"The Causes of World War III": Thirty Years Later Author(S): Ted G

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"The Causes of World War III": Thirty Years Later Author(s): Ted G. Goertzel Source: Sociological Forum, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Jun., 1989), pp. 241-246 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/684492 Accessed: 26-01-2018 16:11 UTC

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This content downloaded from 128.6.218.72 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 16:11:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Sociological Forum, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1989

Notes and Insights

The Causes of World War III: Thirty Years Later

Ted G. Goertzel'

Dire warnings about the imminence of World War III were common in the 1950s, as the world adjusted to the introduction of nuclear weapons. C. Wright Mills and other critical writers exaggerated the power of the military in American society and the weakness of civilian socialforces. In the thirty years since Mills published The Causes of World War III, the mass society has asserted itself and nonnuclear conflicts have been the major threats to world peace.

KEY WORDS: militarism; nuclear war; arms race; military-industrial complex; peace movements.

Thirty years ago C. Wright Mills, the angry young man of American sociology in the 1950s, warned that "within the history of our immediate epoch, World War III is coming about" (Mills, 1960a: 15). Mills's mass market paper- back, The Causes of World War III, sold one hundred thousand copies to a public shocked by Sputnik into realizing that the United States might not always be on the delivering end of nuclear attack. The sales of Causes was surpassed only by Mills's (1960b) apologia for the Cuban revolution, Listen Yankee (four hundred thousand copies), as a popular manifesto for the emerging New Left. Of course, Mills was not alone in believing nuclear catastrophe was imminent. Nuclear pacifists have been predicting disaster for a long time. In June 1947, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published its first cover with the hands of a giant clock filling the page, symbolizing the idea that only a short time remained until the nuclear midnight. The hands crept up a few minutes in October 1949, when the Soviet Union exploded its first bomb. Since then the editors have occasionally moved the hands forward or back a few minutes as the cold war waxed and waned. They have also made the

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This content downloaded from 128.6.218.72 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 16:11:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 242 Goertzel clock smaller and smaller as the years have passed and the nuclear threat has been accepted as an enduring reality. When Irving Howe reviewed The Causes of World War III for Dissent (1959:191), he found it to be "characterized by a relentless thrust of assertion and a bludgeoning style, neither of which is much affected by complexity of argument or thoroughness of evidence." Howe thought Mills was too easy on the Soviet Union and too quick to substitute impassioned description for careful analysis. Despite, or perhaps because of, these weaknesses, Mills's book was wide- ly read and praised by activists. Mills, who died prematurely in 1962, was revered by the student movement of the 1960s, while Howe and his democratic socialists were perceived as stodgy and dismissed as hopelessly out of touch. But how do the two views compare with the benefit of thirty years of hind- sight? Were the power elites of the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s mindlessly drifting and relentlessly thrusting toward war, as Mills alleged? If so, what saved us? Mills is better known for his more scholarly book, The Power Elite (1956), which argued that a tripartite prepotency of the corporate rich, the chief executives of the executive branch, and the warlords of the Pentagon dominated American political life. The Causes of World War III developed the implications of this analysis for planetary survival, arguing that the Ameri- can power elite and its counterpart in the Kremlin were leading the sheepish, indifferent, media-manipulated masses down the primrose path to Ar- mageddon. What can we say about the underlying power elite/mass society thesis? There was a profusion of scholarly debate about the power elite thesis throughout the 1960s, but it bogged down in controversy about paradigmat- ic assumptions, terminology, and research methods. There are no definitive, generally accepted criteria for measuring the power of a group. One simple, objective approach is to examine a group's success in commanding economic resources. Of course, this is not definitive; groups have many noneconomic goals. But one of the principal prerogatives of power is the ability to main- tain, if not increase, one's share of the nation's income. If, as Mills expected, the military/industrial complex were increasingly dominating American life, this should show up in economic indicators. If we use military spending as a percentage of gross national product (GNP) as an indicator of the power of the military, we find that it has declined significantly in the last thirty years. From a peak of 13%7 of GNP at the height of the Korean War, military spending had declined to 10% when Mills published his book and reached no more than 90o at the peak of the Vietnam War. It then fell to just under 5% by 1978, and even with the buildup under Reagan, has reached no more than 7% (Goertzel, 1985).

