Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology

by Howard Zinn

  mil ion people who would never submit, would make it an endless war?

  It appears that the citizens of the United States have been taxed several tril ion dol ars

  because of an irrational fear. An irrational fear is, by definition, inconsolable and yet infinite

  in its demands.

  So we have this irony. That the arms race has deterred what would not take place anyway.

  And it has not deterred what has taken place: wars al over the world, some involving the

  superpowers directly (Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan), others involving them indirectly

  (the Israeli-Arab wars, the Iran-Iraq war, the Indonesian war against East Timor, the contra

  war against Nicaragua).

  While the supposed benefits of the arms race are very dubious, the human costs are

  obvious, immediate, and awful. In 1989 about a tril ion dol ars—a thousand bil ion dol ars—

  were spent for arms al over the world, the United States and the Soviet Union accounting

  for more than half of this. Meanwhile, about 14 mil ion children die every year from

  malnutrition and disease, which are preventable by relatively smal sums of money.

  The new-style Trident submarine, which can fire hundreds of nuclear warheads, costs $1.5

  bil ion. It is total y useless, except in a nuclear war, in which case it would also be total y

  useless, because it would just add several hundred more warheads to the thousands already

  available. (Its only use might be to start a nuclear war by presenting a first-strike threat to the Soviet Union.) The $1.5 bil ion could finance a five-year program of universal child

  immunization against certain deadly diseases, preventing 5 mil ion deaths.4

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  The B-2 bomber, the most expensive military airplane in history, approved by the Reagan and Bush administrations, and by many members of Congress in both parties, was

  scheduled to cost over a half bil ion dol ars for each of 132 bombers. A nuclear arms analyst

  with the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the total cost would run between $70

  bil ion and $100 bil ion. With this money the United States could build a mil ion new homes.5

  Over the past decade, several tril ions of dol ars have been spent for military purposes—to

  kil and to prepare to kil . One can only begin to imagine what could be done with the money

  in military budgets to feed the starving mil ions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; to

  provide health care for the sick; to build housing for the homeless; and to teach reading,

  writing, and arithmetic to mil ions of people crippled by their inability to read or write or

  count.

  There have been hundreds of nuclear weapons tests by the Soviet Union and the United

  States over the years. (News item, 1988: "The United States has concealed at least 117

  nuclear explosions at its underground test site in the Nevada desert over the past quarter-

  century, a group of private scientists reported yesterday."6) The $12 mil ion used for one of

  these tests would train 40,000 community health workers where they are desperately

  needed in the Third World.

  The United States spent about $28 bil ion to build 100 B-1 bombers, which turned out to be

  an enormous waste, even from the standpoint of the military, involving stupidity, greed,

  and fraud (critics said the B-1 would not survive a col ision with a pelican).7 Imagine what

  could be done for human health with that $28 bil ion.

  Health and education in the eighties were starved for resources. But in 1985 it was

  disclosed that $1.8 bil ion dol ars had been spent on sixty-five antiaircraft guns cal ed the

  Sergeant York, al of which had to be scrapped as useless.8

  Imagine what could be done to stop the most frightening fact of our time, the steady

  poisoning of the world's environment—the rivers, the lakes, the oceans, the beaches, the

  air, the drinking water, and the soil that grows our food—the depletion of the protective

  ozone layer that covers the entire earth, and the erosion of the world's forests. The money,

  technology, and human energy now devoted to the military could perform miracles in

  cleaning up the earth we live on.

  But the cost of the arms race is not only the enormous waste of resources. There is a

  psychic cost—the creation of an atmosphere of fear al over the world. There is no accurate

  way of measuring that fear in generations of young people who have grown up in the

  shadow of the bomb. One can only imagine the effect on al those little schoolchildren in the

  United States, who, in the 1950s, were taught to crouch under their desks when they heard

  a siren, signifying a bombing attack.

  And what is the effect on the 10 or 20 mil ion young men (and women) who are either

  conscripted or enticed into the armed forces of nations, and then taught to kil , to obey

  orders, to stop thinking like free human beings?

  These are the certainties of evil in the arms race. There are other things that are not

  certainties, but probabilities, and that is nuclear accidents. When thousands of nuclear

  weapons are stockpiled, when tests are taking place, and when bombing planes are sent

  aloft with hydrogen bombs, there is a strong probability that accidents wil take place

  involving those bombs.

