
          Figures of Speech--Dressed for the H Bomb
          By Tullos, AllenAllen Tullos
          Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, pp. 1-4
          
          By any reasonable and fair-minded standard, our Southern members of
Congress ought to have felt proud of the year they had as military
procurers. Here was close to a billion dollars for Lockheed-Georgia's
beginning production of fifty C-5B Air Force transport airplanes, a
project ultimately to cost eight billion. Here was the ensconcing of
the Rapid Deployment Force at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa and at
the Army's 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina--a
force soon to total nearly 500,000 soldiers. Here were a couple of
nuclear powered aircraft carriers (at $3.4 billion each) headed for
assembly at Newport News, Virginia; an attack submarine was being
named after the city itself. And here and there throughout the South
were the scattered small contracts and subcontracts, like that of a
few million dollars to Pineville, North Carolina's Aeronca,
Incorporated, to supply titanium engine shrouds for the B-1 bomber.
          Nor had the vigilance and resolve of these Southern statesmen gone
uncommended. At a convention of mercenaries held late in the year at
Charlotte, General William Westmoreland saluted the signs of a rebirth
of American fortitude. "The odds of war are exceptionally high in the
future," said the former big gun, "but the route to peace lies in the
ability to wage war." His audience tossed their cannisters in
delight.
          Despite such achievements and such blessings, and a $230 billion
military appropriations bill for 1983, the shrewder members of the
Southern delegation felt a few shivers run through their early warning
systems. Even before Christmas recess, these congressmen were seen
nodding to each other. Nodding turned to huddling and then escalated
into closeting.
          Simply put, they had two problems: how to justify and 

secure their
rightful share of the five year $1.6 trillion military build-up that
President Reagan and Secretary of War Weinberger were pursuing, and
how to deploy their counterforce to pin down and negate an
increasingly bothersome disarmament movement.
          When it comes to making military socks and raincoats and to
quartering troops, Southern legislators and contractors have long done
all right by each other and may well continue to do so (see "Shaping
the South's Pre-War Economy," Southern Changes,
August/September 1982). The South has its congressmen setting on ready
in hardened silos of seniority on armed services and appropriations
committees. In terms of total payroll for military personnel, six of
the top seven states are Southern. The South supplies the War
Department with textiles, tobacco, coal and food. Yet, most Southern
states, compared with states in other regions of the U.S., sell little
weaponry.
          Under the Reagan-Weinberger rearmament campaign, an increasingly
larger proportion of the total military budget will be spent for
weapons. For historical reasons (the old story of Southern defeat and
colonialism and their long legacies), the South lacks the highly
technical, capital intensive industries which are essential to the new
generation of hardware the Pentagon seeks. Economist Ray Marshall has
projected, by US Census region, the increase in distribution of
military dollars between now and 1986: a growth of thirty-seven
percent for the Pacific states, sixteen percent for New England,
fourteen percent for the East North Central, but only six percent for
the East South Central and four percent for the West South Central
states.
          There are a few Southern congressmen, perhaps senators Pryor and
Bumpers are the leading examples, whose residence in a state at the
furthermost periphery of Pentagon contracting seems to have had a bit
of a liberating effect. These men have grown more sceptical and more
visible in their questioning of budgets. Betty Bumpers has organized a
disarmament group--Peace Links (Southern Changes,
November/December 1982). Most of the Southern congressional
delegation, however, has been trying to find ways to put their fingers
on weaponry money while they; maneuver to keep their regular military
dependents happy: "We must not let our conventional forces erode,"
they say.
          Even by the mega-boodle standards of corporate-state war
contracting, the hardware that lies within the horizon of the 1980's
is an enormity. By 1985, the Pentagon's budget (measured in constant,
1972 dollars) will surpass that of both the Korean War and the Vietnam
War at their peaks. In the eye of Creation, this is not to be spit
at.
          Not only does traditional pork barrel profit-taking make the
weaponry of rearmament expensive, so does the increasing complexity of
the products, and the extraordinary specialized resources--both human
and natural--required for production.
          In its military or non-military uses, technological change is
directed by human values. For some time now, the arms race has been
propelled and the world jeopardized by the values of white males with
seemingly unlimited appetites for power and vast capacities for
suspicion and mistrust. Sophisticated systems of weaponry become
antiquated at a faster and faster pace. "Security" keeps sliding
away.
          The continued unwillingness of nuclear nations to negotiate
disarmament has allowed military technicians to continue leaping the
fences of invention. As we now stand, state-of-the-art war machinery
is lodging itself ever deeper in the nervous system. For patrolling
the hostile frontier of the microsecond, tongues and heartbeats have
become intolerably slow triggers. B52's hang on trees, clumsy plums of
an outmoded husbandry. Instead, for example, we have hightech's high
refinement, Stealth, a bomber so alienated that radar can't reach
it.
          Trends in the actual production of weapons have moved in tandem
with the costs and the capabilities of the weapons
themselves. Technological modernization (Tech Mod) by means of
computer assisted design and manufacture (CAD/CAM) is putting the
quietus on the forever flawed and fatigued human element. In the rare
Southern locations where these young machines of promise have already
elbowed their way, flesh and blood machinists have begun to feel like
hand loom weavers in early nineteenth century England. "At
Lockheed-Georgia," observes the trade publication Iron
Age (September 1,1981), "The skills of a thirty-year workforce
are captured in a numerical control tape. It is relatively easy to
train a new employee to load a tape and put material in a machine."
Military contracting dollars shape the speed and direction of capital
intensive Tech Mod.
          Tech Mod may be the shaper of things to come, but shell South has
few manufacturers at the level of Lockheed. 

