For example, in the 1950s, the automobile, refrigerator and television
were key consumer products that supersized our economy and secured a large, robust
middle class.
In 1955, nearly 90 percent of the cars on our nation’s roads were
American-made, with more than 8 million new cars sold that year. From 1945 to
1985, we paved 42,798 miles of interstate highway and bought 300 million cars.
As a result, car-related businesses — from petroleum to drive-through
restaurants to tourism — sprang up from coast to coast, while refrigerators
redefined domestic life.
“A few years ago it took the housewife 5-1/2 hours to prepare
daily meals for a family of four,” Time
magazine reported in 1959. “Today she can do it in 90 minutes or less — and
still produce meals fit for a king or a finicky husband.”
In a nation of 150 million in the 1950s, there seemed no end to...
the number of kitchens in need of a refrigerator and all the TV dinners people
could eat! And housewives suddenly had free time on their hands.
By late 1952, a third of U.S. households had TVs. In some cities it
was reported there were more TV sets than bathtubs! Even though the average
factory worker’s take-home pay was less than $100 a week, the price of a TV was
about $500. Families would do without food and other costly necessities in
order to buy a television set.
One riveting factoid followed another — until I got to the part about
atomic bombs and nuclear warheads. So much for a light piece on how we live in
the context of the times.
I spent hours engrossed in reports from the United Nations Office
for Disarmament Affairs, Federation of American Scientists, Global Security
Institute, World Nuclear Association, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Defense News, and
the Oxford Companion to U.S. Military History.
From 1945 to 1962, the U.S. detonated more than 1,000 nuclear
warheads (300 in the open air) including the two on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
while China, France, the UK and Soviet Union conducted their own tests. Nuclear
proliferation was big business, and there were no signs that it wouldn’t
continue.
By 1985 there were 70,481 nuclear warheads in place around the
world — all capable of far more destructive power than the two dropped on Japan.
According to the Global Security Institute, “It only takes 200 to
sufficiently end civilization.”
Vital though they were for super-power economies, even the most
bodacious, war-ready world leaders finally agreed that there were too many.
They set about dismantling some of them. Today there are only about 22,000. What
a relief!
But wait. The top 20 U.S. defense companies posted revenues in
2011 of $339.2 billion, employing thousands of workers. There’s talk of defense
spending cuts as the U.S. begins wrapping up our latest foreign-war efforts. Won’t
those cuts cost government-funded-dependent jobs and add to our economic woes?
Since the 1950s, our economy has been dependent on our commitment
to war, both directly and indirectly, from Korea to the Cold War to Middle East
dictators and wars on terror, drugs and our southern borders. There’s also the
implicit civil war between the “right” and the “left” here at home these days.
(I think sometimes our right arms and our left arms, both with clenched fists,
forget they’re attached to the same body.)
Maybe more war is the answer to our economic problems? We’re used
to it, seem to accept it, benefit from it. Defense budgets in Asia and the
Middle East are growing significantly, so there’s a promising customer base,
“which presents an opportunity for defense companies to drive growth with
foreign military sales,” according to Deloitte’s 2011 Top 20 U.S. Aerospace and
Defense Company Financial Performance Analysis.
The top five U.S. defense contractors increased spending on
lobbying by a combined 11.5 percent in the first quarter of 2012 compared to
the same quarter last year.
“With 82 percent of our company’s sales derived from U.S.
government customers, we naturally have interactions with virtually every
standing committee in the United States Congress who has oversight authority
over the budgets and policies of all federal agencies, and by extension, the
products and services that Lockheed Martin provides to them,” Lockheed
spokesperson Jennifer Allen wrote in an email to Defense News last month. Lockheed
leads the top-five list.
So: The vast majority of the U.S. population have cars, refrigerators,
TVs, cell phones and internet access; energy to power them; and thousands of
nuclear warheads to “protect” us. It’s a market-driven economy. Why won’t our
government leaders — current and incoming — be specific as to what they have in
mind for us to purchase en masse that will grow business and create private
sector jobs, you know, like in the 1950s? Is it a secret? A surprise? Or is it
just more war? Surely not. We’re more creative than that, aren’t we? I’m all
about a strong military and job creation, but 22,000 nuclear warheads? Really?
This post is
excerpted from my weekly column in the Daily Sentinel as published in the
Sunday, August 19, 2012, edition of the newspaper.
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