Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [72]
At that time, we had lived for nearly forty years under the constant and imminent threat of nuclear annihilation. And then suddenly one day the Commies were gone and the Cold War was over. We were left holding more than twenty thousand nuclear warheads—and the ex-Soviets had thirty-nine thousand for themselves. That was enough firepower to blow up the entire world forty times over.
I think most of us born in the Baby Boom grew up thinking there was probably no way we were going to get to the end of our natural lives without at least an “accidental” launching of one of those missiles. How could it be avoided? With that many weapons just waiting to be fired at a moment’s notice, it seemed inevitable that either some nut case with a trigger finger would hit The Button, or some misunderstanding would lead to an allout attack, or some terrorist would get his hands on the materials and set one off by himself. We cowered under a cloud of fear, which affected everything we did as a nation. And we spent trillions trying to alleviate that fear—by building even more weapons of mass destruction.
Spending all this tax money on a bunch of useless warheads we
hoped never to use, we let our schools go to hell, we failed to provide health care for our citizens, and more than half of our scientists ended up working on projects for the military instead of discovering the cure for cancer or the next great invention to improve our quality of life.
The $250 billion the Pentagon plans to spend in 2001 to build 2,800 new joint Strike Fighter planes is more than enough to pay the tuition of every college student in America.
The proposed increase in monies for the Pentagon over the next four years is $1.6 trillion. The amount the General Accounting Office says is needed to renovate and upgrade every school in America is $112 billion.
If we decided not to build the rest of the F-22 fighter jets the Air Force asked for back during the Cold War (which Clinton, and now Bush the Selected, still insist on funding), that money$45 billion—would fully fund Head Start preschool for every child in America who needed it, for the next six years.
In the mid-1980s, another remarkable thing happened. Challenging Reagan to follow his lead, Gorbachev also announced that the Soviet Union would no longer test any new nuclear weapons. Gorbachev said he was taking this action whether the United States joined him or not. It was a stunning moment—forgotten now, I’m sure, by most Americans. It was the first time any of us were given a stitch of hope that maybe we wouldn’t blow ourselves to smithereens after all.
The insane arms race that we started and the Soviets felt compelled to keep up with eventually contributed to the bankruptcy of the USSR. By the time the Soviets built their first A-bomb in 1949, the United States already had 235 of them. Ten years later we had 15,468 nuclear weapons; the Russians were way behind, with “only” 1,060. But over the next twenty years the Soviet Union spent billions more on bombs—while its people shivered in the cold—and sure enough they finally caught up with us. By
1978 they had a whopping 25,393 nuclear warheads—while we had running water, Stevie Nicks, and a comfortable 24,424 nukes.
Gorbachev inherited a nation that was broke, its people hungry and yearning for the occasional roll of toilet paper.
But even as the USSR was on the brink of dissolving in 1989, it was maintaining an unbelievable 3 9,000 nuclear warheads. The Pentagon just sat back and laughed—our boys were fine with their measly 22,827. Was Washington’s real mission to drive the Communists into such poverty that their people would eventually revolt? Gorbachev, who had this