A very interesting paper on nuclear war, the Cold War, neutron bombs, military and political manipulation of fear, and various other things.
http://boingboing.net/profits_of_fear.pdf
“Rebuilding America’s Defenses” urged the United States to use its unique wealth and power to intimidate potential foreign adversaries before they could grow big enough to intimidate us.
The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center almost seemed to validate this call to action—except that the attack was launched by a handful of religious nuts armed with box cutters. A bigger arsenal to fight foreign wars could never prevent guerrilla actions of this type. Nevertheless the fate of the Trade Center somehow helped to justify deployment of stealth bombers, cruise missiles, tanks armored with depleted uranium, and many more state-of-the-art munitions including massive (conventional) bombs which George W. Bush described as inspiring “shock and awe.” None of this could compare with the glory days of megatons and megadeaths, but the prospect of mobilizing a huge high-tech force (with a little old-fashioned torture on the side) still created perhaps a frisson of horriied fascination. More to the point it delivered an overdue dose of drama for those who still dreamed of playing an historically signiicant role on the global stage. When you factored in the fringe beneits, such as unifying an electorate that had been bitterly divided over an allegedly illegitimate presidential election, “Rebuilding America’s
Defenses” must have seemed irresistible.…
We have given up sitting around wondering what we will do if there’s a four-minute warning of armageddon. Instead, we have been induced to worry about primitive explosives in the hands of semi-literate fanatics who might kill perhaps a few thousand of us in tall buildings or a few dozen of us in public transit systems. Such numbers are utterly trivial compared with the mass annihilation that seemed plausible and imminent during the 1950s and 1960s. They are small even by comparison with highway trafic fatalities, yet the anxiety induced by the possibility of domestic terrorism has become comparable with bygone fears of communism. This makes no sense at all, but fears are seldom rational, especially when they are manipulated by elected representatives who somehow continue to command some trust and respect.
