aid. Defense industries are becoming the coin of the economic development realm . . .”33 North Carolina holds, “Procurement conferences” to “offer a time-honoured opportunity for contractors and military installations to advertise themselves to prospective suppliers - and for congress people to help their corporate constituents do business with the government”34 Tennessee’s Economic and Community Development Office was prepared in 1982 to take anything from consoles for tracking systems to radar systems, laser homing devices, air-delivered clusters of mines and 155mm launching tubes for guns. What it did get in Huntsville, due to the lobbying of influential Howard Baker when he was Senator, was a contract to produce ghoulish body bags, a symbol of the Vietnam War, in preparation for the nuclear holocaust, making it one of the highest per capita recipients of defence contracts in Southern USA.35 The contract office of Robins AFB, a large industrial complex in Georgia, boasted that 1,229 firms had signed up for sub-contracting work there during 1981.36 All eight states in the Highlander study tried to interest small businesses in the advantages of sub-contracting with the prime defence contractors, many with illustrious names such as Hercules, Inc. which produced agent orange during the Vietnam War; J. P. Stevens, manufacturers of army uniforms and a notorious anti-union firm; Dupont, the original American armaments manufacturer, and Union Carbide, infamous for the Bhopal tragedy in India but also the sole private contractor in the manufacture of the first atom bomb by the Manhattan Project and the private corporation synonymous with the nuclear complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee from where US nuclear weapons production is controlled. Oak Ridge produces parts for every major nuclear weapons system.

The intricate system of subcontracting linked the prosperity of a multiplicity of local communities to the concerns of the multinational arms manufacturers. The survival of the prime contractors depended upon the US pursuit of world military superiority and so, therefore, did that of the local communities. It was not simply Union Carbide, General Dynamics or IBM which considered the possibility of detente as ominous. Pentagon dollars shored up sweat-shops in the South’s textile industry and small-time suppliers of everything needed to maintain the expansion of a military production system. A reduction in the Defence Budget would ripple ruin through American society like a wave. This is the meaning of the militarization of American society. It does not necessarily entail jack-booted black or brown shirts pounding in local town squares. It comes about through a national economic dependency on war. The authors of the Highlander study gave their version of militarization when they stated:

“We think that the U.S. military production system is ... a maddeningly unimaginative, not to mention dangerous, way to offer public works jobs and conduct centralized economic planning through the back door. Making body bags in Scott County, Tennessee, may help shore up corporate power or establish consensus among the nation’s haves, but it has very little to do with militarily defending places, people or ideas . . .

“The hall-mark of the military production system, at least in our region, is choicelessness. In communities all around the South, military production is one of the few - if not the only - games in town. Various social programmes and civilian industries may create more jobs than capital-intensive airframe assembly . . . but the actual choice many people face is: work in a plant making military boots or military beans or don’t work at all. Their families and neighbours feel the ripples of that choicelessness. Multiply all those folks by their counterparts around the U.S. and you have a profoundly dependent economic constituency. Unless it has the freedom to change, chances for any arms race changing are slight.”37

As so many industrial workers know, sub-contracting can involve a repressive authoritarian relationship. British trade unions have consistently fought against it in the ’lives of their members, in coal mining, iron and steel and building in particular. It creates a state of dependence and stifles dissent. People become grateful for small mercies and refrain from complaining about low pay and oppressive conditions. This is characteristic of all sub-contracting relationships. Small businesses and local communities become equally subservient to the wishes of the contractors as do individual work-people. In order to maintain their precarious stakes they support and protect the system which oppresses them. When given a free election they vote for it. They endorse its ideology believing that it acts in their own interests. At no point are the intentions of the prime contractors questioned for they are embodied in that same ideology. In this way a consensus is achieved.

Long and Short War Scenarios

In the USA the consensus is about accepting the legitimacy of arms production, even though this exposes them to the possibility of genocide and only in the most macabre way serves the interests of the dominant contractors. It is another of those intriguing contradictions in American society. Those people who are tied up in the militarization of American society and are, therefore, dependant upon the extension of America imperialism, are essentially isolationist in their political practice. They want to be left alone but their ability to do this is dependant upon the destruction of the lives of others, in societies and cultures they seemingly care little about.

