Origins of the arms race examined They planned to turn the Pentagon into a hospital!

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IT'S reading books like Defended to Death' that makes you realise just why Michael Heseltine is scared to engage in debate with the opponents of nuclear weapons.

Assembled in nearly 400 pages of closely argued text, appendices and notes, are a veritable armoury of facts and figures demolishing every aspect-of conventional Tory mythology and the US propaganda justifying the present massive nuclear build-up by Reagan and Thatcher.

More comprehensive and ambitious in scope than earlier books such as Protest and Survive' , and "Overkill', Defended to Death' is described as "a study of the nuclear arms race from the Cambridge University Disarmament Seminar" . And as one might hope from a group of ten capable academics, the result is, for the most part, an exceedingly thorough piece of work.

A historical examination of the conflicts between the imper¡alist nations and the post-revolutionary Sovet Union is marred by the fact that the Russian Revolution is mistakenly dated as 1918 - but in general does an effective job of showing why the Soviet leadership - whose territory was invaded by imperialist troops three times in the first half of this century has good reason to fear encirclement and aggression from the imperialists.

The account is perhaps excessively uncritical of the emergent Stalinist bureaucracy - particularly when it refers to the crash industrialisation of the l USSR from 1928-38.

And surprisingly it makes little of the impact of Stalinist purges in decimating the leadership of the Red Army, or his foreign policy which left the Soviet Union exposed to Hitler's invasion in 1941.

Hostile

But it points out that despite its hostile environment, the USSR at the end of the 1920s was rated less of a military power than Poland - let alone comparable to the main imperialist powers.

It was in the hot-house conditions of World War 2 - in which regrouped. Soviet forces bore the brunt of the fighting against Hitler's armies - that this Percentage 3I disclosed.

Reagan 1975-9 $ millions 1,322 1,819 3,518 3,247 1,227 2,037 1,745 2,385 3,109 atomic bomb.

But perhaps more significant, the USA developed for the first time a permanent and massive military apparatus. Unlike the aftermath of the American Civil War and World War 1, this apparatus was not dissolved, and the US war industries were not converted back to peacetime activity.

The authors point interestingly to the curious design of the Pentagon.

"The Pentagon is entered up gently sloping ramps. They were constructed in this way to allow stretcher trolleys to be wheeled in with ease, not in the event of an attack, but because it was intended to turn the building into a hospital when the war ended because it was no longer required for a military purpose." (p.87).

Not only the buildings, but many of the institutions we now see as inseparable from the functions of US imperialism also date only from the end of World War "In addition to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), the State Department and each of the three services have their own intelligence offices, all created in their present forms since the Second World War. " (p.87).

The sheer scalc of this new apparatus and the particular relationship of government defence spending to the burgeoning arms industry gave birth to what the authors term the "Steel Triangle" the military-industrial complex which heavily overshadows policy decisions of successive administrations.

The power and influence of the armaments lobby in US society is enormous. The authors point out that in 1980, "203 higher education institutions in America were Department of Defense contractors, receiving contracts worth $652 million. (p.146). Between 1978 and 1981, military research on US campuses has increased by 70% in dollar volume.

That is a lot of gravy - but the train of scientific people seeking to lap it up is dwarfed by the numbers making big money from the commercial research, development and production of new weaponry. As the authors point out:

"The vast cost and lengthy lead times for new weapons mean that once a contract is granted, the government cannot afford to allow the contract to fail. There are, in consequence, exceptionally attractive clauses in many military contracts. Special clauses are included which make it impossible for firms to lose money;.. (p.150).

Defended to Death' lists the dependency of vast US corporations on defence contracts, and points out that 88.5% of US defence contracts are granted without competitive bidding. And it looks at the involvement of former high-ranking military officers in these big moneyspinning firms.

Caucus

But the book does not sufficiently explain why this happened. The power and influence of this military caucus would only reach such a level insofar as its demands were clearly seen to coincide with the political aims and reactionary ideology of the US capitalist class as a whole.

Lale on the scene as a world power, the American ruling class not 'only nurtured a fanatical hatred of communism, but also ambitions to extend their economic and political power in a new world climate, in which the old, traditional empires were being broken up.

The vast expansion of the US military apparatus ran hand in hand with the strategic placement of "aid" and investment as part and parcel of attempts to consolidate capitalism in the Western countries and Japan under American domination.

In recent years the contradictions of the economic strategy have undermined US economic and political control over Europe and Japan: only in the military field is the USA undisputed leader of the imperialist nations.

It is under these conditions that, as the authors point out, the USA has consistently set the pace of the post-war nuclear and conventional arms race, forcing the Soviet bureaucracy to respond in self-defence. Like many previous texts, 'Defended to Death' demolishes the American arguments for siting Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe.

The authors go further, and in WEAPONS the chapter Changing Nuclear Policies' show how the development and availability of Trident. Cruise and Pershing missiles, the technology for Multiple Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicles (MIRV) and the MX missile arose from decisions taken up to two decades ago by various long-gone US administrations - often under the influence of seriously misleading intelligence information.

Pershing

The Cruise missile started life in 1967 as a proposal for an electronic decoy device to confuse Soviet air defences, the Pershing missile was originally designed as an army missile with a range of only 100-400 miles, Trident started out in 1966 as a long range missile that would enable submarines to operate from US bases only - while the MX missile was offered as a sop to jealous Air Force service chiefs. Now each looms as a monster casting its own black shadow over the world.

The implication is clear: