The Kennan debate touched on another key issue in American foreign policy: arms control and its scholastics, within the general framework of a bi-polar ideological struggle.
The post WWII arms control regime is divided between conventional arms and nuclear arms because the separate logic governing them are as different as those governing Newtonian mechanics and Einstein relativity.
It is historically inaccurate to think that a military industrial complex always existed in America. Captains of 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 up to the eve of WWI, and defense contracts were negligible and less than prestigious. Respectable businesses were not particularly interested in government defense contracts. Even navy ship-building was mostly done in government yards.
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 America's entrance to WWI stopped further protests and the post-war extensive demobilization in America made disarmament a non issue.
The Washington Conference of 1912-22 sanctioned parity for the American and British navies. The lack of public resistance on the navy built-up was partly due to the navy, unlike the army (excepting the National Guards), having a more defensive role, given America's long 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 demobilization pressures.
War planning in WWI caused a radical restructuring of the economy. Yet the aggregate profits of American 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 poorer classes. Labor benefited from full employment and from government regulation on hours and working conditions. Farmers became better off financially during the war, but agriculture fell further behind industry. The railroads gained spectacular efficiency from centralized government control. Shipping became a super efficient industry through logistics support for a large army in Europe.
The most significant fact was that about 10 million men, 25% of the work force, were taken out of productive work and had be supported at a high level of military consumption. The lesson was that by a deliberate collective effort, an enormous expansion of production was effectuated through a planned economy.
The return to normalcy after the war dismantled the American war production machine and prevented it from making any contribution to economic expansion in peace time.
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, 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 morality 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 revealed that DuPoint's plant near Nashville had grossed a profit of 40,000% on its capital, soliciting a response from Pierre DuPont that since his company was selling technology rather than a commodity to the government, looking at return on capital was misleading.
War planning by the War Production Board in WWII learned from the dismal experience of the the War Industries Board of WWI. Immediately upon 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 power to halt civilian automobiles in favor of munition production. A second and more important advantage was that war planning could immediately be manned by in-placed trained personnel of the New Deal, a point correctly made by Chuck Grimes. The economic benefits of war was substantial: full employment, price stability through control and rationing, insatiable economic demand, priority allocation of resources to support the spectacular miracle of production. The American economy quickly became addicted to these euphoric vitamins from war.
At the end of WWII, the New Dealers, now powerful and 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, monetary and fiscal policy implications and the economics of the banking system. Employment and unemployment data were readily available through national registration of insurance and social security.
The lessons of the post WWI 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 and government officials after WWII. The need for a planned "mixed" economy that was "neither pure capitalism nor socialism" became mainstream conventional wisdom until the 1970s.
Post WWII demobilization affected the economy differently than that of post WWI, due to the availability of a host of social programs: unemployment insurance; a system of public employment agencies; government guaranteed bank loans for home buyers, farmers and entrepreneurs; a GI Bill for education; veteran medical benefits and hospitals, 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: home, automobiles, 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 famous concept of "structural unemployment" which for the U.S. economy was defined at 4% of the work force. Three "scientific" factors behind structural unemployment were identified by the Economic Advisors to the President: 1) post war baby boomers population jump; 2) racial discrimination, and 3) the existence of chronic depressed areas.
The solution for these structural factors were considered to be requiring different time frame than economic cycles. The baby boom problem was to be solved by a lengthening of the education and enlarging enrollment, thus reducing the number of first time job seekers and delaying their entrance to the job market. The racial issue would have to wait decades (until Kennedy and Johnson and in large measure still unsolved today), and the Area Development Act would tackle the third issue. This "scientific truth" condemns 4% of the American work force into permanent exile for the economy and allowed the economics establishment to close its eyes to this man-made "natural" evil without being guilty of derelict of duty.
If even cancer can be conquered, it is unbelievable that structural unemployment cannot be solved. The real reason it has not been solved is because the economics establishment has accepted the condition as scientifically "natural" and thus depriving vital and financial oxygen to all necessary research into seeking a solution.
Even then, two alternative economic scenarios for post WWII 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 by a convenient coalition of diverse domestic interests: the ideological anti-Communist right; academia and think-tanks which thirsted after research funds, big business which wanted to continue war contracts in peace time, demobilized military officials who joined the private sector who sought to maximize the value of their war time experience in the private sector, government planners who saw a way to militarized the peace for economic purposes.
