Day # 147 Paying the Cold War Piper

As the victorious powers began re-arranging the world after World War II, things began to go awry.  Conflict emerged between the Soviet Union, our erstwhile allies, and the Truman administration.  Whomever you want to blame for the Cold War, and there is a lot of blame to go around, during the years immediately after the Big One, the US side followed Truman, George F Kennan and Dean Acheson down the primrose path they called "containment".  All sorts of countries were now free or wishing to be free of the yoke of colonial meddling.  Countries as far flung and different as Greece and Viet Nam began to have rebel uprisings.  To have an uprising you need guns and the new Superpowers were more than happy to oblige, shipping arms willy-nilly to whomever aligned, even slightly, with a pro-Soviet or pro-western political agenda.  By shipping arms to small rebel groups who opposed the Soviets, the US was supposedly containing the spread of Communism. The Russians, of course, were doing exactly the same.

It became obvious to Truman's apparatchiks that containment using small groups of armed rebels probably wasn't going to keep the pesky ruskies at bay.  Thus the cork was popped out of the bottle of nuclear containment and the Cold War was on.

Of course, this little blog entry is not intended as a complete history of the Cold War, but just a few more tidbits if you will allow.

The Famous General inherited the White House and the Truman Doctrine.  I know that at the end of the Eisenhower years he famously warned about the dangers of the "Military-Industrial Complex" but that is probably because of his guilt over this monster that, while not birthed during his eight years as president, certainly took on some healthy girth through that era.  During the 1950's, we had Allen and John Foster Dulles, Walter Bedell Smith and Robert Cutler, amongst others, preaching the gospel of the arms race to Eisenhower and the rest of the world.

And so it continued, through Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan and then Bush who was just hanging around when the wall came down.  Technologies progressed, guidance systems got better, nukes went to sea on submarines but the parade went on and the behind-the-scenes thinkers, tinkerers and military gurus kept up the drum beat.  One of the most constant voices throughout, and the most Kubrickian of the cast of characters, was Curtis "Bombs Away" Lemay who left us with a reorganized Strategic Air Command and such bon mots as:

"I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons. However, the public opinion in this country and throughout the world throw up their hands in horror when you mention nuclear weapons, just because of the propaganda that's been fed to them."


So what did this legacy cost us?  Well, besides all of the moral cost and the climate of fear that ruled the chess game of world politics and caused American suburbanites to dig bomb shelters in their back yards, there was an unfathomable financial drain on the world.  But for the moment, let's be zenophobic and concentrate on the costs to the United States alone.


As you might imagine, estimates on the cost of the Cold War vary greatly.  In the interest of fairness I will start with the lowest figures I could dig up.  The sources for these figures were Department of Defense and Center for Defense Information.  All the figures used are averaged out for 1998 dollars (I don't know why they use 1998).  The lowest cost estimates for just the nuclear weapons, including deployment, maintenance and oversight is 5.8 Trillion Dollars.  This is for the period 1940-1996 and does not include any other defense spending and does not include weapons systems like artillery and short-range missiles that had both conventional and nuclear capabilities.  This is a very low figure, but lets start there.  If you use this as a benchmark, the citizens of the US footed the bill for nukes at 10.4 Billion Dollars per year, every year, for fifty-six years.  That averages out to 28.5 Million Dollars a day, every day.


While the numbers listed above are frightening, it does get worse.  If you look at the period of the Cold War as 1945 through 1996 (historians differ on the starting years) the US had an average defense budget of 285.4 Billion Dollars and that's after you factor out the Korean War years and the Viet Nam War years.  During the years that we were supposedly at peace, we spent 810 Million Dollars a day on defense spending.  To be fair, I will grant you that a peace time army is a reasonable expense but most of this spending was driven by the Cold War.  So, just for argument, lets give back 50% of this mountain range of cash for the Generals to have their toys.  That leaves a daily expenditure of 405 Million Dollars each and every day for the duration of the Cold War factoring out Korea and Viet Nam.


Instead of a world cloaked in fear of nuclear annihilation, which permeated everything down to the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, what we could have had for that amount of money is staggering.  Here is a small sampling of what we might have done with the money had we a bit more vision and a bit less wooden-headedness (thank you Barbara Tuckman).  We couldn't have done everything on the list, but we certainly could have done a few.  Pick your cause de jour and mourn:

The US National Deficit -- It would not have existed.  Not at all

The Transportation Infrastructure -- Completely re-built.  Twice.

An Educated Society -- 41.5 Million citizens could have gone to a four year private university in todays dollars for the cost of the low estimates listed above.  We could have had the most educated and competitive society in the world.

Universal Health Care --  Done and done.  And no co-pays.

Social Security -- Fully funded and financially healthy.

Environmental Issues -- With the kind of technology that we could have brought to bear on evironmental issues, we could all be driving zero emissions cars and using power off of the most sophisticated grid in the world while paying the coal miners not to dig the foul stuff out of the ground.

In truth, I simple cannot imagine the sums of money that we are talking about here.  Six Trillion, Thirteen Trillion, these are sums too vast for my feeble comprehension.  What is much more immediate and discernible for me is the immense feeling of loss over horrendously missed opportunities.  As I read the conclusions of Cold War Historians I find that most acknowledge the whole thing was a disaster for all concerned.  And it concerned all of us.  We, as a society, shoveled obscene amounts of money into the gaping maw of fear, dogma and misunderstanding.  We fed this beast year after year until it controlled us and we were over-mastered.  Morally and financially bankrupted, or nearly so, we continue to stagger along under the weight of this legacy, the effects of which will still be felt for years to come.