The Cold War Is Over

It is time to end the Cold War. Fifty years ago, the American Republic set out to rid the world of the Communist menace. To defeat the "evil empire," this country set up a huge National Security apparatus, engaged in dozens of covert and overt wars, and ran up $5 trillion in debt. Even if one bows to the questionable doctrine that the massive military spending we have engaged in since the end of World War II was the necessary price to pay to protect our freedom, the fact is that the enemy has been defeated and it's time to declare victory and call it quits!

And yet, our spending goes on unabated. This year, the Pentagon budget will be somewhere between $260 and $270 billion dollars, much of it going to continue to manufacture weapons against an enemy that no longer exists! Indeed, we have already wasted an astounding $45 billion on the first 21 B-2 bombers and the House of Representatives has authorized initial funding to build nine more at an additional cost of $27 billion. All for a weapon that cannot even do what it was designed to do, which was to penetrate Soviet radar after an enemy first strike and destroy the last remaining vestiges of civilization! Two years ago, the General Accounting Office concluded that the B-2's radar system could not distinguish between a rain cloud and a mountain and last year it was reported that the plane's stealth covering, the very core of its covert design, melts in the rain, blisters in the sun and chips in the cold. And if that isn't enough, the Air Force doesn't even want the planes in the first place because it admits that they neither work nor serve any military purpose. Isn't it extraordinary that all this money continues to be thrown away to build flawed weapons to attack the country that we are now sharing a space station with?

Clearly, we are, as one defense analyst suggests, "Marooned in the cold war!" But the insanity continues. For instance, we still maintain 100,000 troops in the middle of a united Germany, defending a "border" that no longer exists. And now, the President and the Senate Leader want to expand NATO by first bringing Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic (with other former Soviet block countries to follow) into a military alliance that no longer has any discernible purpose.

It seems that Eisenhower was right when he warned us of the military-industrial complex. Because while the American citizen continues to be hoodwinked, there is, in fact, one segment of our society that stands to gain by the expansion of NATO and the continuance of the cold war mentality--the well-heeled military conglomerates like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, who stand to gain billions of dollars in taxpayer-backed arms exports to the potential new members of the military hardware club.

You see, here's how it works. In order to join NATO, these newly independent Eastern European countries will have to modernize their militaries. They will do this either by buying hardware outright from U.S. firms or by joining partnership agreements with those companies to co-produce, say, fighter planes with them. How will these fragile new economies pay for their new arsenals? Well, some of the money will come directly from our coffers, that is, from the bloated military budget (remember: $260 billion) with no strings attached. Some, they will simply borrow from us, from a $15 billion arms export foreign aid that was created by Congress in 1995, and another fund, the Central European Defense Loan Fund, set up by the Administration. Now, if all goes well, they should be able to pay off these loans in future years. They get their aircraft and the arms merchants make their money.

Ah, but what if these countries find that they cannot meet their payments? Will Lockheed-Martin take a drubbing? Not on your life. You will, and so will I. In this decade alone, some $10 billion worth of U. S. government loans for arms sales have been written off; if past is prologue, it will be the major weapons contractors who get all the economic benefits and U.S. taxpayers who pay the piper. Not a bad scheme if you happen to be an executive of a major weapons manufacturer. And all it cost was a few million dollars to your favorite political party or incumbent's campaign committee. Well, as they say, money talks.

And, of course, ending the cold war would have to include bringing the curtain down on our 36-year unsuccessful embargo of Cuba (a policy which has not dislodged Castro's grip on power, but has increased the misery of the Cuban people), and working seriously to abolish the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons. Mutual assured destruction never was a sane policy to begin with; even if one could have once argued its merits, surely its day has long passed.

The truth is, NATO has, depending on how you look at it, either achieved or outlived its purpose. There is no overriding national or multinational rationale to continue the policies of the cold war except to keep the military-industrial complex awash in lucrative, no-risk contracts, while rewarding influential politicians with hundreds of unneeded Pentagon projects for their districts. This is clearly a situation where the country's political clothes are worn out and it's time to agitate for a new suit!