The questions to be asked about these contradictions do not concern individuals but are about the structural conditions which give rise to them and the ideology which re-inforces them. The same applies to those contradictions which envelope the executives of the major American corporations and multinational companies. In a society where private capital dominates these executives have the greatest power. Their primary concern is to maintain the hegemony of private capital. They maraud the world in pursuit of this concern. Herein lies the genesis of their antiSovietism. They can never accept a social organization in which private capital is non-existent and which, through its successes, shows that private capital is both dispensable and a transient phenomenon. Yet their very acts to protect private capital lead to its possible destruction.

The Highlander Report relates an incident which occurred two days after Ronald Reagan was elected as President in 1980 but which had been planned by President Carter and his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, two years before. It illustrates the contradiction of private capital and it reads like a sick game:

“Two days after Ronald Reagan swamped Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election, Washington went to war. Between November 6-26, the military and Carter’s civilian agencies conducted the biggest government-wide mobilization exercise since World War II, battening down various governmental hatches and pretending that the balloon was about to go up in western Europe.

“Called Operation Proud Spirit, that exercise was part of an effort kicked off nearly two years earlier by National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. In the Spring of 1979, before Iran and before Afghanistan, Brzezinski directed 21 government agencies to review their mobilization plans, an effort that culminated in Carter’s 1980 Presidential Directive 57 - a broad blue print for mobilizing the military, the civilian population and American industry. Proud Spirit itself emerged as something less than a smashing success. While bureaucrats hunkered in imaginary fox holes, the Pentagon’s Worldwide Military Command and Control System (WMCCS), said to be the world’s largest and most expensive computer system, “fell flat on its ass”, according to one Pentagon player for twelve crucial hours, the system failed to sift and relay reports on unit readiness and transportation and to issue deployment orders.

“But there was more going on during Proud Spirit than electronic failures and electoral post mortems. Between November 12 and 19, a few dozen men gathered at the Pentagon and the National Defense University at Fort McNair. Called together by Army Chief of Staff Edward C. Meyer, the men represented some of the weightiest corporations in military contracting; RCA, ITT, Raytheon, Boeing, Hughes, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Martin Marietta, and seventeen others. Military-industrial get-togethers happen every day in Washington but the men who attended this meeting were not the high-powered lobbyists who represent the defense primes in the capital. Instead they were the companies’ chief executive officers (CEO). And not all of them represented corporations with obvious or longstanding ties to the military. General Foods, Caterpillar, the Associated General Contractors, and Republic Steel mixed with DoD’s leading beneficiaries.

“General Meyer’s Partners in Prepondence were in Washington to talk about the guts of the Carter- Brzezinski initiative - industrial mobilization. Earlier in the year, Business Week had published a landmark article, “Why the U.S. Can’t Rearm Fast”, alleging breakdowns and bottlenecks throughout the nation’s military production system. Within weeks after the CEOs concluded their business at Proud Spirit, the House Arms Service Committee and DoD’s Defense Science Board released reports echoing and embellishing Business Week’s cry of alarm. The reports painted a picture of a dangerously deteriorating defense industrial base abandoned by contractors, frustrated by long lead times and capacity shortages, saddled by regulatory red tape and inconsistent buying patterns, perilously over-reliant on foreign sources of hard goods and nonfuel minerals and facing a critical shortage of skilled engineers, technicians and blue- collar workers.

“Meyer’s invitees were presented a stunningly solicitous list of Army questions about fixing their alleged problems. “What kind of financial or legislative incentives are required to motivate indirectly to invest in new facilities and to generally expand the industrial base? . . . Given the eventual shortage of technically skilled workers to what extent should defense producers change over to equipment-intensive, computer-driven plants? . . . Should the federal government be responsible for construction to expand facilities to satisfy mobilization needs, to fund it, and to perform the engineering and construction.”38

The question which followed inevitably from these questions was ‘what kind of war are we mobilizing for?’ Is it for a short war or a long war? For a short war scenario mobilization would be irrelevant because it could come too late. On this point the Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency explained that “Modern weapons make the first battle the last. The manufacturing base that was critical to the U.S. in the past wars will be of little use to us in future conflicts that are likely to be short, violent and dominated by advanced technology. There simply won’t be any time to mobilize an entire nation and its manufacturing base.” This vision dominated US military thinking until the end of the 1970s and, therefore, determined the nature and extent of their industrial demands. It came in part from a belief that the Soviet Union, even during the period of detente, would embark on a nuclear attack without warning, thus provoking an almost instantaneous nuclear war; and in part from the US’s actual involvement in wars since 1945. The Vietnam War was defined as a ‘short’ war, as were the Arab-Israeli conflicts. Whilst this view prevailed the role of industry was largely confined to the supply and maintenance of weapons of war. This, of course, was highlv profitable for the small exclusive set of armaments manufacturers. "Short war" thinking was challenged m the late 1970s and eventually demolished during President Reagan's first year in office. It was supplanted by the belief that both the USA and the Soviet Union would engage in conventional war similar to World War II and would hold back from using nuclear weapons even when one side was clearly winning. The Highlander Report commented that “The Pentagon's 1970s preparations to fight one and a half wars turned to a 1980s vision of unparalleled, long-term destruction in any number of theaters. Advocates claim that altering the defence industrial base to cope with a long war's demands deters conflict by sending adversaries signals that the US has even contingency covered, including a replay of World War II . . . Long war many be a dubious strategic construct. But one thing it does undeniably well is shake the Pentagon's money tree. It makes almost any industrial base look inadequate for the job ahead." 30

