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By Root 1290 0

under $1000 per year. Not a whole lot of "bang for the buck," as military analysts are wont to say. A cheaper, more effective, and certainly more life-affirming anti-Soviet policy would have been to hand each of our supposed enemies $40,000, then tell them to go home and take care of their families. Forty to eighty years' worth of wages in one pop would buy a hell of a lot of goodwill: had the Soviets offered me an equivalent amount of money to vote for Gus Hall, perennial Communist party presidential candidate in the United States, I would have voted, signed petitions, carried placards, and written letters to the editor. Anything to allow me to permanently stay on the gravy train.

So the goal was never to stop the Soviets. That's what we said, but our actions and inventions pointed to the real goal of our culture.

Incendiary devices causing firestorms that burn to death hundreds of thousands of people in a single night. Bouncing Bettys. Land mines. Atomic bombs. Hydrogen bombs. Neutron bombs. How do we make sense of these?

The military and CIA experts James A. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi analyzed military spending, and made comparisons that reveal much about the real intent of our culture: "For what the world spends on defense every 2.5 hours, about $300 million, smallpox was eliminated back in the late seventies. For the price of a single new nuclear-attack submarine, $726 million to $ 1 billion, we could send 5 to 7.5 million Third World children to school for a year. For the price of a single B-1 bomber, about $285 million, we could provide basic immunization treatments, such as shots for chicken pox, diphtheria, and measles, to the roughly 575 million children in the world who lack them, thus saving 2.5 million lives annually. For what the world spends on defense every forty hours, about $4.6 billion, we could provide sanitary water for every human being who currently lacks it. Looking at it another way, the roughly $290-$300 billion that the United States [spent] on defense in 1990 is greater than the total amount that Americans contribute to charity each year, about $100 billion, plus total federal, state, local, public, and private expenditures for education, roughly $150 billion, plus NASA's entire budget of $7.6 billion, plus federal and state aid to families with dependent children, $16.3 billion, plus the cost of the entire federal judiciary and the Justice Department combined, $5.5 billion, plus federal transportation aid to state and local governments, $17.5 billion. ... A single Stinger missile costs $40,000, or roughly 30 percent more than the income of the average American family, nearly twice more than the income of the average black American family, and about 400 percent more than the so-called poverty line. .. [and] the price of 2,000 rounds of 7.62-mm rifle or machine-gun ammunition, about $480.00, is slightly more than what the average Social Security beneficiary receives every month." How do we wrap our minds around these priorities?

Or take plutonium. How do we explain the fabrication of plutonium? Plutonium is fundamentally a man-made element. Although traces occur naturally in uranium, its use in nuclear weapons and power have caused it to be "produced in extensive quantities," as my staid CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics puts it. Extensive quantities, in this case, means about 260 metric tons of plutonium-239, in addition to nearly a thousand tons of plutoniums fifteen other isotopes. Two hundred and sixty metric tons is two hundred and sixty thousand kilograms is two hundred and sixty million grams is two hundred and sixty billion milligrams. The inhalation of a few of these milligrams—a barely visible speck—causes death by internal asphyxiation in a few months as lung tissues scar up from a bombardment of alpha radiation and choke off oxygen supply to the blood. Two hundred and sixty billion milligrams is two hundred and sixty trillion micrograms. The inhalation of a few of these micrograms—by far invisible to the naked eye, as well as undetectable by human taste or smell—likely causes