Return to the ground floor of this tower
Return to the Main Courtyard
Return to Fort Freedom's home page
]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] DEFENSELESS COWARDS [[[[[[[[[[[[[[
by Tom Bethell (2/14/1989)
From The American Spectator, March 1989, p. 11
Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent.
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
On September 30, 1988, in a Wall Street Journal editorial
entitled ``Curious Chemistry,'' Air Force chief of Staff Larry D.
Welch was quoted as saying in an interview with the paper's
editors: ``As soon as the President announced his vision of a
Strategic Defense Initiative, there was an immediate opposition
to the idea. It wasn't an argument over whether SDI was
technically feasible. It was an argument over whether defense is
destabilizing, and I think that is an absolutely nonsensical
argument. We have no defense worthy of the name. This
tremendous opposition to introducing a defensive element to the
U.S. deterrent strategy has to be one of the most mysterious
pieces of political chemistry we've seen.''
The newspaper then editorially noted that the Reagan
Administration had compromised with the ``curious'' sentiment
that defensive missiles are immoral and offensive ones are not,
thereby ``perhaps compromising our national security as well.''
This may have been the strongest criticism directed at Reagan in
his eight years in office, but no one seemed to notice it.
I write on Inauguration day, amidst a general sense of
euphoria in Washington. Bipartisan consensus has once again been
restored to foreign policy, we are told. ``The Establishment is
back,'' a Washington Post editor wrote a few days ago, ``not just
the individuals and the pedigrees, but the state of mind.''
Which is what I am worried about, frankly. We are supposed to
feel reassured that Andover, St. Marks, Yale, and Princeton are
back in the saddle. And we are supposed to derive comfort
because the left-wing senator from Maine and new Senate Majority
Leader, George Mitchell, is ``trying very hard to establish from
our side an atmosphere of cooperation and bipartisanship.''
David Ignatius, the editor of the Washington Post's Outlook
section, noted that Secretary of State James A. Baker III was
dutifully consulting with his predecessors, in a way that was
reminiscent of ``the best and the brightest'' at the outset of
John F. Kennedy's Administration. Lurking beneath the comparison
with the ironically named ``best and brightest,'' of course, was
an implicit prediction of disaster ahead: Kennedy's highly
qualified Ivy Leaguers soon strolled into the quagmire of
Vietnam. Does a comparable fate await President Bush's team, so
many of whom come from a comparable background.
What is disturbing about the present situation is not so much
that the country is undefended as that it is undefended because
we are afraid to defend ourselves. In an article in Human Events
last summer [9 July 1988], Jon Utley, a friend of mine who lives
in the Washington area, put the matter somewhat differently, but
he too is disturbed. ``The studied absence of any civil defense
is a sin of pride of Biblical proportions. Are many Americans so
arrogant as to consider a nuclear attack on us as meaning the end
of civilization?''
By all accounts the Soviet economy is collapsing; Soviet
troops are retreating from Afghanistan (they are supposed to be
out by February 15), having been beaten back by ragtag brigades
of free-lance mujahedeen (armed, however, with the willingness to
die for their cause). Still, the Soviet strategic arsenal is
intact and there can be little doubt that the U.S. leadership is
afraid to construct an air-defense against it. And we will not
even think about civil defense for the American people.
Has anything comparable to this ever happened before -- a
great power so fearful of its collapsing adversary that it cannot
muster the will to defend itself? ``The sad fact is that few
nations in history have adopted such a `strategy' as that of the
United States, purposely leaving its citizens as unprotected
hostages to attack,'' Utley wrote. Petr Beckmann, the publisher
of Access to Energy in Boulder, Colorado, believes that the
present lack of will among the American leadership class is more
grave than it was in Neville Chamberlain's England of fifty years
ago.
The predicament we are in is disguised by the existence of the
misnamed Department of Defense, which spends $300 billion
annually, none of it on defense. The very large sums of money
that the department disposes of every year amount largely to a
form of domestic pork barrel, the money going to salaries,
pensions, the maintenance of many obsolete, World War II-era
bases, the subsidy of foreign governments and taxpayers, and (to
be fair) the procurement of offensive weapons.
The Pentagon spends nothing on civil defense, that task having
been delegated to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which
is housed on the campus of what once was a Catholic college in
Emmitsburg, Maryland. Its budget is about $150 million a year,
part of which is dedicated to earthquake preparedness. One day
recently I drove out to Emmitsburg to hear two talks on civil
defense, one given by Arthur Robinson, who publishes a pro-civil
defense newsletter entitled ``Fighting Chance'' (P.O. Box 1279,
Cave Junction, Oregon, 97523). The other speaker was Justin
Frank, the president of the Washington chapter of Physicians for
Social Responsibility. He said that when Jimmy Carter began his
``defense buildup'' in 1978 it ``frightened a group of
physicians,'' the best known of whom was the left-wing
pediatrician Helen Caldicott. Dr. Frank said he joined the group
about eight years ago, ``the day after my son was born.'' He
said the ``goal'' of PSR was ``to prevent nuclear war,'' and its
``values'' were enshrined in the belief that life is ``precious''
and ``vulnerable.''
Justin Frank had one and only one argument against civil
defense, and it is the same as the argument against strategic
defense: whether civil or strategic, defense makes nuclear war
more ``thinkable,'' because if ``one side'' has it, the
temptation to launch a first strike would be irresistible; he who
has defense can strike first and win.
This is the argument that Air Force Chief of Staff Welch calls
``nonsensical.'' Imagine the reaction if someone in Neville
Chamberlain's Britain had denigrated the British development of
radar, on the grounds that that would make war with Hitler more
``thinkable.'' The makes-war-thinkable argument contains the
following hidden assumption: ``We'' are no better than ``they.''
There are simply ``two sides,'' both alike threatened by the
awful technology of nuclear weapons. But this is a lie and the
American willingness to be bullied into silence by it is
disturbing. ``We'' should not accept this slanderous imputation
of bad faith and of evil, aggressive intentions, awaiting only
the security of civil and strategic defenses before they can be
carried out in the form of a first strike.
The Soviets meanwhile are building both strategic and civil
defenses. By contrast, we would do well to suspect their motives,
because of the yawning gap between their form of totalitarian
government, imprisoning and subjugating all those who live under
it, and our democracy. But the Physicians for Social
Responsibility do not protest the Soviet programs of civil and
strategic defense. They know about it but don't mind. And this
can lead only to the following conclusion: they believe that if
the U.S. is defended, it is more likely to attack the Soviet
Union than a defended Soviet Union is likely to attack an
undefended U.S.
Notice also the following: all of PSR's stated goals (``to
prevent nuclear war,'' ``to eliminate the use of weapons of mass
destruction,'' etc.) could be achieved by a U.S. surrender. No
one ever points out that those who argue that ``defense'' is
destabilizing tend to be in sympathy with the socialist ideology
that has legitimized the exercise of power in only one of the
``two sides.'' May we not conclude that the true goal of PSR and
of all organizations that deplore a defended U.S. is the spread
of international socialism? Helen Caldicott may have embarrassed
her PSR colleagues, but only by her candor, when in 1988 she
compared Mikhail Gorbachev to Jesus Christ. If British opponents
of radar in 1938 had turned out to be Nazi sympathizers, would
they not have been regarded with a certain suspicion, to put it
mildly? But in the U.S. today it is the greatest of all political
taboos to cast suspicion on the designs of those who really do
sympathize with the ideology that has legitimized Soviet rule for
seventy years.
Arthur Robinson is a biochemist, who used to work with Linus
Pauling until the two split irrevocably ten years ago. Robinson
is now one of the leading U.S. experts on civil defense, and he
has much to say on the subject. Perhaps his most important point
directly contradicts PSR's makes-war-more-thinkable argument. In
fact, says Robinson, civil defense makes war less thinkable
because if ``one side'' knows ``the other side'' has its
population in shelters, then it knows that tens of millions of
people will survive a nuclear attack. And the prospect of
confronting these survivors deters the attack. For this reason,
Robinson believes, the Soviet Union is now most unlikely to
attack China, which has large civil defense shelters under its
major cities. As Jon Utley wrote in Human Events: ``The great
irony is that if Americans had shelters, and enemy would have
infinitely less incentive to launch a surprise attack. Just by
their existence they would probably never be needed. But without
them America makes itself more and more inviting to a first
strike.''
In its latest (1988) edition of Soviet Military Power, the
Pentagon devotes a few pages to Soviet civil defense. ``For 40
years, the Soviet Union has had a vast program underway to ensure
the survival of the leadership in the event of nuclear war,'' the
document reports. ``This program is designed solely to protect
the senior Soviet leadership from the effect of nuclear war.
These deep underground facilities today are, in some cases,
hundreds of meters deep and can accommodate thousands of
people.''
Another speaker at the FEMA conference was Leon Goure, Soviet
emigre [acute accents over the e's] who is perhaps the leading
expert in the U.S. on Soviet civil defense. He has an elaborate
slide show to prove that the word ``solely'' in the above
paragraph is incorrect. Increasingly, the Soviet civil defense
program can protect ordinary Soviet citizens as well as party
members. Soviet Military Power does go on to say:
The secrecy of the program and the uncertainty about the
extent and nature of these facilities are major causes for
concern. The deep underground program, which rivals Soviet
offensive strategic weapons both in scale and commitment,
remained undiminished even as the Soviets agreed to limit
their defenses against ballistic missiles in the ABM
treaty. ...
The deep underground facilities beneath the city of
Moscow are directly associated with the main centers of
state power. They provide the leaders of the various
organizations of state control the opportunity to move from
their peacetime offices through concealed entryways down to
protective quarters below the city, in some cases hundreds
of meters down. Once there the Politburo, the Central
Committee, the Ministry of Defense, the KGB and the
apparatuses of the many other state ministries can remain
sheltered while the USSR coverts to a wartime posture. The
fruits of this 40-year construction program now offer the
Soviet wartime leadership the option of remaining beneath
Moscow, or, at some point, boarding secret subway lines
connecting these deep underground facilities. From there
the Soviets can make their way to nearby underground
complexes outside Moscow where they plan to survive nuclear
strikes and to direct the war effort.
In response, Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci called in
September 1988 for the development of earth-penetrating nuclear
weapons designed to burrow down into these shelters. But is this
the way to go? Should we not be developing strategic defense,
and civil defense? If the Defense Department does not soon avail
itself of the latest available technology, which is to say
technology with real defensive capability, then the country will
be imperiled, if it is not already.
The collapse of socialist economies makes the Soviets more
dangerous, not less so. Their leaders must now know that they
are doomed to fall further and further behind. As for their
strategic arsenal, they must fairly soon either ``use it or lose
it,'' as Arthur Robinson put it to me. A more likely scenario,
he added, was a contrived international crisis, whereupon the
Soviet leaders would order their population into shelters -- and
call upon ours to surrender. Then what would we do?
As I left the Emmitsburg conference, I recalled a remark made
by a FEMA employee from the audience during the question period
after Arthur Robinson and Justin Frank had spoken. I wrote it
down: ``A group of us laughed ourselves sick in the pub last
night, because we're supposed to be preparing for nuclear war,
and we're utilizing that money to deal with hazardous-materials
incidents and to deal with earthquakes. And the general public
doesn't know that.''
[The following is part of the article above.]
Jon Basil Utley, ``America Needs a Privatized Civil Defense'',
Human Events, Vol. 48, No. 28 (9 July 1988), pp. 12-13.
An annual subscription to the informative monthly Journal of
Civil Defense costs $18. Address inquiries to P.O. Box 910
Starke, FL 32091.
FEMA's address is:
Federal Emergency Management Agency, Washington, D.C. 20472
FEMA also makes available a six-hour home-study course. To get
it write:
FEMA Home Study Program
Emergency Management Institute
16825 South Seton Ave.
Emmitsburg, Md. 21727
* * *
Return to the ground floor of this tower
Return to the Main Courtyard
Return to Fort Freedom's home page