meta [part the second]

[Robin Landseadel]

On Dec 15, 2009, at 9:26 PM, rich wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 11:42 PM, Robin Landseadel
> <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> You most certainly can and will if you throw Allen Dulles and  
>> Prescott Bush
>> and [specifically and particularly to GR] Dr. Werner von Braun into  
>> the mix.
>> Pynchon does—the bad karma of the Nazis becoming "America's" hot  
>> potato of
>> the sixties and seventies is the actual "work contents" of GR.
> ______
> and that karmic transfer is surely our lasting shame.
>
> on a sort've related tangent, we should add the career of Paul Nitze
> to that list
>
> rich


	Paul Nitze—The man who brought us the Cold War.
	By Fred Kaplan

	When Paul Henry Nitze died at the age of 97 on Oct. 19, an era
	died with him. If there was one man responsible for America's
	emergence as a global military power in the mid-20th century,
	Nitze could lay claim to that credit. If one man was most
	responsible for the nuclear nightmares that many Americans 	
	suffered along the way, Nitze could wear that tag as well.

	In the annals of Cold War history, three sets of documents stand
	out as potent hair-raisers—the kinds of documents that not only
	gave their readers cold sweats, but also changed the course of
	American security policy—and Nitze wrote all of them.

	The first and most pivotal was a top secret paper, written in April
	1950, called "United States Objectives and Programs for
	National Security," more famously known as NSC-68. In the
	months leading up to this paper, the Truman administration was
	split on its policy toward the Soviet Union. Secretary of State
	Dean Acheson saw the Soviets as a serious threat that needed
	to be countered through an enormous military buildup.
	Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson sided with fiscal
	conservatives—and Truman himself—who believed that
	boosting the annual arms budget beyond $15 billion would
	wreck the economy. Acheson's powerful policy planning chief,
	George Kennan, though worried about the Soviets, favored a
	"containment" policy that stressed bolstering the West more
	through political and economic means.

	At the beginning of 1950, Acheson fired Kennan and put Nitze
	in his place. Nitze, a former Wall Street banker, had been one of
	Kennan's deputies, but openly sympathized with Acheson.
	Nitze's first task: Scare the daylights out of Truman, so he'd 	
	raise the military budget. NSC-68 was the vehicle for doing so. . .

Much more @:

http://www.slate.com/id/2108510/