Dangerous Capabilities: Paul Nitze and the Cold War

Where we went wrong. "Then (World War II) ended: now what happens? Well, everybody expected that we were going to go right back into the Depression, because nothing fundamental had changed. The only thing that had changed was that we’d had this big period of government stimulation of the economy during the war. Then came kind of an interesting…it wasn’t really a debate because it was settled before it started—but the issue was at least raised: Should the government pursue military spending or social spending? —Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power, p74, 2003 Every American student of history that seeks to preserve democracy should know how today’s threats to democracy grew from a single decision made without the consent of the American people. Two long-serving State Department officials met on a train one night near the end of World War II. A deep conversation began that changed the world then—and keeps changing the world now—robbing a global civilization of the time it will take to adopt a new and secure path for the future at the end of a hard struggle to save the planet. Nature is not cooperating with our best estimates of time remaining as extreme weather lashes us. Society looks on while one political party is clearly bent on sabotage, conjured by a tyrant’s paranoia and deep chasm of character flaws. The most selfish and destructive party in our history was created in the image of Donald Trump over a period of four years. The Republican Party ratified its allegiance to him by weaponizing itself to destroy voting rights in the world’s leading example of democracy, to attack the US Capitol and stop the election verification procedure in session, and to fill courts across America with hardline loyalists after deliberately and illegally withholding appointments to the Supreme Court by President Obama during his eight years in office. Under Trump, Republicans slowly slipped into his orbit and succumbed to the madness that turns ordinary people into blithering outlaws. Social media sites such as Fakebook assist by providing wild stories of conspiracies and complete falsehoods; easy fodder for consumers who opted out of education and are not inclined to compare multiple news sources for verification. There is only one solution left open: Popular demand to end conflict and pursue human prosperity—correcting the 1947 National Security Act mandate to spend the bulk of our wealth on a future war with the Soviet Union for our common defense. As each year passed after the secret choice and the mandate for war, our taxes paid an average of $700 billion on “Defense" compared to $5 billion on education. That disparity is driving us downward as despair and terror grow under nature’s assault. The Department of Defense is not unaware and not unsympathetic, but, like us, looks on, awaiting a new directive. In university studies of peace, we cannot escape the fact that our funding comes from a violence-centric source—the 1947 creation of a Department of Defense for conflict with the Soviet Union. My hope is that we convert such insanity to common sense by fully tasking the Department of Defense to defend nature as global superpower, initiating an intelligent future from war games to the transformation of killers to natural caretakers. We will need a network for ongoing recovery, a workforce for restoration, structural preservation, mobilization for the planned relocation of populations under threat, migration assistance, food and water replacement, wetlands projects, investigations into new resources and habitats, delayed degradation, and human progress in the activity of employment for environmental stabilization. Perhaps half the world can be preserved while the other half is naturally farmed for sustenance, both making high-degree efforts at water production and land preservation. This harmonious innovation beholden to a great power is natural civilization. And if we venture out of our solar system or seek co