Once 'long-war' planning became the cornerstone of industrial policy both the military and industrial sections of the complex moved in with claims of lack of preparedness, of industrial deterioration, of shortages of almost anything, of over-reliance on either foreign-based multinationals or US multinationals which operate abroad, such as Texas Instruments and other firms which produce 85 per cent of all US military semi-conductors in south-east Asia. Thus the long-war' strategy coincided with the isolationist attitudes of Americans in general. It involved reversing the trend and bringing jobs back to the US, moving towards a state ot autarky bv eliminating what is described as “over-reliance on off-shore sourcing". It became patriotic and seemingly good economic sense to engage in preparations of war in peacetime. With this policy the military-industrial complex was having all of its own wav: there was a consensus about the economics of militarising American society; most people believed they were benefiting from it and the complex retained its hold on the sy stem, reaping in fat guaranteed profits at the same time.

The Responsibility of the President

Where does the President stand in relation to the military industrial complex? If Eisenhower thought in 1961 that it had "unwarranted influence' what is Reagan's position? Anthony Lewis, the New York Times’ columnist, for instance believes that influence has grown beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmares.40 What kind of accomplice is Reagan then in bringing about the militarisation of American society? Does he lead or is he led?

The President signs the Directives which initiate or confirm policies. He stipulates the formulas with which the study groups have to grapple. His is the main public voice uttering policies on behalf of the government. It was President Reagan who campaigned on the need to rebuild US military power and who equated military power with national pride and international status. Whenever he has had the opportunity he has glorified the actions of American armed forces in the Lebanon, in invading Grenada and in bombing Libya. He has provided the ideological trappings for the militarization of American society. His signature had authorized the transfer of federal funds from social to military uses. Without his active involvement and full commitment the process could not take place. What kind of responsibility does this confer on him?

There is no question that the actions of the President serve the interests of the military-industrial complex but he is not their servant in the sense that he takes orders from them. On the contrary, in personal relations both the military chiefs and the leaders of industry are solicitous of him, acknowledging his superior status. There is, in fact, no need for him or them to examine the nature of their relationship. They all share the same ideology. It is inconceivable to imagine an American President being elected through the existing system who did not toll the virtues of individualism, of private profit and the accumulation of capital. They pursue the same aims. The President as a political leader has to mediate between competing interest groups but his primary aim must coincide with that of the dominant economic group in the society, otherwise the system would lack cohesion and become destabilized. Even during the New Deal period of President Franklin D Roosevelt when he introduced legislation to encourage trade unionism and assist the poor, the prime government intention was to protect the institutions of capitalism. The existing political processes in the USA do not allow for major dissent against capitalism.

The main question to be asked about the President of the USA is not whether he is the master or servant of this or that particular group but what is the nature of the system of which his position is an integral part for it is that which confers a behaviour pattern on him irrespective of his political party. There has been no President since 1945 who has not been anti-communist and anti- Soviet, who has not been vitally concerned with securing military superiority for the USA, who has been unwilling to overthrow by subversion or force if necessary those states within the hemisphere of the US and sometimes without, who have challenged its hegemony. It has not mattered that during that period four Presidents have been from the Democratic Party and four from the Republican Party.

Capitalism comprises sets and layers of exploitative relations derived from the antagonistic class relationship between the owners and non-owners of property. Exploiters are pitted against the exploited and rival exploiters are pitted against each other. This system operates with a ruthless disregard of personalities and of compassion for people. This characteristic is present within a single capitalist country and in its relations with others.41 On an international level there is a hierarchy of nations, exploiting and being exploited. This is what makes up the capitalist system.

