OUR BEST DEFENSE AGAINST TERRORISM
By Dr. Robert Bowman
Dr. Robert Bowman has been studying the Pentagon budget for
a long time. He worked at General Dynamics. He was in the Air Force for
22 years, flew a number of combat missions in Vietnam, and rose to the rank
of Lt. Colonel. He's also a bishop in the United Catholic Church (not the
same as the Roman Catholic Church).
THE MOST SERIOUS THREAT that the United States now faces is terrorism, whether
it's in Saudi Arabia or in an airplane or in the Fed-eral Building in Oklahoma
City. Why is it a serious threat? Because we are hated around the world,
because we have done hateful things. We need a reasonable defense budget
that allows us to protect our shores and borders from foreign attack, but
it should not protect the financial interests of Exxon, Chiquita Banana,
and Chase Manhattan Bank. If they want to earn money around the world, exploit
Third World peoples, steal their resources, take Arab oil from under the
sand and kill Arabs to do it-let them hire their own thugs! Why should we
American taxpayers have to pay for this enormous defense budget in order
to hire an army for them? Why should our sons and daughters be drafted to
go to war to be cannon fodder for power politics?
In one of the recent issues of Space and Security News, which I publish,
I look at all the individual weapons programs-over a trillion dollars of
weapons in the pipeline-and I recommend which ones should be continued and
which ones should be terminated. It turns out that the vast majority of
those programs we don't need and they ought to be terminated. I also take
a look at the force structure. How many Trident submarines do we need on
station to guarantee deterrence? What about land-based missiles? What about
land-based bombers? How many army divisions, marine divisions, and all the
rest of it? By going through the details and asking what missions do they
have to perform, what are the threats to those missions, how much do we
need to counter those threats, then what kind of programs should we continue,
I came up with a budget that would give us greater security but would not
accomplish the one mission that is now taking the biggest pot of money-the
mission of protecting the far-flung, international, financial interests
of these corporations.
When I started studying the Pentagon budget, I had two defense budgets.
As a lifelong military man, I put on my colonel's hat and came up with a
defense budget which is about 25% of our peak budget of 1990. That's a 75%
cut, but we would have more security with that budget than we have now with
our bloated one, and we would be doing less damage around the world and
making fewer enemies.
As a bishop in the United Catholic Church-which is a peace church, a non-violent
church like the Quakers-I came up with something totally different. I would
disband the armed forces totally and put trust in the promises of Psalm
37: "Trust in the Lord and do good that you may dwell in the land and
have security." Of course, I'd get rid of the CIA and all the rest
of that. Eventually the defense budget would go down to zero. It would take
a while because we can't kick the guys out in the street, but the point
is, I saw these two different things-one with my colonel's hat and one with
my bishop's hat-and now they've come together. They're one and the same.
As a military man, I understand that there's a threat that no amount of
money can fix-not hundreds of billions nor a trillion dollar defense budget-and
that is the terrorist nuclear threat to the United States. As a military
man, I have come to the conclusion my bishop's budget is right because the
only way we can protect ourselves against terrorist nuclear weapons is by
no longer being hated. There is no military system, there is no technology
out there, there is no Star Wars, that can protect this country because
a terrorist is not going to use a ballistic missile. He's going to float
his nuclear weapon up the Potomac on a barge or fly it into Red Square in
a Cessna or smuggle it into the Berkeley campus wrapped in a bale of marijuana
or deliver it in a Ryder rental truck.
The greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people is Star Wars,
which promised to put a shield in front of any possible incoming nuclear
missile. Everybody thought that Star Wars started under Reagan, but that's
false. Star Wars actually started in 1962. I directed all the Star Wars
programs from 1976 to 1978-when their existence was secret-under presidents
Ford and Carter. I know what they can do and what they can't do. We were
looking at laser battle stations, developing the lasers and the mirrors
and the pointing and tracking system, the computer brain, and all those
things, but we couldn't say anything about it. It was very secret.
President Reagan turned the program upside down in 1981 as soon as he came
into office. Actually, his people-the ideologues whom we in the military
used to call the lunatic fringe-came in with Reagan with their version of
Star Wars, which attempted to deploy offensive weapons disguised as "defense."
They sold it to the American people as a "peace shield." It not
only was not a peace shield; it had nothing to do with shooting down ballistic
missiles. The Reagan administration ordered the Defense Department to use
Star Wars to shoot down opposing satellites, seize military control of space,
and then destroy targets on the surface of the earth without warning. So
while they were supposedly developing this "peace shield," they
were really developing offensive weapons for the purpose of regaining absolute
military superiority over the Soviet Union!
Well, now we have absolute military superiority over the Soviet Union. The
Soviet Union, as a matter of fact, doesn't even exist. What's left of it
is our friend. Yet, the defense budget is increasing year after year, from
here on out to the next millennium-and we don't have any enemies! Part of
that budget is Star Wars. I think that's a horrific shame because there's
so much we need to do in this country. Right here in California, in Santa
Rosa, they are making electric cars, many of them with solar cells on the
roof and on the hood so that the batteries can be recharged while you park,
while you're at work. But the government isn't supporting that. We're not
doing anything to protect people or the environment. We're not investing
in the infrastructure. We're even cutting people off welfare in order to
increase this obscene defense budget, which is almost as much as all the
defense budgets of all the other nations on earth put together.
