|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Doug Henwood
||
|| These people are scary. Is this the core of US bourgeois opinion, or
|| are these folks marginal loons?
||
|| Doug
US bourgies were perfectly happy with the far more dangerous US-Soviet standoff, and so were the petty bourgies. Bomb shelters were once a status symbol and people invited their neighbors over to their shelters to show off. However, when push came to shove, the US always backed off.
Strangeloves like Richard Perle are great for generating the militarist hype and nutty nuke projects that keep the pork-fed nuclear militaro-capitalist complex happy. Clinton was putting the entire militaro-industrial complex out of business. Pentagon sleazeballs saw their incomes diminish and defense contractors had to face up to the fact that their junk was worthless on a free market. Closed down bases and laid-off weapons factory workers were a major source of repug Clinton hatred. So the Bush junta seized power to reinstate the statist military economy and save the corporate dinosaurs. As conventional weapons dinosaurs have now been taken care of, it's time to attend to the nuclear dinos.
It's all about the bottom line so nobody's really going to use the damn things. Strangelove crazy talk is great for generating procurements, but nobody listens to them in a real crisis. Which bourgie or sleazeball bureaucrat wants to risk a nuclear exchange and lose everything? Conventional bombs and bombers have gotten so huge and deadly that battlefield nukes aren't worth the hassle either. There's no sense in wiping out an enemy force with just one bomb and risk irradiating millions of civilians when you could do the same with a few hundred tons of bombs and Boeing can make 20K on every 1000 pounder, the B1 proves it can actually fly and drop bombs, a market for hand-held bomb guidance devices is created, etc..
The only places where nukes risk being used in wartime is against SLBM subs and hardened nuke silos.
Hakki