“And it was just a lot better for Boeing and Lockheed and Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics to go that way than not to have them, then they wouldn’t be selling the weapons. And by the way what I’ve learned just recently by books like … A guys named Kofsky wrote a book called Harry Truman And The War Scare of 1947.
Reveals that at the end of the war, Ford and GM who had made most of our bombers went back to making cars very profitably. But Boeing and Lockheed didn’t make products for the commercial market, only for commercial air except there wasn’t a big enough market to keep them from bankruptcy. They had suddenly lost their vast orders for military planes in mid 1945. The only way they could avoid bankruptcy was to sell a lot of planes to the government, military planes. But against who? Not Germany we were occupying Germany, not Japan we were occupying Japan. Who was our enemy that you needed a lot of planes against. Well Russia had been our ally during the war, but Russia had enough targets to justify, so they had to be an enemy and they had to be the enemy, and we went off from there.
I would say that having read that book and a few others I could say, I now see since my book was written nine months ago, that the Cold War was a marketing campaign for selling war planes to the government and to our allies. It was a marketing campaign for annual subsidies to the aerospace industry, and the electronics industry. And also the basis for a protection racket for Europe, that kept us as a major European power. Strictly speaking we’re not a European power. But we are in effect because we provide their protection against Russia the super enemy with nuclear weapons, and for that purpose it’s better for the Russians to have ICBM, and missiles, and H-bombs, as an enemy we can prepare against. It’s the preparations that are profitable. All wars have been very profitable for the arms manufacturers, nuclear war will not be, but preparation for it is very profitable, and therefore we have to be prepared.”
Thanks!
This was very much Ellsberg’s view on eg the 80,000 Hours podcast: