The Pentagon, headquarters of the U.S. Defense Department, as viewed with the Potomac River and Washington, D.C., in the background.
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DJ: That's how my father got into this. He was in the Department of Agriculture with Henry Wallace when the country started gearing up for another war and later found itself never getting out of this business of war.
The religion of the United States has become the total destruction of the enemy. With us, it is always unconditional surrender. It's not enough to defeat an enemy, you have to destroy them. This is closely linked to the possession of nuclear weapons, the idea of total destruction rather than simply defeat. It is a part of the extreme arrogance built into the American culture: We must never lose, we must always win. ["]
Very important studies on strategic bombing in World War II concluded that it wasn't the strategic bombing that won the war. However, this myth has been perpetuated ever since, that strategic bombing wins wars. It continues because the Air Force needs a lot of money to stay in business.
During the Vietnam war, the question was put to experts as to what would be the effect of bombing the north. They concluded that it would "only unite the enemy against us." But the Air Force wanted to bomb and they got what they wanted. They wanted a piece of the action. Washington politics plays a huge role in getting us into these wars. So even in cases where the intelligence community manages to produce something that makes sense, it typically gets ignored.
All this seemed to subside somewhat with the recognition of the concept of "mutual assured destruction." The trouble is, since the Soviet Union collapsed, the arrogance of the United States -- which made Truman, for example, decide to drop the atomic bomb on Japan after Japan was already defeated -- has come back, as you said, on steroids.
When Putin, in 2007, said that he wanted a multipolar rather than a unipolar world, from then on Russia and Putin have been the enemy. Besides, we have got God and the Dollar on our side and we can do anything. During the Cold War you had some measure of caution at the top. Now all caution has gone to the winds. Someone like Steven Cohen, for example, a top expert [on Russia], is effectively marginalized because he is not on the administration line.
DB: There's a section in your book called "Imagining Doomsday," which describes efforts by the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group to study the implications of radioactive fallout. I imagine they are now going back over this stuff, this is the information they need to know.
DJ: Well, supposedly they are at work revising the weapons to make them more powerful and less radioactive. All this business about putting up a "shield" in Eastern Europe is obviously meant to give the United States a first-strike capacity. It won't work, but that is the latest illusion. It isn't meant to shield us from Russian aggression, it is meant to shield us from Russian retaliation.
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