You would think that the people who are always complaining about the Defense Department budget would cheer if the Pentagon saves money. But no. The recent announcement that the Defense
Department underspent its budget by some “13 billion last year brought forth as much criticism as if it had overspent, plus demands to punish the Defense Department by reducing next year’s budget. Some commentators also used this announcement as an excuse to trot out the favorite left-wing cliche that President Eisenhower “warned about the military-industrial complex.”
This is a classic example of taking a quotation out of context to misrepresent the author’s meaning. The principal message of Eisenhower’s Farewell Address of 1961 was his warning against the Soviet military threat: “We face a hostile ideology -— global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. … A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.”
Based on this analysis, the Eisenhower Administration initiated and funded the three great weapons systems that still defend us today: the Minuteman missiles, the Polaris submarines, and the B-52 bombers.
President Eisenhower gave another important warning in his Farewell Address about an entirely different group of power-seekers: “Yet in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
The scientific-technological elite of which Eisenhower warned consisted principally of the men who attended the Pugwash Conferences, a series of semi-secret meetings which take their name from Pugwash, Nova Scotia, the home of Cyrus Eaton, who hosted and bankrolled the first conference in 1957. Most of those who attend are Soviet and American nuclear scientists and government officials and advisers.
The organizer of Pugwash was Lord Bertrand Russell, author of the famous slogan “Rather Red than dead,” and that is an accurate summary of what the Pugwash Conferences are all about. Their long-range objective was to eliminate the Eisenhower strategy of defending America through military superiority and replace it with U.S, disarmament and accommodation of the Soviet Union.
Pugwashers worked toward this goal by articles written for prestigious journals and research studies financed through the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Two of the most notorious were the 1963 reports called “Phoenix Study” and “Study Fair.”
As soon as Eisenhower left the White House, this elite flooded into government office. They successfully blocked all programs to build additional weapons over the ones Eisenhower had already ordered. They cancelled Eisenhower’s plans for a second thousand Minuteman missiles. For 14 years, they have been able to prevent the building of an advanced strategic bomber to replace the aging B-52s.
It is a great tragedy that Americans did not heed Eisenhower’s warning against. the scientific-technological elite. This group did capture U.S. public policy, and today is still persuading our leaders to persist in the folly of detente instead of meeting the challenge of reality.