This circumstance, rather
than gun-shyness, makes it a little easier to understand why several
Southern congressmen seem to be moving slowly in giving their
wholehearted support to portions of Reagan and Weinberger's proposed
new weapons systems. Take the MX missile for instance.
          At a late November (1982) news conference in far away Wyoming, that
state's congressional delegation showed sheepish glee. "Senator
Malcolm Wallop Brings Home the Big Bang," read the headline. For a
time, one hundred MX missiles, worth from $26 billion to fifty billion
dollars, seemed headed West. "I think the MX is going to be great for
Cheyenne," said Mayor Bill Nation. "After all, the military has had a
one hundred year relationship with the town, back to the days of the
cavalry and old Fort Carlin. I think it's great." Blessed was the
Peacekeeper.
          The South, however, had little to gain from MX. The project's prime
contractors--Martin Marietta, Rockwell, Northrop, Morton Thiokol,
Boeing, Aerojet--were located in places like Colorado, California,
Massachusetts, Utah and Washington. Realizing their need for Southern
friends in high places, these contractors gave their largest campaign
contributions for the reelection of Florida Democrat and
Appropriations Committee member Bill Chapell ($33,900) and Alabama
Republican Bill Dickinson ($19,500), the ranking minority member of
the Armed Services Committee.
          Despite the contractors' and the Administration's efforts,
production of the weapon has been postponed. The Reaganites failed to
strike sufficient terror or glamor into the hearts of members of
Congress to give depressed Americans the Christmas gift of MX. Perhaps
the contractors should have thrown a few meaty ribs towards Dixie. Was
it coincidence that at the heart of the failure to get MX production
underway was the opposition of two key Southern senators?
          Coincidence or not, South Carolina's Ernest Hollings and Georgia's
Sam Nunn leaped on the Administration's marketing failure with MX,
turning it into an opportunity to assume the leadership and vocabulary
of the contingent of tough-minded friends of the Pentagon, the ones
who do their homework and know the value of a dollar. Here, on the
holy ground of American pragmatism, is where the battles for military
procurement will be waged in the next few years.
          By waving the spangled banner of industriousness, efficiency,
accountability and productivity, Hollings and Nunn (and the
like-minded from other regions such as Ohio's John Glenn and at times,
even Colorado's Gary Hart) seem capable of rallying a consensus and
shifting the weaponry debate into the reductive calculus of
cost-benefit ratios and away from the fundamental questioning of
increased armaments and nuclear war policy posed by the disarmament
movement. With micro-chip wisdom, comparative casualty counts from
this or that weapons system over a spectrum of video war scenarios can
now be fleshed out on the head of a pin. At the arcade of nuclear
gamesmanship, the hooked players look for a winning
strategy and for high and stringent criteria
for waging war. Such absurdity masquerades for realism in a world
where thousands of warheads yearn for their night on the town.
          "Most Americans," says Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, "have begun
to connect military spending not with strength, but with waste." The
ludicrous search for a secure MX basing mode has done much to help the
public make the connection. This is where the punch card pragmatists
log-on. Senator Hollings, who knows that the winds of this mood may
well blow someone into the White House in 1984, recently abandoned his
support of the B-1 bomber and led Senate opposition to the Dense Pack
MX deployment. "Careful, pragmatic and thoughtful decision making is
required," says Hollings, "if we are to maintain a strong, credible
defense posture. Our economy has no room for procurement of a Pentagon
wish list." His solution? Continue Pentagon spending at present levels
plus three percent real growth per year.
          Having gotten his multi-billion dollar C-5B airplane through
Congress for Lockheed and the homefolks, Senator Nunn was also ready
to assume the stance of scrutiny. Adapting his lines from the cliche
of a television wine commercial, he helped to stymie the MX until such
time as it can be properly seasoned. "I've never felt," he patiently
vouched, "like we should buy a missile until we know what we're going
to do with it." Among his colleagues on the Armed Services Committee
and on the Hill, the far-seeing Nunn's opinions wield considerable
throw weight. In order to "fight recession," he is willing to "slash"
defense spending by five or six billion dollars.
          As an example of an imaginative proposal which Nunn says, "is
simply dead in the present sober atmosphere," he cites Georgia
Congressman Larry McDonald's attempt to ride the publicity plume
thrown off by the completion and dedication of the Vietnam War
Memorial on the Mall in Washington. McDonald had advanced a military
jobs program to trench away at North Georgia's Etowah Indian Mounds
and produce a rubble and bone-filled crater as a monument to World War
III. "It should be built now," McDonald pleaded, "so speeches can
justify it and so there will be living tourists to visit it."
          Nunn also disparaged Alabama Senator Jeremiah Denton's "Project
Interface-Off." This would have posed an unblinking, laser killer
satellite eyeball to eyeball in 