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  In fact there have been over a hundred of those accidents. The military cal s them, in its quaint language, "Broken Arrows." One of the first of these was the loss of four hydrogen bombs over Spain in 1966. They didn't explode, but there was radioactive fal out. Lies were

  told by both the Spanish and American governments for a long time, undoubtedly to try to

  cool public resentment against the U.S. military presence. Nevertheless, there was a

  demonstration of a thousand people in front of the U.S. Embassy in Madrid. It was charged

  by the police, who beat demonstrators with clubs. It seems that many Spanish citizens

  resented the fact that hydrogen bombs were being flown, like bales of cotton, over their

  land.9

  It should be noted that a hydrogen bomb—also cal ed a thermonuclear bomb—is the

  superbomb, developed after the original atomic bomb. Instead of fission, splitting a uranium atom, or a plutonium atom, to release the amounts of explosive energy that were released

  over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the hydrogen bomb works by fusion, in which two hydrogen

  atoms are put together to release far more explosive energy. Indeed, 1,000 times as much,

  so we must imagine a bomb 1,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

  The one dropped on Hiroshima was equivalent in its destructive power to 14 kilotons

  (14,000 tons) of TNT, the material used in ordinary bombs. There are hydrogen bombs with

  the power of 14 megatons (14 mil ion tons) of TNT. And it is these bombs (cal ed "strategic nuclear weapons" to differentiate them from the smal er "tactical nuclear weapons") of which both the United States and the Soviet Union have accumulated 10,000 each.

  Two of these superbombs were involved in an accident in North Carolina in 1961. A Defense

  Department document obtained nineteen years later by the Reuters news agency revealed

  what the Pentagon at the time refused to confirm or deny. The Reuters article said:

  On January 24, 1961, a crashing B-52 bomber jettisoned two nuclear bombs

  over Goldsboro, North Carolina, according to the document. A parachute

  deployed on one bomb, while the other broke apart on impact.

  The bomb with the parachute was jolted when the parachute caught in a tree

>   and five of the six interlocking safety switches were released, said the former

  officials. Only one switch prevented the explosion of a 24 megaton bomb,

  1,800 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, they

  said.10

  That should give anyone pause. The superpowers have in their arsenals the equivalent of a

  mil ion Hiroshima-type bombs. Only people who were both saints and geniuses might

  possibly be trusted with such weapons. This does not seem an accurate description of the

  leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union. Consider an item like the fol owing,

  shortly after Ronald Reagan took office as president:

  President Ronald Reagan and his top three aides flew to Washington

  yesterday aboard the so-cal ed "Doomsday Plane", a $117-mil ion jumbo jet

  equipped to serve as an airborne command post in a nuclear war … . Deputy

  White House secretary Larry Speakes quoted Reagan as saying he was highly

  impressed and as adding, "It gives me a sense of confidence."11

  The very possession of nuclear weapons endangers the possessor. The chance of blowing

  ourselves up by accident is greater than the chance of invasion by a foreign power, just as a

  homeowner who keeps a rifle handy is (as statistics show) more likely to kil a member of

  the family with it than to shoot an outside intruder.

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  We would need an extraordinary faith in technology to believe that we can have 10,000

  thermonuclear weapons, some of them in airplanes flying overhead, and perhaps 20,000

  smal er nuclear weapons in various places, and not have accidents.

  There is an even more awesome prospect than "Broken Arrow" accidents. That is, a radar

  error that wil signal an enemy bombing attack and thus trigger off, perhaps automatical y

  without human intervention, a genuine attack that would be the beginning of the end for

  everybody.

  In fact, there have been many computer errors, over 100 of them in 1980-1981. One of

  them led to a "red alert," that is, the radar announced an imminent Soviet attack, and

  planes with hydrogen bombs were about to be sent aloft when the error was discovered. A

  news dispatch of June 18, 1980:

  On June 3 and June 6, errors in a computer at the North American Air

  Defense Command headquarters inside Cheyenne Mountain, near Colorado

  Springs, caused the system to warn erroneously that Soviet intercontinental

  missiles had been fired at the United States. The alert sent nearly 100

  bomber crews to start their planes' engines.12

  A few months before that incident, there was an Associated Press dispatch:

  The worldwide computer system built to warn the President of an enemy

  attack or international crisis is prone to break down under pressure, according

  to informed sources who have worked on or examined the system.

  A Pentagon document defending the system said that general y the

  "computers render effective support; the principal exception occurs in crisis

  situations."13

  It wil only fail in "crisis situations"!

  There have been enough disasters with advanced technology to persuade us not to believe

  those "experts" who assure us blandly that some device is "foolproof or "fail-safe" or has quadruple guards, or whatever. There was the near meltdown of the nuclear reactor at

  Three Mile Island, which came frighteningly close to a major catastrophe and which let loose

  enough contamination to cause sickness in humans and animals years later. Then came the

  even worse disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Soviet Union. And shortly after

  that, the failure of the U.S. space shuttle Chal enger, which kil ed al those aboard.

