A Really Simple Proposition: "No Victorious Wars"

A Really Simple Proposition: “No Victorious Wars”

P. Schultz

            Having stumbled on a book entitled JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, by L. Fletcher Prouty, I began reading it and was struck by his rather simple or strait forward argument about the history of the Cold War from 1945 up onto the end of the Cold War with the demise of the Soviet Union. Here is that argument.

            Because of the advent of nuclear weapons and the possibility of eradicating life on the planet should these weapons be used in a general war, the Cold War was a “legislative creation of the CIA,” and included “the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis” which “were craftily orchestrated events designed to fill the gap between what mankind had known as conventional warfare and the incalculable impact of all-out nuclear war.” [xxii]

            Or again: “World War II was over and conventional warfare died with it.” And at greater length: “This type of limited warfare was not designed solely for the purpose of making war to make money, as has been the case throughout history for most countries; but it was necessitated by the knowledge as early as 1943, that the atom bomb would be ready before the end of World War II. As many have recognized, the war did not end until the first of each of the original types of atomic bomb, Implosion and Gun-type, had been given its initial bloodbath public demonstration over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then, and only then, did these world-class planners realize that they had made a terrible mistake in funding those nuclear physicists and their industrial backers to produce the atom bomb. From the time of the first use of nuclear weapons until the present, and even more certainly for the future, the atomic bomb demonstrated that effective warfare, as it was known since the dawn of mankind, has ended. The almost timeless era of conventional warfare is over. There will be no more victorious wars. There will be moneymaking, meaningless wars. The next real, all-out, and unlimited war will lead to Armageddon on Earth. It will be the last.” [Xxiv]

            This was like a light bulb experience for me: “no more victorious wars….[but] moneymaking, meaningless wars.” This seems to describe precisely America’s wars during the Cold War and in its aftermath as well.  I have often wondered why America’s establishment was willing to invest so heavily in the Vietnam War even though they knew it could not be won or why that establishment has been satisfied to be tied down in a war in Afghanistan for 18 years. Now I think I have an answer: Wars don’t have to be won to serve the establishment. As Tocqueville noticed in his Democracy in America, “The secret connection between the military character and that of democracies was the profit motive.” As Prouty says: The modernized concept of warfare “is driven by the profit motive; it must be profitable. Another way to put it is that the profiteers make war a necessity.” [Xxviii]

            Seems to me that this is a proposition worth thinking about.