Each of the nations, have need for armed forces both to protect themselves and to encroach on others. The country at the top of the hierarchy uses military power to drive off challengers and to extend its influence. Thus militarism and imperialism are two sides of the same coin. Precisely how militaristic a country needs to be, however, depends on circumstances. Imperialism does not necessarily involve a high level of militarism. Positions in the hierarchy can be secured by ideology as well as force. The British in the 19th Century were imperialist without being overtly militaristic. The USA in the years leading up to the Second World War had similar qualities.

What accounts then for the growth of militarism in present-day USA? The USA, as the leading capitalist nation since 1945 is in a unique historical position. It is jostled by Germany and Japan for the leading position but although this in the past has led to wars it is not now the main threat. The insecurity of the USA stems from the existence of a large and increasing segment of socialism in the world which is the antithesis of capitalism Its position as the leading nation is threatened because the system itself is threatened. This has never happened before. In the inter-war years the Soviet Union existed but it was not feared. The Americans, victims of their own propaganda, believed that the new Soviet state was perpetually on the verge of disintegration and would if attacked topple like a pack of cards. The resilience of the Soviet people in the Second World War, the economic achievements of its system and the tremendous victories of the Red Army shattered those delusions. The spread of socialism has prevented the pieces being put together. The American defeat in Vietnam confirmed the vulnerability of capitalism and the potential of socialism.

So it is the socialist challenge to private property rights which is the real threat to the USA and all the Presidential talk about Soviet aggressiveness is a smokescreen to cover this fact. The threat, therefore, is global. It is not one, moreover, which can be met by economic and ideological methods which had failed in the interwar years when socialism was a fragile thing. The crude use of military power is the only option left. This was made clear when President Truman announced his Doctrine of Containment on 12 March 1947.42 “No pronouncement”, D F Fleming commented, “could have been more sweeping. Wherever a Communist rebellion developed the United States would suppress it. Wherever the Soviet Union attempted to push outward, at any point around its vast circumference, the United States would resist. The United States would become the world’s antiCommunist, anti-Russian policeman" 13 Thus was created the need for a huge sprawling, marauding military machine.

The decision to start this process rather than to seek accommodation with the Soviet Union was a Presidential one but he made it as the custodian of the private enterprise system, reflecting the needs of that system. Once it was made then the Pentagon began priming the pump of military production which quickly developed its own dynamism, grew under its own momentum and made its own demands on the political leaders. The role of Presidents and lesser political leaders thereafter has been to facilitate the transfer of the nation’s resources to the custody of arms manufacturers and to legitimize it as a patriotic act. This all the Presidents have done though with varying degrees of public commitment.

If the US President has masters then the apparent culprits are the leading executives of the largest conglomerates of private capital involved in arms production, namely the multinational companies. The military chiefs undoubtedly comprise an influential pressure group but they are formally subordinate to the President and owe their appointments to him. The executives of the multinational companies, on the other hand, are largely autonomous and have vital economic power bases. They control budgets greater than those of many states. On their own they can destabilize governments and topple political leaders. It is not impossible to conceive that the US President could be a casualty.

If we reason on the basis of appearances in this case we conclude by condemning multinational companies. That was the way President Eisenhower proceeded. If he had remained in office after his valedictory address presumably he would have proposed constraints on the core elements of the militaryindustrial complex such as a code of conduct similar to that drawn up by the UN or a Senate investigation with much publicity about chicanery over arms contracts. No such actions would, of course, have resolved the problem which, as I have already pointed out, is no less than the militarization of American society.

Appearances, as all social analysts should know, can be misleading. Multinational companies are the latest expressions of the tendency under capitalism for the degree of monopoly to increase. Their behaviour is not unethical according to the values of capitalism nor is it different from that of any other monopolies in similar circumstances. It is difficult to distinguish between the activities of Krupp and Thyssen during the rise of Nazism and Union Carbide and General Dynamics in contemporary USA. The multinationals, like their minions, respond to their situations. They could not do otherwise and survive. Those situations are set by the capitalist mode of production. If a President wants to alter the behaviour of multinational companies and destroy the influence of the military-industrial complex there is only one course; it is to abolish that mode and replace it with a socialist one. The difficulty is that he is as much a puppet in the system as the leading arms manufacturers, a servant of the hidden hands of the market which are trying to maximize private profit for those who already have most.

