Sleepwalking to Armageddon by Helen Caldicott

Author:Helen Caldicott
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620972472
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2017-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

Proxmire was speaking in 1969, so this is hardly a new phenomenon. A few years back, Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe did an analysis of what happened to three- and four-star generals and admirals once they left the government, and he found that thirty-four of thirty-nine of them went to work for Pentagon contractors or set up defense consulting firms.22 At the high end of the scale, it’s not a question of who is going through the revolving door, it’s more a question of who is not.

Another way the nuclear weapons industry in particular and the military-industrial complex in general try to control the public debate is by funding hawkish, right-wing think tanks. The advantage to contractors of operating in this fashion is that the think tanks can serve as front groups that pose as objective policy analysts when in fact they are carrying water for the industry. It’s sort of like political money laundering—but it’s political idea laundering. There are many examples of think tanks that are funded by the weapons industry.

My favorite industry-funded right-wing think tank is Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, which has been the biggest booster of the Star Wars program since shortly after Ronald Reagan announced it in the mid-1980s. Mr. Gaffney served with Richard Perle, known informally as the “Prince of Darkness” because of his gloomy view of the Soviet Union. Gaffney left the Reagan administration because they weren’t anti-Soviet enough for him once they started talking about things like reducing nuclear weapons in Europe. It didn’t take him long to set up his center with funding from Boeing, Lockheed, and other major defense contractors.23

Another key industry-backed think tank in the nuclear policy field is the National Institute for Public Policy. When the George W. Bush administration was coming into power, this institute released a report on nuclear weapons policy that was adopted in large part by the Bush administration in its first nuclear posture review. It included things like increasing the number of countries targeted by U.S. nuclear weapons and building new, more “usable,” bunker-busting weapons. At that time NIPP had an executive from Boeing on its board, and its director was Keith Payne, infamous in the annals of nuclear policy for a 1980 article he co-authored for Foreign Policy magazine entitled “Victory Is Possible,” about how the United States could win a nuclear war while “only” losing 30 to 40 million people.24 This is the kind of person the nuclear weapons industry funded to promulgate its views.

Last but not least is the Lexington Institute, the think tank that never met a weapons system it didn’t like. Their key front man, Loren Thompson, is frequently quoted in news stories on defense issues. It is rarely pointed out that he is funded by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and other weapons contractors.25

When traditional lobbying methods don’t get the job done, the industry’s argument of last resort is jobs—in particular, jobs in the states and districts of key members of Congress. The industry routinely

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