The Care And Keeping Of The Atomic Bombs(Wills"Bomb Power")

According to Wills in "Bomb Power",the care and keeping of the bomb began a whole series of security measures that made it impossible to put the nation back on a truly peacetime basis.The immense cost of the nuclear establishment,social costs as well as financial ones,would be in the maintenance of the vast security system around it and even more for its delivery systems.From Strategic Air command,to tactical missiles to nuclear submarines,to ICBMs and finally plans for missile stations in space(Reagan) with each system cocooned with secrecy and expense.

After WWII,arrangements multiplied a thousand times as the strategic Air Command set up bases in foreign countries(including dictatorships) for the servicing of its nuclear-cargo planes.A steady supply of oil had to be secured to keep our air empire running(thus our concern about the middle east).The arsenal was expanded for tactical nuclear forces with additional bases.With ICBMs,observation and guidance satellites had to be launched and kept in space.All this apparatus was directly descended from General Grove's(head of Manhattan Project) private air force,the first nuclear delivery system.

Foreign governments that granted us territory and protection were supported,even if they were not very good at recognizing the rights of their citizens.Being the champion of the free world meant maintaining nuclear superiority,not actually advancing freedom in the countries that cooperate with us.Our anxiety over nations going communist was a large part prompted by fear that this would shrink the area for such bases.This meant spying on other countries,propping up those that gave us what we needed and undermine those that did not.

The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 created a system that made atomic weapons a separate part of the nation's arsenal,with the President the sole authority over their use.In case of nuclear attack,the President would not have the time to consult Congress or instruct the public.The President's alert meant our permanent submission to his/her authority.The power over the atom is outside the constitutional order of succession under the twenty-fifth Amendment,and outside the military chain of command.The Constitution severely limits the Presidents function as Commander in Chief.He/she is the Commander in Chief of the army and navy and state militias when called into the actual service of the U.S.(director of military operations).The Constitution gave Congress the power to call up the militias to execute the laws of the union,suppress insurrection,repel invasions,provide for organizing the army and disciplining the militias.General Washington's appointment as Commander in Chief was done so by the Continental Congress.Washington flaunted no military symbols as President due to the importance of civilian rule in our Republic.Modern Presidents(since Reagan)have taken to being saluted though salutes are supposed to be only to military superiors recognized by their rank in uniform.

The passing of authority over the bomb does not follow public order(vice president,speaker of the house,etc.)It is entrusted to a secret few trained to handle the assignment.This system is another descendant of General Grove's authority.

When a real attack against NY and the Pentagon occurred on 9/11,Mr. Cheney assumed the powers of the presidency even though George Bush was still alive.Cheney ordered jet fighters to shoot down the last airliner terrorists had seized.The President was informed after Cheney gave the instructions,Cheney would in later days make the most extreme claims of executive authority without oversight or check of any kind.He defended his own actions.The concentration of emergency authority in the executive branch(WH) makes many officials say they can speak for the President.Those in the modern executive office(Commander in Chief)often act without letting Congress or the people know.These surrogates can be Republicans like Oliver North illegally funding guerrilla fighters in Nicaragua or Democrats like RFK plotting to assassination of Fidel Castro.They have the means of acting this way because of the vast and secret apparatus of the National Security State,which was set up in the era of Bomb Power and the newly empowered Commander in Chief.The elaborately constructed set of institutions enforces the ides that anything executive agencies do is justified in the name of national security.The Bomb instilled a structure of fear.

More from "Bomb Power" soon.

Our Bloody Valentine: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan

The Manhattan Project,Secrecy And J.Robert Oppenheimer



J.Robert Oppenheimer


The "Manhattan Project",according to Wills in "Bomb Power",was a miracle within the larger miracle of wartime productivity.It was a triumph of secrecy,of vast tax moneys unaccounted for,of research compelled,of resources commandeered,of human tasks assigned and huge sites built or expanded.The director of the scientific work was J.Robert Oppenheimer.He persuaded General Groves,military leader of the project,that scientists had to explore problems together,criticize one another's work and develop one another's insights to be successful.Oppenheimer was able to recruit superstars of physics,including famous men driven from Europe by repression.This immigrant talent and American scientists worked together as a team to bring solutions to the project.Groves had a team of security men spying on the scientists even in their isolated community and resented the use of foreign languages his security team could not understand and report on.

The average age of the scientists was twenty-four.Theoretical physicists(atomic particle physics) tend to do their best work when they are very young.Some scientists refused to join the mysterious program they were sounded out for.The military authorities debated what to do with people who knew what was going on at Los Alamos but either refused to join in or left the confines.Groves wanted to draft them to Los Alamos or send them to some distant military outpost to be watched until the end of the war.One of the security officers,Boris Pash,wanted to take them out to sea for questioning(Russian style) and not return with them if needed.Pash was also convinced that Oppenheimer was a Communist.Groves knew he could not succeed without Oppenheimer's essential contributions as leader of the scientific team but he put Pash in the compound to spy continually on Oppenheimer.

It surprised many that Grove put Oppenheimer in charge of the physicists.Edward Teller thought Hans Bethe should have been put in charge(a German was politically insensitive).Oppenheimer's Berkeley colleague Ernest O Lawrence might have been a more obvious choice but Groves didn't want him away from his vital work on the cyclotron he was perfecting for creating the high-energy beam needed to bombard atoms and split them.

When the Bomb was successfully exploded on July 16,1945, in a test code-named Trinity,it proved more powerful than the scientists had expected.President Truman would call the Bomb"the greatest thing in history" and his revelation of it to the nation"the happiest announcement I ever made".The military-industrial complex,with a poisonous admixture of government and secrecy,had scored a triumph that would show the way to many government activities.It offered a model for dealing with the Russians,Germans,Communists and Nazis.The secrecy that had enveloped Los Alamos would quietly cross the entire American landscape in the years to come.

More from "Bomb Power" in the near future.

Bomb Power,Fatal Miracle"Manhattan Project"

In the first chapter of "Bomb Power" by Garry Wills,he writes about the conversion from a peacetime economy to a war economy during WWII.Automobile companies,shipyards,corporate and university laboratories turned their attention to military inventions and technology.All of the conversion was fueled by a massive(stimulus) injection of government money and the imposition of government regulation and rationing.Businessmen who had resented and resisted government activism in the peaceful days of the New Deal were forced at first,and glad afterwards,to accept federal intervention on a scale never before dreamed of in America.They accepted the new rules gladly since they prospered greatly under them.The GDP doubled during the war and real wages rose dramatically.The U.S. was producing an astonishing fifty percent of the world's goods and services at war's end.

The war revealed the "dirty little secret" of American capitalism,according to Wills.The myth of capitalism is that the free market is the most efficient economic system.It was proven that governmental sponsored and regulated production is far more efficient.In wartime,the government can compel the collection of raw material,channel research,subsidize new production methods without taking time for them to prove profitable,redistribute labor pools,eliminate distracting competition by the incompetent.During wartime,governmental interference with business competition is always adopted.When it is important to get things done,and done fast,the government must be relied on(maybe we should do this today for energy,agriculture and housing))War is always good for the economy for those who win wars and avoids destruction of assets(we should increase revenues today through tax credits(stimulus)  for the majority and taxes for the wealthy minority and have a new,larger stimulus that rebuilds America and increases jobs and more importantly wages).

The "Manhattan Project" was part of the stimulus program for WWII.After President Roosevelt secretly authorized the effort to produce a bomb,it was his decision,and that of his advisers,that the project must not be trusted to civilian management.One of the main reasons for putting the operation under military discipline was to hide the funding($2 billion).Brigadier General Leslie Richard Groves was put in charge of the project.Groves wanted Congress to know nothing about the Bomb until it was not only completed but used on the enemy(start of executive power not supported by the constitution).Groves was supported by Henry Stimson(Sec. of War),George Marshall(Chief of Staff)),Vannevar Bush(Chairman of the National Defense Research Comm) and Brehon Somervell(Army Chief of Supply).President Truman didn't know of the bomb until twelve days in office when Roosevelt died.The degree of silence was astonishing given the size of the operation.It is true that some British scientists and Russian spies became aware of the project but no one knew of it's destructive power until Hiroshima.

Groves built up three industrial sites.Hanford in Washington State collected,extracted and purified plutonium.Oak Ridge in Tennessee for enrichment of uranium and Los Alamos in New Mexico for the construction of the Bomb.Another site in Alamogordo,N.M tested delivery planes while the Tinian Islands was developed as a staging site to launch attacks on Japan.Hanaford alone employed 132,000 people,Oak Ridge had 200 buildings on 825 acres while Los Alamos had 3,500 scientists,soldiers,construction workers,staff,and families living inside a triple ring of fences.

More from "Bomb Power" soon.

U.S Marines,Water Balloons And Tug Of War Games

I just had the best day at school all year.We had an "advisor" day where the students meet with me and then participate in various games against each "advisor " group.I have a number of Marines in my class. They are signed up for many years and will participate and "protect" us in the countries our civilian authority(executive branch)tells them to.I told all of them today to be very careful and I want them to return alive so they could continue their lives here in beautiful America.They looked at me strangely, as if not considering the danger at all( have they been brainwashed by our culture).I didn't tell them today that I think every American engagement since WWII was unnecessary and that the previous executive branch decisions have been wrong and costly(human life and percentage of the federal budget).That the National Security State has drained our country's resources and we have the highest child poverty rate in the developed world.I told them to win the tug of war today(we did win).It was a great day today above all because it was free and unscripted.At the end of the day,I was soaked in water from students pouring water over my head( I was successful on all my targets also).Students were in chaos,throwing water balloons around at teachers and fellow students( a catapult was made to throw balloons long distances).We all talked and laughed about getting even and ran around free and pure just the way Sarah Palin likes it.America at its finest, with hot dogs at the end of the day.Parents and local boards of education would have had a fit but they don't understand educational psychology the way I do(have a masters in it and I'm a thirty seven year expert).We all enjoyed ourselves because censorship was locked up for the day.We censor kids too much during the day,week and year.They don't have any power in the ""modern classroom".Teachers are censored by the principals and principals are censored by the superintendents.It's the same in most jobs in America.I wrote about this in a previous post on "work councils" in Germany where  working relationships between workers and management is different.The modern classroom prepares the students to follow orders and don't make waves(we produce great marines)We should be teaching democracy in the classroom and in the workplace.As you know, we have lost it in politics to the rich and famous.The relationships teachers develop with students come from mutual respect and the easiest way to develop this to share in the decisions of the classroom.Equal power breeds ownership of one's environment that all humans desire and need.

'Bomb Power" Equals Executive Power(Garry Wills)

The introduction to Gary Wills"Bomb Power" posits that the "Bomb" altered our subsequent history down to its deepest constitutional roots."Commander in Chief",after the creation of the fission bombs,took on a new and unconstitutional meaning.It redefined the government as a National Security State,with an apparatus of secrecy and executive control.The "Bomb" made only one part of the government the supreme power and all must defer to it,for the good of the nation.

It all grew out of the Manhattan Project,secretly funded,and was a model for the covert activities and overt authority of the government we now experience.Congress was kept in the dark,Harry Truman(Vice President) was also never told until he became President.The National Security State,according to Wills,articulated itself in various intelligence agencies,the CIA,NSA,the programs of classification and clearance,the new doctrines of executive power or presidential signing statements that nullified laws passed by Congress.State secrets multiplied beyond the power to clear them for release or for the courts to demand their production.

In the past,wartime had led to suspensions of various parts of the constitution(loyalists in the revolution,Lincoln cancelled habes corpus in the Civil War,Japanese-Americans in WWII).After the "Bomb" was built,for the first time in our history,the President was given sole and unconstrained authority over all possible uses of the Bomb.The President has the sole authority to launch nation-destroying weapons,he has license to use every other power at his disposal that might safeguard that supreme necessity.

Vice-President Cheney used these facts to justify the policies of the Bush administration on a whole range of issues(warrant less surveillance,indefinite detention of suspects,kidnappings across the world and enhanced interrogation).He was right to say that the logic for all these things is the President's solitary control of the Bomb.Executive power has been,since WWII,Bomb power.

More from Will's"Bomb Power" shortly.

Blaming The Victim:1971 Book by William Ryan,Still Pertinent Today

William Ryan wrote the book"Blaming The Victim" in 1971 but some of his observations are pervading conservative thought today.Many conservatives today use this perspective to support a dying capitalist system(71% of families,combined income, make under $50,000) that has not only turned its back on the lower class but has justified their rationalizations with their poisoned faux pas psychology.They don't look at the external statistics on economic inequality,crime rates,medical uninsured,dilapidated schools,expensive food, housing and a host of social problems that affect class mobility.Class mobility is basically the same for each economic level.Do we victimize the middle class for not making it into the upper class?
The generic process of Blaming the Victim,according to Ryan, is applied to almost every American problem. The miserable health care of the poor is explained away on the grounds that the victim has poor motivation and lacks health information. The problems of slum housing are traced to the characteristics of tenants who are labeled as "Southern rural migrants" not yet "acculturated" to life in the big city. The "multi-problem" poor, it is claimed, suffer the psychological effects of impoverishment, the "culture of poverty," and the deviant value system of the lower classes; consequently, though unwittingly, they cause their own troubles. From such a viewpoint, the obvious fact that poverty is primarily an absence of money is easily overlooked or set aside.
I have been listening to the victim blamers and pondering their thought processes for a number of years. That process is often very subtle. Victim blaming is cloaked in kindness and concern, and bears all the trappings and statistical furbelows of scientism; it is obscured by a perfumed haze of humanitarianism. In observing the process of Blaming the Victim, one tends to be confused and disoriented because those who practice this art display a deep concern for the victims that is quite genuine. In this way, the new ideology is very different from the open prejudice and reactionary tactics of the old days. Its adherents include sympathetic social scientists with social consciences in good working order, and liberal politicians with a genuine commitment to reform. They are very careful to dissociate themselves from vulgar Calvinism or crude racism; they indignantly condemn any notions of innate wickedness or genetic defect. "The Negro is not born inferior," they shout apoplectically. "Force of circumstance," they explain in reasonable tones, "has made him inferior." And they dismiss with self-righteous contempt any claims that the poor man in America is plainly unworthy or shiftless or enamored of idleness. No, they say, he is "caught in the cycle of poverty." He is trained to be poor by his culture and his family life, endowed by his environment (perhaps by his ignorant mother's outdated style of toilet training) with those unfortunately unpleasant characteristics that make him ineligible for a passport into the affluent society".

According to Ryan, are the poor really all that different from the middle class? Take a common type of study, showing that ninety-one percent of the upper class, compared to only sixty-eight percent of the poor, prefer college education for their children. What does that tell us about the difference in values between classes?

First, if almost seventy percent of the poor want their children to go to college, it doesn't make much sense to say that the poor, as a group, do not value education. Only a minority of them—somewhat less than one-third— fail to express a wish that their children attend college. A smaller minority—one in ten—of the middle class give similar responses. One might well wonder why this small group of the better-off citizens of our achieving society reject higher education. They have the money; many of them have the direct experience of education; and most of them are aware of the monetary value of a college degree. I would suggest that the thirty percent of the poor who are unwilling to express a wish that their children go to college are easier to understand. They know the barriers—financial, social, and for black parents, racial—that make it very difficult for the children of the poor to get a college education. That seven out of ten of them nevertheless persist in a desire to see their children in a cap and gown is, in a very real sense, remarkable. Most important, if we are concerned with cultural or subcultural differences, it seems highly illogical to emphasize the values of a small minority of one group and then to attribute these values to the whole group. I simply cannot accept the evidence. If seventy percent of a group values education, then it is completely illogical to say that the group as a whole does not value education.



Ryan continues,"we return, finally, to where we began: the concept of Deferred Need Gratification. The simple idea that lower class folk have, as a character trait, a built-in deficiency in ability to delay need gratification has been explored, analyzed and more or less blown apart by Miller, Riessman, and Seagull. They point out that the supposed commitment of the middle classes to the virtues of thrift and hard work, to the practices of planning and saving for every painfully-chosen expenditure is, at this point in time, at best a surviving myth reflecting past conditions of dubious prevalence. The middle classes of today are clearly consumption-minded and debt-addicted. So the comparison group against which the poor are judged exists largely as a theoretical category with a theoretical behavior pattern. They go on to raise critical questions, similar to those I have raised earlier in this chapter. For example, on the question of what one would do with a two thousand dollar windfall, there was a difference between class groups of only five percent—about seventy percent of the middle class said they would save most of it, compared with about sixty-five percent of the lower class. On the basis of this small difference (which was statistically, but not practically, significant), the researchers, you will remember, had concluded that working-class people had less ability to defer need gratification. This conclusion may reflect elegant research methodology, but it fails the test of common sense..".

I bring you Ryan's statements to support the lower class and their struggle to overcome economic injustice.Ryan wrote the book forty years ago but remains prevalent today.Many of the conservative arguments remain today as our economy has declined and the lower class array of problems have increased.The once powerful middle class is losing numerous members annually and are joining the victims that they tried to separate from in the past.It is ironic that the same conservative middle class of Reagan will join their brothers and sisters of the lower class as new victims to be disregarded by the professional upper class.