The way to peace turns out to lie not through war preparations, but through peace preparations. Preparing for war very often, though not always, leads to the launching of wars, wars that in many cases would probably not have happened without the preparations. Even the Project for the New American Century could not have advocated for the demonstration of the United States' military preeminence had the United States not built up a military dramatically larger than (though obviously not powerful enough to crush) anyone else's.
When Winston Churchill spoke in New York City on October 9, 1929, his $12,500 speaker's fee was paid by the chairman of African Explosives and deputy chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries which manufactured bombs, ammunition, and poison gas. Imperial Chemical was a descendant of the company of Alfred Nobel (the arms manufacturer and creator of the eponymous "peace prize"), and it worked with Dupont in the United States and I.G. Farben in Germany, the latter being the supplier of gas for the Nazis' gas chambers. Churchill spoke in support of larger militaries.
In President Franklin Roosevelt's office were an ashtray with a ship on it, a cigarette lighter in the shape of a ship's wheel, a barometer, a ship's clock, paintings of sea battles, and a model of a destroyer. Throughout the White House were ship models and paintings and lithographs of naval battles. A portrait of the president in the New York Times Magazine on April 3, 1938, carried the caption:
If instead of Churchill and Roosevelt, Britain and the United States had placed in power men or women who lacked affection for weapons and financial interests in weapons, would war have been as likely to occur and to take the form that it did? (E.L.F. Wood, Lord Halifax, would likely have made peace with Germany, but Churchill insisted on war.)
And if war had to happen, would it have been as bloody had we not armed the other side? In 1934, the French arms company Schneider sold 400 tanks to Hitler's Germany, and the British company Vickers sold Hitler 60 airplanes. Meanwhile, the U.S. company Boeing sold three two-engine airplanes to Germany. Pratt and Whitney sold BMW (Bavarian, not British, Motor Works) the rights to build one of its engines. The Sperry Corporation had a patent agreement with the German company Askania. Sperry made bombsights and gyroscopic stabilizers. American companies sold Germany crankshafts, cylinder heads, control systems for anti-aircraft guns, and enough components to produce a hundred planes a month. According to at least some monthly reports from the U.S. government during the 1930s, Germany was the third largest purchaser of U.S. weapons.
Beginning in 1938, Lockheed licensed the Tachikawa and Kawasaki companies in Japan to build 200 transport bombers. Before the United States cut off oil to Japan, it had been -- right up through 1940 -- shipping Japan tens of millions of dollars' worth of "aviation gas" each year, relabeling the substance "high-grade motor fuel" in order to avoid highlighting its purpose.
Between June 1962 and January 1964 only 179 of approximately 7,500 weapons captured from the Vietcong had come from the Soviet bloc. The other 95 percent were U.S. weapons that had been provided to the South Vietnamese.
So, perhaps stockpiling weapons can increase the likelihood of wars, and selling piles of weapons to the other side can make the wars bloodier, but didn't the accumulating mountain of weaponry during the Cold War lead to a bloodless victory?
No, it didn't. It led to endless and very bloody proxy wars fought with "conventional" weapons, not to mention the post-Cold-War proliferation of nuclear weapons to additional nations -- which can only look harmless up until the moment it eliminates all life on the planet.
The Cold War, just like the period that followed it, involved as much lying as any hot war. The way to build more weapons in an "arms race" is to pretend the other side is ahead of you. In May 1956, Curtis LeMay, head of Strategic Air Command, in testimony before a Senate subcommittee, claimed that Soviet aircraft production was outpacing that of the United States, creating a mad rush to "catch up." In fact, the exact opposite was true, and LeMay almost certainly knew it. John Kennedy campaigned for president promoting a fictional "missile gap" with the Soviet Union, then boosted military spending by 15 percent in his first year. In reality, the United States had more missiles than the Soviet Union did, even before Kennedy doubled the production rate of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and increased the planned fleet of nuclear submarines. This, of course, encouraged the Soviet Union to try to keep pace.
All of this is good news for weapons makers, but not for peace planners. Having built all kinds of weapons, people tend to start thinking about how they might use some of them. They focus their attention on war plans, war scenarios, and hypothetical war contingencies, but not on planning for peace. In 1936, an English subcommittee strategized an air war on Germany. They determined that bombing German cities would not cause Germany to surrender, but -- importantly -- in spite of that knowledge, they developed plans for bombing German cities. In contrast, in 1938, when Clarence Pickett, a leader of the American Friends Service Committee asked Roosevelt to talk directly with Hitler to try to avoid war, Roosevelt replied that he'd thought about that but was more concerned with building up a strong air force. Planning for war was more important than working for peace. (More shocking to the contemporary eye, of course, is the phenomenon of a president communicating with a peace activist at all.)
In 2002 the British government produced a document known as "the Iraq Options Paper," which recommended the steps that would be necessary as a precursor to a military attack on Iraq. Britain and the United States would have to slowly build up pressure to frighten Saddam Hussein. A refusal to admit U.N. inspectors could serve as a justification, but intense diplomatic work would be needed first to win support from the U.N. Security Council and other nations. Re-energizing the peace process between Israel and Palestine could help sell the world on attacking Iraq. A major media campaign would be needed to prepare public opinion. So much planning just to arrive at something the planners would claim was a last resort.
Of course, Iraq had no connection to al Qaeda, but the general and dangerously vague "war on terror" was driven by propaganda that substituted al Qaeda for the Cold War's Soviet Union, inflating reports of the al Qaeda threat and pursuing policies that actually helped to build al Qaeda. In September 2010, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) produced a report overseen by a former deputy director of Britain's foreign intelligence agency, MI-6. The report found that the threat from al Qaeda and the Taliban had been "exaggerated" by the western powers. The occupation of Afghanistan had "ballooned" out of all proportion from its original aim of disrupting and defeating al-Qaeda and in fact constituted "a long-drawn-out disaster." The report admitted that the occupation was fuelling violence.
Always innovating, the United States at about the same time found another way to fuel probable future violence. In the largest U.S. weapons sale ever, the Obama administration arranged to sell Saudi Arabia 60 billion dollars worth of aircraft. Apparently Saudi Arabia would need these to fend off the menace of Iran, which possessed a small air force consisting largely of old planes supplied by none other than -- you guessed it -- the United States.
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