The Cold War was not only good politics, it was good economics and even good science.
But the nature of armament was fundamentally changed with the arrival of the age nuclear weapons. Initial calculations were concluding that the cost effectiveness of nuclear destruction was geometrically superior to conventional bombs in term of TNT per dollar. The problem was that only the United States had the bomb, thus there was no need for a large stockpile and also no need for even conventional arms.
It is reasonable to surmise that of various interests that helped the Soviet to quickly develop a nuclear capability, ideology had not been the only consideration. Arms control scholasticists in U.S. think tanks were actively promoting the need to let the Soviet have the bomb and an effective delivery system, being confident at the same time that the U.S. 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 4600 and USSR 2000.
The military on both sides soon embraced arms control, having understood that arms control was 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 the game. That state of parity is known as stability.
If either side achieves de-stabilizing advantage, the incentive for surprise attack would be enhanced. So giving the Soviets nuclear secrets up to a point was to enhance the protection of the U.S. security.
Eisenhower, a conventional war warrior, who had an old soldier's distaste for the new technology and the new scholastics, whose entire career was built with his inability to complete a whole sentence, had Malcom C. Moos, his speech writer, to come up with the eloquent and catchy term: "military/industrial complex." Eisenhower was confronted with a new and dangerous phase of the arms race.
The technological imperative has pushed weaponry toward intercontinental missiles openly demonstrated by Sputnik in 1957 and the prospect of missile launching nuclear submarines was becoming real. Not being able to tell the American public about military "secrets" that America's enemy already knew, and not being able to overcome a soldiers averse to giving an enemy military secrets, Eisenhower naively thought that by alerting the public on the unsavory link between business and the military would slow down the arms built-up. There is truth to the saying that generals always re-fight the last war in the current one. Eisnhower, 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 America was achieving radical size and weight reduction of her hydrogen bombs, making big booster missile irrelevant as a delivery system. As it turned out, big boosters provided the technological imperative for the development of MIRV (multiple independently-targetable reentry vehicles) technology more than a decade later.
Yet public and press hysteria forced both Eisenhower and Kennedy to loose control of their defense budgets to include large amounts of waste and redundancy to remove the "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 advisors to Reagan, understood and urged on him a strategy of a new level of conventional arms race in the name of nuclear arms control that eventually bankrupted the Soviet economy and thereafter the Soviet political system as well.
The Cold War was not won by American democratic ideals. It was won by an American arms control strategy that was sustainable only by a capitalistic system. Kennan was dishonest and wrong in claiming otherwise during his later years, and those who claim him to be a "dove" are hopelessly misled by devious propaganda. The beatification of a "dovish" Kennan is part of a comprehensive campaign to glorify the "natural and scientific" superiority of capitalism over socialism. It is important for marxists to understand this clearly. America now is seeking a replacement of economic role of the Cold War. The attacks on Iraq are 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 and Texas are closely tied to smart bomb production at a cost of $1 million a pop.
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 Air Force proposed to rename itself as the Aerospace Force, and promoted the irrelevant and basically non-existent missile gap. The Navy harked back to science fiction to point out spaceships are the provence of the Navy because ships have always been naval vehicles. The Army, fearful of becoming obsolete in a strategic nuclear age, promoted the concept of limited nuclear wars where the foot soldier remain key. The term "wish list" became Pentagon budget parlance to denote serious fantasy.
Response time became a major factor in strategic nuclear defense. Response time to enemy attack by long range bombers with nuclear bombs had been shortened to hours, as compared to weeks by the 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 American Right was that while he would be liberal in domestic economic policy and civil right politics and 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. Clinton, upon 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 not withstanding the Eisenhower warning, defense expenditure rose. The defense budget of 8 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 a heavy payload missile research program that it really was.
Richard Barnet detailed in his The Economy of Death published in 1969 detailed the rise of new super rich like David Packard who parlayed an electronic hobby in his garage into a $300 million personal fortune by the mid 60s; Simon Ramo and Dean E. Wooldridge of TRW which catapulted from a $6,000 operation in auto parts into a $120 million defense contractor in a few year by 1967.