While we don't have any enemies, we do have potential adversaries-as least
as described by the CIA and the Pentagon. There are "adversaries"
like Cuba and North Korea, Vietnam, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, yet our defense
budget is 26 times as much as all of theirs put together. We do have an
imbalance. If we cut our defense budget back, it would bring things into
balance in the world. I also think that we and the other democracies of
the world ought to be contributing to a United Nations rapid deployment,
peace-keeping force. They should be the global cops-not us.
If we cut back, others will cut back. Arms races that have occurred have
been added to, perpetrated by, spurred by, our buildup. If we cut back our
forces to a rational size, more in balance with those of Britain and Germany
and a lot of the other countries in the world, I think other countries would
relax. Many nations are building their military up to counter ours because
they see ours imposing the will of our multinational corporations. How many
times have we sent the marines to Nicaragua? I think 14 times! It was never
to protect the American people. Neither was it to protect the Nicaraguan
people. It was to protect the United Fruit Company! Let's face it. How often
have we sent troops to the Middle East? The marines went over there and
deposed Mossadegh in Iran, and we stuck our puppet Shah on the throne. That
was not to help or protect the American people or the Iranian people. It
was to protect our oil companies!
We fought a war against Saddam Hussein to protect a hundred billion dollars
in investments that the Emir of Kuwait had in western banks. If we lost
Kuwait and that investment, it would be a tremendous blow to the western
corporations and banks. It wasn't just the oil under Kuwait. It was the
Emir himself and his investment. Seeing us so much more powerful than anybody
else-the last remaining superpower-spurs other countries to want more and
more in the way of armaments. Our weapons manufacturers are happy to supply
it and don't care whom they sell to. We need to put a halt to international
arms transfers. Any weapon being transferred across international borders
ought to have a permit required by the United Nations.
The biggest threat we face is the nuclear terrorist threat. Fortunately,
it has proven rather difficult to miniaturize a nuclear bomb and get it
somewhere in the United States. Eventually it will happen. However, there
are two things that we can do immediately. We can buy up the plutonium,
and we can buy up the brains. We're trying to do that. We are trying to
support the nuclear scientists in the old Soviet Union, for example, with
peaceful work like the Soviet space program, so that they don't have to
sell themselves to Saddam Hussein in order to feed their families. Unfortunately,
Congress keeps giving us a hard time about these things. They say, "This
is not really defense. We shouldn't send money to Russia. Who knows what's
going to happen?" We've got to subsidize Russia now in order to make
sure that the plutonium and the brains don't wind up in the hands of nuclear
terrorists. It's not a perfect solution.
It is possible that all that is standing between us and a nuclear bomb going
off somewhere in America is the willingness of one of these countries, Libya
or Iraq, to put up several million dollars and buy a few individuals and
some plutonium. We ought to face it because the Star Wars, the whole Defense
Department, the 82nd Airborne, the 101st-all of them-are totally impotent,
useless, and obsolete against a terrorist nuclear weapon because that weapon
is not going to come by ballistic missile. It's going to come like all the
cocaine that is smuggled into this country-and we don't have any weapons
to stop it. They can dump an extra ten billion dollars a year into the Defense
budget or an extra hundred billion dollars a year. It isn't going to make
any difference! The only way, ultimately, that we're going to protect this
country and its people against terrorist nuclear weapons is by changing
our ways, by not being hateful, by therefore not being hated! If we disband
the military completely and put its resources into feeding the children
of the world-a job that we could do-and support existing relief agencies,
paying our dues to the United Nations, we could get rid of starvation around
the world with less money than we spend on the Defense Department. To start
with, we ought to stop hunger here in the United States.
We can change our ways, we can change the thinking, the ethical base of
90% of the American people, but we're still not going to change things until
we sever the connection between money and power in this country. To put
it in a nutshell, both political parties are largely owned by the oligarchy
in this country, the owners of the weapons-manufacturers, the big banks,
the multinational corporations. Money is what does it. We have the best
congress that money can buy and a president who, in order to conduct his
campaign, has to sell himself to people with money. Then the people with
money own him and call on him to do things that he really doesn't want to
do but has to do, like NAFTA and GATT and the Trilateral Commission and
escalating defense budgets to protect the financial interests of our multinational
corporations abroad.
What makes us different from Japan and Germany and other countries is that
we do not have proportional representation. We have a two-party winner-take-all
system, which makes it impossible for third parties to get a toe-hold. Also,
we are dominated by a monopoly media. After the Reagan deregulation of the
media, the major corporations-the same ones that are the source of the problem-can
own the newspapers, the radio stations, and the television stations in a
metropolitan area. Unless people have access to alternative media-too few
do and too few take advantage of it-they don't get the truth.
For years I have been preaching that if we want to be a great nation, we
must first be a good nation. Now I think that has really become the bottom
line. If we do not start making friends around the world, if we do not become
a good member, a good neighbor in the family of nations-not the boss, not
the bully, not the king of the hill!-one of these days we're going to be
in for it.
Material for this article was excerpted and edited, with permission, from
the interview of Dr. Robert Bowman on the "We the People" radio
broadcast.
Anyone interested in contacting Dr. Bowman or subscribing to his newsletter
can contact him at 5115 South A1A Highway, Melbourne Beach, Florida, 32951,
or (407) 952-0601.