  Those events were accompanied by official lies to cover up the true nature of what had

  happened. Indeed, nuclear technology, because its failures have cataclysmic consequences,

  encourages political leaders to deceive the public, as happened right from the beginning of

  the atomic tests in the Nevada desert. The Atomic Energy Commission lied to the GIs who

  participated in those tests and who later developed cancer far beyond the normal statistical

  expectations.

  There is stil another cost of the arms buildup, and that is the fact that the possession of

  superweapons tempts the possessor to use it as a threat in any international crisis. Once

  the threat is made, it is very difficult, given the traditional concern of political leaders with

  "credibility," "saving face," "maintaining our image," etc., to back down.

  That is why the world came close to nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis in the fal of

  1962, when the discovery of the presence of Russian missiles on Cuba led to an American

  ultimatum to Khrushchev, where both nations needed to "save face" by bul ing it out. As

  Kennedy's adviser Theodore Sorensen put it, the president "was concerned less about the

  missiles' military implications than with their effect on the global political balance."14

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  Only Khrushchev's decision to back down enabled an agreement on removal of the missiles, in return for a pledge not to try again to invade Cuba. President Kennedy estimated that

  there was a one in three chance of nuclear war in that situation and yet he went ahead with

  his threats.15 And what provoked it was that the Soviets did in Cuba what the United States

  had already done in Turkey and other countries, to place missiles very close to the borders

  of the other superpower.

  Recently, a researcher asked some of the top military and strategic leaders of the United

  States the commonsense question: Why in the world do we need tens of thousands of

  nuclear bombs for deterrence? Suppose we assume (what I believe to be false), that nuclear

  weapons are needed to deter a Soviet invasion or attack, surely a few hundred bombs—

  enough to destroy every major Soviet city (and which could be carried on two

  submarines)—would be a sufficient deterrent.

  The answers of these policymakers were startling; they acknowledged that the weapons

  were unnecessary from a military point of view, but claimed they served a "political"

  purpose in that they conveyed a certain image of American power. One analyst with the

  Rand Corporation (a government think tank) told him:

  If you had a strong president, a strong secretary of defense they could

  temporarily go to Congress and say, "We're only going to build what we

  need … . And if the Russians build twice as many, tough." But it would be

  unstable political y… . And it is therefore better for our own domestic stability

  as wel as international perceptions to insist that we remain good competitors

  even though the objective significance of the competition is … dubious.16

  In short, hundreds of bil ions have been spent to maintain an image. The image of the

  United States is that of a nation possessed of a frightening nuclear arsenal. What good has

  that image done, for the American people, or for anyone in the world? Has it prevented

  revolutions, coups, wars? Even from the viewpoint of those who want to convey an image of

  strength—for some mysterious psychic need of their own, perhaps—what image is conveyed

  when a nation so overarmed is unable to defeat a tiny country in Southeast Asia, or to

  prevent revolutions in even tinier countries in the Caribbean?

  The weapons addiction of al our political leaders, whether Republican
or Democrat, has the

  same characteristics as drug addiction. It is enormously costly, very dangerous, provokes

  ugly violence, and is self-perpetuating—al on a scale far greater than drug addiction.

  Aside from its uselessness for military and political purposes, its colossal waste of human

  resources, its dangers to the survival of us al , nuclear deterrence is profoundly immoral. It

  means that the United States is holding hostage the entire population of the Soviet Union—

  the very people it claims are suffering under communism—and stands ready to kil them al

  if the Soviet government makes the wrong move. And the Soviet Union is doing the same to

  the American population. If we think holding hostage the passengers of an airliner is

  unspeakably evil and cal it terrorism, what name shal we give for holding hostage the

  entire human race?

  The arms race is sustained by a fanatical righteousness that sees international conflict as

  total good versus total evil, and is wil ing to sacrifice hundreds of mil ions of lives in a

  nuclear war. Wil iam Buckley wrote in the mid 1980s:

  The suggestion that … no use of nuclear weapons is moral y defensible, not

  even the threat of their use as a deterrent, is nothing less than an eructation

  in civilized thought, putting, as it does, the protraction of biological life as the

  fit goal of modern man.17

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  Not only are we supposed to feel intel ectual y inferior if we have to look up the word eructation (which means belching, and Buckley, intent on showing off, is not using it

  accurately); but we are supposed to feel moral y inferior if we oppose nuclear deterrence

  because of some cowardly feeling that life is more precious than political victory. Buckley is a Catholic, and we might contrast his statement with that of Vatican II: "Any act of war

  aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with

  their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and

  unhesitating condemnation.18

  It is sad to see how, in so many countries, citizens have been led to war by the argument

  that it is necessary because there are tyrannies abroad, evil rulers, murderous juntas. But

  to make war is not to destroy the tyrants; it is to kil their subjects, their pawns, their