Global Eye - Bleak House

[CHIMO]

It's a familiar image: the U.S. president followed by an aide with the "football," the ever-present attache case that holds the codes for launching a nuclear attack. But for years, these supposedly supreme commanders-in-chief did not have the slightest idea which targets would actually be hit at their order. This occult knowledge was reserved for a small circle of Pentagon officers who called themselves the "guardians of the arsenal" and kept the true attack plans secret from the civilian leadership.

The first civilian to see the plans, during the Kennedy administration, was, ironically enough, Daniel Ellsberg -- the Pentagon consultant who later leaked the "Pentagon Papers," revealing the disastrous lies behind America's war in Vietnam. What Ellsberg found was moral insanity almost beyond imagining. The only plan proposed by the "guardians" was an all-out nuclear strike on every city in the Soviet Union, as well as on China and the Warsaw Pact nations, with a deliberately low-balled estimate of 400 million people killed immediately. There were "no intermediate steps, no flexibility and no warnings" incorporated in the plan, which could be triggered by a range of non-nuclear provocations, some posing no direct threat to the United States at all. What's more, the high priest of the nuclear cult, General Curtis LeMay, reserved the right to launch this genocidal fury on his own, as a first strike, if he suspected the Soviets were preparing to attack.

Civilian control of the military was thus exposed as an empty myth; the center of power in the U.S. government had shifted from the decisions of democratically elected leaders to the imperatives of procurement and militarist paranoia emanating from the five-sided fortress raised up in a Virginia wasteland known as Hell's Bottom.

This is just one of the many chilling stories recounted in James Carroll's important new book, "House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power." Carroll, an acclaimed novelist -- and son of a top Pentagon official -- provides a devastating inside history of the military state-within-a-state that usurped the Republic and now reigns unchallenged in Washington.

http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/05/26/120.html

[cliss]

1. Great article.

Thanks for posting. When you read stuff like this, "..moral insanity almost beyond imagining" you wonder how on earth we've survived as a country, for this long.

[CHIMO]

2. Makes Me Wonder

How we managed to survive as a civilization this long. It seems that it won't last long according to the article. It just takes one push on the button.