Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Race to Destruction
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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justified on the basis of an alleged “missile gap,” which President
Eisenhower correctly maintained did not exist; the origins of the “missile
gap” lie in the failure of an earlier “bomber gap” to materialize. The
Russians in fact had four operational ICBMs, located at a single missiletesting
site, when the Kennedy Administration undertook the
construction of 1000 Minuteman missiles to compensate for the “gap”
which it knew to be fraudulent, setting off the current phase of the
strategic arms race. At the time, Fred Kaplan observes, “there was a
missile gap, even a deterrent gap, and the ratio in forces was nearly ten
to one—but the gap was in our favor.” Kennedy’s adviser for National
Security Affairs, McGeorge Bundy, noted in an internal memo that the
phrase “missile gap” had had a “useful shorthand effect of calling
attention to . . . our basic military posture”; the facts were therefore a
marginal issue. The arms build-up proceeded, independently of the
alleged motive. 71
The third major build-up under Reagan was justified to the public by
an alleged “window of vulnerability,” which would make it possible for
the USSR to knock out 90% of the US ICBMs with only one fifth to one
third of their long-range missiles, so Paul Nitze and other Reagan
advisers argued. “This wonderful phrase,” Walter Pincus observes,
“emerged during the attack on former President Carter’s strategic arms
limitation talks with the Russians . . . The ‘window’ was supposed to
open in the early 1980s and close only when U.S. deployment of
substantial MX missiles was underway . . . While the ‘window’ was
open, however, the alleged Soviet advantage in ICBM power was going
to encourage Moscow to undertake all sorts of aggressive adventures
around the world, unafraid of any Washington response.” But, Pincus
continues, the “window” opened even wider under Reagan, with the
phasing out of old systems before new ones come into operation, and
somehow the Russians did not rampage, though according to official