Since these companies were involved in selling "threat reducers", it was necessary for them to first sell "threats". James T. Ling, the conglomerateur 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, had its 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. McNamara and the Whiz Kids, fresh from turning the Ford Motor Company back into profit by making cars cheap in both price and quality, brought the same systems analysis approach they borrowed from war planning back to the Pentagon where it had begun, and developed into a high science by the strategic bombing program of the Air Force, but had since been largely forgotten by the post war generals.
With mission oriented cost/effectivenss, concepts of kill-ratio; flexible response; etc, McNamara de-politicized the military and in the process, militarized politics. Foreign relations becomes 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 unique parlance defy common sense. Labeling Kennan a dove is part of this confusion.
The logic of nuclear arms control evolved into a modern scholasticism that gave new meanings 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 can no longer be achieved through diplomacy until nuclear war is 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 to maintain peace. The doctrine of massive mutual assured destruction (MAD) became enshrined in every think tank. The originator of this type of theory was Herman Kahn in his famous Thinking about the Unthinkable, which defines stages of escalation of terror that the final stage of 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 a 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 capability. Weapons that kill people are stabilising (good, because they reinforce terror as a deterrent to nuclear war), weapons that destroy weapons are de-stabilizing (bad because they reduce terror by providing protection against destruction). 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 small localized scale is promoted by the same government that employed massive global nuclear terrorism as the basic tool for constructing an arms control regime that enabled it to win the Cold War.
Clausewitz' 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 a a gospel by nuclear war scholasticists. War, according to Clausewitz, was merely continuation of diplomacy by other means. Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), in his influential book: On War, would insightfully identify diplomacy as merely an extension of war, is a tailor-made dogma that 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 is the result of failed diplomacy.
Clausewitz, being a realist of the age of Napoleonic wars, would view war as a natural condition in human affairs. His ideas would enjoy renewed attention in the post Second World War era of superpower Cold-War military doctrine in which, due to technological imperative and ideological irreconcilability, war by nuclear weapons, though undesirable, is considered as an inherent and imminent possibility and its deterrence achievable only by making its projected outcome utterly unbearable to the surviving side. It is a war prevention scholasticism based on the politics of terror and fear.
Under this doctrine, prevention of nuclear war would rest 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 would escalate from a relatively fluid scenario of if-then (if you transgress with action - then you will be attacked), to the impasse of either-or (either you desist in intention or you will be attack) and finally to the locked position of neither-nor (neither would you start - nor would you be attacked), all based on the doctrine of "Massive Mutually Assured Destruction", known among nuclear warfare scholasticists by its perceptive acronym: MAD.
This was the point when the term Hawks and Doves appeared in war politics. Dove wants weapons that kill population (ICBM), Hawks want weapons that destroy weapons (ABM- a bullet to shoot an incoming bullet, known as a solution in search of a problem.) Doves want to expose the population to defenseless attack, as hostage to peace. Hawks want civil defense to protect population. Doves want unprotected missiles, espoused to enemy attack to remove fear of a second strike. Hawks want mobile missiles that are hard to target and deep protective silos for missiles that will survive a first attack. Doves want B-52 bombers (470 bombers) that are slow enough for a recall, Hawks want missile launching nuclear submarine (64 Poseidon SLBMs each with ten 50 kiloton warheads and 600 Polaris missiles) under the North Pole that can launch after Washington is obliterated.
Technological imperative gives the world MIRVs- Multiple Independently targetable vehicles, named Minuteman III, each carrying three 20 kiloton warheads (100 Minuteman III, 900 Minuteman I&II), Doves want to deny the defense system, (54 Titan IIs with 10 megatons, 10 times Minuteman's kill power) of any second strike capability.
The latest agreement with the Russians not to aim ICBM warhead on American cities is in fact a victory for the Hawks. Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union resulted in two treaties and several less formal agreements. SALT I, began in 1969 and ended in 1972, with agreement on the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (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 commission 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. SALT II begun in 1972, signed in 1979, set precise limits on the numbers of each type of strategic launcher. The treaty permitted the testing and development of certain kinds of launchers. Although the treaty never entered into force, both the United States and the USSR pledged to abide by its limits.
In 1982, President Reagan advanced his proposal for a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). Direct talks between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev led to the signing of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987. In 1991, President 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 United States, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. All five countries eventually ratified the treaty, 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, enough to wipe out civilization many times over with a single first strike.
Henry C.K. Liu