space with anything the Soviets chose
to send up. Denton is gathering himself for another try.
          More to Senator Nunn's liking was Strom Thurmond's promotion of a
three billion dollar plutonium blender-reactor at South Carolina's
Savannah River Plant where three reactors already produce the weapons
grade plutonium that goes into all US nuclear warheads and bombs. "I
believe that this reactor will be important to our nation's production
of weapons material and an asset to the state of South Carolina," says
Thurmond, "provided that environmental concerns are properly
addressed." Happily, Thurmond's cautionary quibble reveals no new
found concern for ecology but comes as a theoretical salve to the
embarrassingly unpatriotic disclosures of two Atlanta
Constitution reporters that residents near the Savannah
River Plant have a much higher than normal incidence of Polycythemia
vera, a rare blood disease linked to radiation exposure.
          Other Southern congressmen have also begun to float on the rising
pragmatic tide. Senator J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana, a Democratic
member of the Appropriations Committee, offers the Multiple Launch
Rocket System, a mobile Army weapon that fires a dozen rockets a
minute at targets eighteen miles away. He seeks as much of the four
billion dollar system for his state as he can swing.
          In Florida, St. Petersburg's Republican Congressman Bill Young,
noting that the bikini swimsuit was a spinoff of the atomic testing
once done in the Pacific, has proposed that a five hundred square mile
section of the Everglades National Wilderness be set aside as a
testing range for the new generation of weapons. His eye, and the eyes
of several Florida retailers, are fixed on the job-creating and
commercial possibilities of the inevitable fashion
aftershock. Already, designers are toying with prototypes of the
"Everglaze," a kind of permanent rain- and swimwear fused to the
skin.
          Even North Carolina Senators Helms and East are coming into phase
with their call for authorization of Fayetteville and Fort Bragg's
annual August Heat and Death Festival as the official 1984 World's
Fair, or, in a compromising mood--as a kind of living, flaming
monument of the sort Representative McDonald seeks at the Etowah
Mounds.
          "We like to close all our shows with a good sacred number." So
spoke the leader of minimalist rock band Po' White Noise one recent
night as it rolled through Atlanta from Japhet, Georgia, lingering in
a local bar long enough to deliver the lyrics:
          
            I'd rather die a red lizard's death on a limb Than ascend in
that hydrogen cloud. *
          
          *"Lizard On A Limb," in lieu of copyright, Square
Root Music, 1982.
          Luckily, Senator Nunn and our elected Southern leadership never
heard this cheap shot of a song from this disaffected bunch of street
jeremiahs. In the land of promise, a way was opening. Death was the
growth industry of the 80's and Megadeath the final index of
productivity. The bacon would yet come home to roost.
          
            Figures of Speech is an occasional feature
of Southern Changes which grants the editor temporary
license.
          
        