The conclusion of this chapter taken by itself is pessimistic for it seems that the only effective constraint on the multinational beneficiaries of nuclear arms production is the abolition of the system which spawns them. But multinationals and Presidents are but parts of the jigsaw which make up international society. The desire of the Soviet Union for peace, the peace initiatives of the non-aligned nations and the campaigns of Peace Movements in Europe together generate a world opinion in favour of peace which American society cannot ignore and which reinforce those in the US who favour the elimination of nuclear weapons. It is clear, however, that the problem which American arms production creates for the world can only be resolved within and by American society.

Arms production has become the engineer of the US economy. To displace it would cause severe dislocation. On the other hand the possible consequences of continuing with it could be the annihilation of the society which feeds from it. It is this choice which will force a solution involving the elimination of nuclear weapons. The electorate of American society is a vital part of the jigsaw. The choice it faces must compel it to silence the advisers and cut off the funds on which nuclear arms production depends. When there is no profit in arms production the multinationals will be forced to do other less damaging things.

FOOTNOTES

1. The Presidents of the USA since 1948 have been:
2. Harry S Truman, 1952 - Dwight D Eisenhower, 1960 - John F Kennedy (succeeded by Lyndon Johnson on his assassination in 1963 until 1964), 1964 - Lyndon Johnson, 1968 - Richard Nixon (succeeded by Gerald Ford on his impeachment in 1974 until 1976), 1976 - Jimmy Carter, 1980 - Ronald Reagan, 1984 - Ronald Reagan
3. The Presidency of Dwight D Eisenhower by Elmo Richardson, 1979, p. 192.
4. The New York Times, 18 January 1961.
5. “The President and the Executive Branch” by Robert R. Bowie in The Making of America’s Soviet Policy, edited by Joseph S. Nye, Jr., p. 69.
6. Elmo Richardson, op. cit., pp. 74-75.
7. Stated by James Killian, Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology; quoted by Paul B Stares in Space Weapons and U.S. Strategy. Origins and Development, p. 39.
8. The New York Times, 18 January 1961.
9. Stares, op. cit., p. 58.
10. Richardson, op. cit., p. 185.
11. The Power Elite, 1958, pp. 6-7. Mills was the Professor of Sociology at Columbia University.
12. Reported in full in The New York Times, 18 January 1961.
13. Monopoly Capital by Paul A Baran and Paul M Sweezy, 1966. p. 190.
14. Our Own Worst Enemy by Highlander Research and Education Centre, Tennessee, USA, 1983, p'. 229. This book is a valuable, highly detailed account of the militarization of the US economy.
15. Robert R Bowie, op. cit., p. 71.
16. Source: World Military Expenditure and Arms Transfer; published annually by the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
17. This column indicates the President who was in office at the time of the election and, therefore, concerned with the arms expenditure for the previous 4 years.
18. Lyndon Johnson became President for one year on the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963, before being elected in his own right.
19. Gerald Ford assumed office on the impeachment of Richard Nixon in August 1974. He was therefore President for only 2 years and bore little responsibility for their events.
20. This figure has been obtained from the 1985 Year Book of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
21. Source: Space Weapons and U.S. Strategy, Origins and Development by Paul B Stares, p. 255.
22. Explanations concerning Presidents are as in the previous table, except that the 1959 figures, the year before the Presidential election, are intended to show the level of space expenditure before the full effect of the launching of Sputnik I was felt, compared with 1963 when it was in full swing.
23. Stares, op. cit., p. 217.
24. ibid, p. 225
25. New York Times, 19 November 1985.
26. Source: Federation of American Scientists (New York Times, 19 November 1985).
27. Paul B Stares, op. cit., pp. 225-229
28. The Washington Post, 19 November 1985.
29. The New York Times, 19 November 1985.
30. Quoted by Paul B Stares, op. cit., p. 216.
31. Our Own Worst Enemy, op. cit.. p. 6.
32. ibid, p. 6.
33. The New York Times, 19 November 1985.
34. Our Own Worst Enemy, op cit, p. 12.
35. ibid, p. 13.
36. ibid, p. 55.
37. ibid, pp. 13-14.
38. ibid, p. 191.
39. ibid, pp. 1-2.
40. ibid, pp. 3-4.
41. Lexington Herald - Leader, Lexington, Kentucky 23 November 1985.
42. See Monopoly Capital by Paul A Baran and Paul M Sweezy 1968, Penguin Edition, chapter 7, for a further and penetrating analysis of this question.
43. See The Origins of the Cold War by Martin McCauley, 1983, pp. 65-69.
44. The Cold War and its Origins by D F Fleming 1960, volume 1, p. 446.