While most of the world is clear in its condemnation of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the U.S. defense industry sees the crisis in a somewhat different light.
"If Iraq does not withdraw and things get messy, it will be good for the industry," remarked a New York investment analyst in late August. "You will hear less rhetoric from Washington about the peace dividend."
The confrontation in the Persian Gulf highlights the fact that -- for those whose pocketbooks and careers are dependent on the military economy -- the demise of the Cold War does not mean that peace need get the upper hand. Before August, with the budget deficit, the S&L crisis, and a long-neglected social sector hungering for any available funds, defense contractors, weapons labs, and think tanks were trembling in fear of a leaner future.
Iraq's attack -- and Bush's damn-the-diplomacy, full-speed-ahead response -- threatens to derail the peace train before it leaves the station. The Gulf crisis, according to a Reagan-era defense department official, "lends more credibility to the Pentagon's argument that the world isn't at peace now, just changed."
Indeed, the Pentagon and its civilian counterparts haven't acted as if the Cold War thaw has changed anything:
- The Pentagon is seeking a 22 percent increase in Star Wars funding next year, while the program's new director urged that the space-based weapons system remain focused on "protecting the country from an all-out Soviet assault."
- The Northrop Corp. carried out an all-out assault of its own this summer -- trying to convince Congress to buy 75 B2 Stealth bombers (each one, at $860 million, costing more than the entire Head Start program), designed to track down and destroy Soviet mobile missiles after the first exchanges in a nuclear war. Northrop appeared to have lost the battle in July when congressional committees voted to curtail the bomber, but within days of the Iraqi invasion, the B2 received a new breath of life on the Senate floor.
- The Energy Department released this summer its plan to "fully modernize" and reorganize its network of bomb factories so that the military can make new nuclear weapons at least through the year 2050.
- The Navy announced that Trident II missiles, the most accurate and deadly sea-launched missiles ever built, are now fully operational and deployed in Trident submarines. And the Bush administration made yet another attempt to revive the long-reviled MX-on-rails plan, requesting $2.8 billion in next year's budget to move 12 of the missiles from their silos to a mobile rail system.
MILITARY STRATEGISTS are even now concocting the next generation of weapons, new uses for current weapons, and new strategies for fighting the wars hot and cold of the next decade and the next century. Those who are designing and creating the weapons that are on the drawing boards and in the pipelines today are little affected by the global warming in East-West relations, for they are making preparations even now for the next Cold War.
Randy Kehler, one of the founders of the nuclear weapons freeze campaign, continues to sound the clarion call about the arms race. "Yes, there's been progress of a sort with respect to nuclear disarmament," Kehler said before the August 2 invasion. "The political climate has changed, the issue has been 'democratized,' leaders have been forced to make some moves. But to my knowledge not one single new weapon that [the government] has really wanted has been scrapped ... A few items slowed down maybe, but nothing stopped."
The reason? Kehler thinks it's because Congress refuses to risk the wrath of the weapons industry -- and the workers, families, communities, and local and state governments that the industry holds hostage -- by shutting down production lines.
Many peace organizations, meanwhile, have moved from a single-issue focus on stopping the nuclear arms race to an array of other critical concerns, including racism, poverty in this country and in the Third World, so-called low-intensity warfare, the environment, and others. The broadening of focus and the making of connections were essential if peace groups were ever to be able to address the roots of the arms race. But what has been lost is a decisive, concentrated effort aimed at putting an end to nuclear weapons.
The peace movement has failed to counter the prevailing myth that the arms race is no longer a problem. In public perception, with the demise of the Cold War, the nuclear threat faded as well. The unfortunate reality is that nuclear weapons are still a threat. In fact, in some ways the peril has increased with the changed global scene.
The risk of an all-out nuclear war between the superpowers has been reduced, thanks to Gorbachev's reforms and the resultant eased relations between East and West. But the Soviet leader's position is far from stable, and the potential for upheaval in the world's second nuclear power threatens Gorbachev's ability to institutionalize his promised steps toward disarmament.
In addition, the removal of the Cold War overlay, ironically, increases the likelihood of a nuclear strike on a developing nation. The danger of nuclear escalation engendered by the U.S. Soviet standoff made a nuclear attack on a Third World country at the height of the Cold War almost unthinkable.
During the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon had chosen targets for nuclear attack in North Vietnam -- but he didn't dare risk invoking Brezhnev's wrath (or that of the U.S. public) by actually crossing the nuclear threshold. Now, with less fear of sparking the big one, a limited nuclear use is more conceivable for one of the superpowers or a regional adversary -- in a crisis such as the Persian Gulf or in the next conflict down the road. And the chances of an accident involving nuclear weapons, or that a non-superpower conventional conflict could cross the nuclear threshold, have been little diminished by the East-West thaw.
In short, the nuclear situation -- despite improved superpower relations -- is a catastrophe waiting to happen.
I WAS 4 YEARS OLD when the Berlin Wall went up. My daughter was 4 when it came down. My generation grew up with the Cold War. Our values, habits, and ways of thinking about the world have been largely defined by an East-West conflict armed with a nuclear hair-trigger.
The nature of East-West relations, thankfully, has changed, arguably forever. And yet, because our ways of thinking have not, the nuclear hair-trigger remains. If we are to leave a different kind of world for my daughter's generation, we will have to make a choice. We can either continue down the road we've been on for generations, heaping the latest "modernized" weapons atop the already-burgeoning stockpiles, and accept that a permanent national-security state is to be the Cold War's lasting legacy.
Or, we can finally lay war aside and set out on a new, in some ways uncharted, journey as we seek a world order based not on the tools of destruction but on the human and humane tools of diplomacy and reconciliation. Perhaps now is the time to put into practice peace activist A.J. Muste's adage, "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way."
Jim Rice is editor of Sojourners.
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