Knelman, F.H. America, God and the Bomb: The Legacy of Ronald Reagan.
Vancouver: New Star Books, 1987. 478 pages.
F.H. Knelman is a professor of physics and engineering, and has been
active in peace and disarmament movements since the late 1950s. This book
examines the arms race and Star Wars mongering of the Reagan administration.
Since Reagan is mostly the effect, not the cause, Knelman also looks at some
cold warriors from think tanks and defense industries. While the roots of
the nuclear escalation can be traced to the 1975 founding of the Committee
on the Present Danger, by 1984 several secret documents had been leaked that
presented our new nuclear strategy. The U.S. under Reagan had adopted an
offensive nuclear posture: now planners clearly assumed that a nuclear war
was winnable. Then came Star Wars, which made equally insane assumptions
about the feasibility of shooting down all offensive missiles.
Reactionary pundits and defense moguls got rich from these assumptions,
as they brought us closer to war and created huge budget deficits. Their
projections of missile gaps and Soviet intentions, intended to justify this
spending, were all massive distortions of the actual situation. Knelman even
suspects that the entire U.S. effort might have been a scam, designed to
force the Soviets into economic suffocation as they try to keep up. But this
probably assumes too much strategic IQ from defense planners; it's more
likely a simple case of milking the taxpayer for fun and profit.
ISBN 0-919573-75-4
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