This article appears in the October 6, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
October 1982
The So-Called NATO Conventional Build-Up
[Print version of this article]
Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in EIR Vol. 9, No. 43, Nov. 9, 1982, p. 57.
Let us call things by their right names. The so-called “Conventional Military Build-Up” policy is purely and simply a build-up for colonialist wars against developing nations. In other words, “NATO Out-Of-Area Deployment.”
The argument made by the supporters of the “conventional build-up” policy is simple. They say: the existing strategic thermonuclear deterrent of the United States is enough to stop the Soviets. They say: stationing nuclear weapons in Western Europe is unnecessary, except for bargaining purposes. They say: the wars which are going to be fought during the 1980s will not be between the NATO and Warsaw Pact forces. The wars of the 1980s, they say, will be colonial wars, fought with “conventional weapons,” against the nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
On military policy, we happen to agree with Niccolò Machiavelli, Oliver Cromwell, Lazare Carnot, Benjamin Franklin, and General Scharnhorst. In our opinion, this is one thing the Swiss do right: universal military training and a weapon of national defense in the trained citizen’s home. Such policies inspire second thoughts in the minds of ambitious aggressors and shatter the arrogant dreams of plotting tyrants, contributing to peace, and to true democracy.
That republican military policy is not what the backers of “conventional build-up” are proposing. Retired U.S. General Maxwell Taylor says it all quite plainly. The purpose of the “conventional build-up” is what Taylor calls “population and raw materials wars.”
Taylor may be evil, but he is not confused. He has a map of Africa, for example. As he describes this map, he intends to wipe out most of the population of black Africa, except for the population of Nigeria, which he generously recommends be reduced only by one-half.
If Taylor’s policies remind one of the Eastern European practices of Adolf Hitler, the resemblance is not accidental. Taylor, together with retired General William Westmoreland, is a spokesman for the Draper Fund’s Malthusian lobbying organization, the Population Crisis Committee. General William Draper, creator of the Fund, was earlier a leading booster of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, together with the family of Governor W. Averell Harriman and other blue-blooded luminaries of the New York American Museum of Natural History. What the Harriman family and Draper stated that they admired most about the Nazis was Hitler’s “racial purification” policies. By adopted political pedigree, General Maxwell Taylor has turned himself into a neo-Nazi mass murderer.
This is the policy of the Club of Rome, of the World Wildlife Fund, of the “blue-ribbon” Committee for the Year 2000, of the “Global 2000 Report” and the “Global Futures Report.” This is also the population-policy side of the “conditionalities” policies of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and sundry allied institutions. It is also the policy of practice flowing out of the neo-Malthusians of the “Nuclear Freeze Movement.”
The alternative to the evil of the “conventional build-up” is the policy of Dr. Edward Teller presented to an audience at the Washington, D.C. Press Club Oct. 26: a combination of advanced military technologies and fulfilling the “common aims of mankind,” the economic development of the Third World’s nations.
For 35 years, Dr. Teller emphasized, the world has lived under the balance of terror of nuclear warfare. With aid of advanced anti-missile technologies, he stated, we can eliminate that age of terror, and free mankind from the evil doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” orchestrated by the rabid neo-Malthusian, Robert Strange McNamara.
As we have been insisting since 1977, science has the knowledge to develop space-based beam-weapons, to destroy nuclear missiles in the stratosphere. Earlier this year, the U.S. National Democratic Policy Committee[fn_1] published a policy-design, stating the feasibility of developing and deploying such weapons, and also linking that policy to Third World technological development. Dr. Teller and U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger agree with such new military policy, along with a growing number of others.
Now is the time for the United States to resume the policy-outlooks for which it fought World War II. Let us join with Dr. Teller, and resolve to follow his lead, to bring to an end the age of mutually assured destruction.
If NATO were to continue the “conventional build-up” and related policies, which the faction of Lord Carrington has been pushing, the combination of savage weakening of the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation in Europe] economies and North-South “population and raw materials wars,” means almost certain nuclear warfare between the superpowers. Teller warned of this sort of danger and rightly so. Hence, we must insist, the overlap between the Malthusians of the nuclear-freeze and so-called peace movements is the greatest single cause of actual outbreak of general nuclear warfare over the period ahead.
The “nuclear freeze” and “conventional build-up” movements are not only evil, but apocalyptically imbecilic. Let the OECD nations come to their senses, before the recent drift into a “post-industrial society” puts us irreversibly on the slide down into nuclear apocalypse.
The EIR article was reprinted from the Nov. 1, 1982, issue of the U.S. newspaper, New Solidarity.
[fn_1]. The National Democratic Policy Committee was created by the LaRouche movement. For an insight into its activities see the article, [back to text for fn_1]
