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

The Race to Destruction
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
335
tolerable, even desirable. But the state role in development of advanced
technology must be preserved, so no limits can be accepted on research,
development and deployment of new and more advanced weapons
systems in conformity with the now well-established system of state
industrial policy. Build-down combined with Star Wars is a natural
posture for the US, though there are problems, since the allegedly
“defensive” systems compel the USSR to enhance its offensive capacity.
Meanwhile the debates will proceed in their largely irrelevant terms.
One can see why the substantial popular support for a nuclear freeze
had no effect. A nuclear freeze would place limits on the creation of an
ever-more intimidating posture in which our conventional weapons
become “meaningful instruments of military and political power” (Harold
Brown), and on the crucial state role in high technology development
and production. It is therefore unacceptable. In particular, in the
absence of any realistic alternative system of state capitalist industrial
management, the nuclear freeze cannot arise as a serious issue within
the political system, whatever popular attitudes may be. As Seymour
Melman has emphasized for many years, the disarmament movement
must assign the issue of economic conversion a central place on its
agenda, or it will achieve very little. And this is no simple matter,
because it bears on the institutional structure of power and privilege, as
the owners and managers of the society are well aware.
Adopting the point of view of the dominant elites, one can see why
“peace” has become a dirty word, some kind of Russian plot; the
common term “peacenik,” with its intended connotations, is a case in
point. There is no term “warnik”; advocacy of militarism is the domain of
the “good guys,” not deviants of one or another sort—it is furthermore
the norm, so no term for this stance is required.