Curtis Lemay

Founders of the American Garrison State (1945-1960) - Part 2

Submitted by arendt on Mon, 07/23/2018 - 6:51pm

PART THREE: The Founding of the National Security State

In the 1930s, the US was still "building out" to its continental dimensions. The Interior Department was on a dam construction spree that tamed wild rivers and brought electricity to the West. The Hoover Dam, built at the bottom of the Great Depression, was the capstone of these civilian projects. It enabled the prolific growth of Southern California, home to much military industry and to a rabidly rightwing electorate that would spawn Richard Nixon.

WW2 kept alive the spirit of gigantic national projects; it just shifted this build out to the military.

Episode 9 (first hour) - Nixon as a "tamper" in the Tet A-bomb (UPDATE: HOUR2)

Submitted by arendt on Thu, 09/28/2017 - 11:05am

In my review of episode 8, I said:

Tet was like the chain reaction phase of an A-Bomb - it's all over in 30 nanoseconds; but it takes another whole second for the enormous energy released to begin to become manifest macroscopically.

That energy should have ended the war in 1968. Instead, we got Nixon, who prolonged it for another seven years. Nixon was what nuclear weapons people call "a tamper".