This content downloaded from 128.6.218.72 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 16:11:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Causes of World War III 243

There have been two intervals of military buildup during the last thirty years - the Vietnam War and the Reagan years - but they were both exceptions to the longer trend. These exceptions have been more the result of civilian political forces than of anything done by the military. If the Penta- gon Papers showed anything, it was that Lyndon Johnson led us into Viet- nam for political and ideological reasons, not at the urging of the military. Reagan's rearmament was advocated most forcefully by The Committee on the Present Danger and other groups of neoconservative intellectuals, warmly welcomed by a grateful military to be sure (Sanders, 1983; Wolfe, 1984). The most controversial recent attempt to build up the military, the Star Wars (Strategic Defense Initiative) program, was a civilian initiative that caught the military by surprise. It is a last ditch attempt by the right wing to counter overwhelming public pressure against further increases in military spending (Goertzel, 1987). Of course there is a military/industrial complex in the United States and most other nations, but the record of the past few decades shows that it is no stronger as a political force than many other groups. The elderly, for one example, have been much more effective in winning their demands for a larger slice of the nation's fiscal pie. Spending on social security, medi- care, and other programs for the elderly has grown steadily, in both abso- lute and relative terms, over the past thirty years, and has greatly exceeded the rate of growth of military spending. Increased spending on the elderly might be expected in a nation with an aging population. What if we look at spending on youth? If we compare federal defense expenditures with total government spending (federal, state, and local) on education, we find that when Mills wrote in 1958 the United States spent 8.5%o of the GNP on the military and 3.6%o on education. In 1968 the percentages were 8.5%0 and 4.9%0. In the aftermath of Vietnam, in 1978, military outlays had declined to 4.6%7 of the GNP, while education was at 4.7%70. Even after six years of Reaganomics, in 1986, defense was at 6.2%, with education at 4.5%7o. Educators have been able to hold on to their share of the nation's fiscal pie, despite declining birth rates and school popu- lations. The warloads, by contrast, have enjoyed only brief periods in the fiscal sun. Certainly one can argue that the hundreds of billions spent on defense are wasted, while those spent on education, old age pensions, and the like advance human welfare. This is doubtless why, in the absence of a perceived crisis or threat, the public generally favors increased social spending and op- poses spending more on arms. Mills's thesis, however, was not the wasteful- ness of war, but the unrestrained power of the warlords. Mills (1960a:90) asserted that "the immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it." But these preparations have continued for

This content downloaded from 128.6.218.72 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 16:11:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 244 Goertzel thirty years and we seem no closer to war now than we were then. Ameri- cans are great believers in technology and are quick to believe technological developments will have important social consequences. Nowhere is this fas- cination with technology more apparent than in the American preoccupa- tion with military hardware, which Samuel Huntington (Schwartz and Derber, 1986) has called "weaponitis." This cultural ailment is just as pronounced on the left as on the right. The peace movement exaggerates the danger of new weapons systems, while the militarists exaggerate their value. We at- tribute great significance to changes in the number of missiles, when the num- bers are actually quite arbitrary and make little difference. The fact is that all the new weapons systems introduced in the past thirty years have made remarkably little difference in the balance of power or the risk of war between the superpowers. In 1958, Mills had no way of knowing that the United States was head- ed to war with North Vietnam, not with the Soviet Union. He might have anticipated, however, that the post World War II dominance of the world system by the United States and the Soviet Union was bound to decline. The master trend of the past few decades has been the weakening of the military, economic, and political hegemony of the superpowers. If nuclear weapons are used again, it will more likely be between India and Pakistan than between the United States and the Soviet Union. Too great a focus on strategic armaments, and on U.S./Soviet dynamics, obscures the more likely sources of conflict. If Mills's analysis was flawed in many ways, can we say that it was a failure? As a work of social science, perhaps so, but what if we consider it as a piece of political propaganda? Mills had a strategy for political change. He thought that the excessive power of the military was "due less to any greed for power on their part than to the civilian default of political power" (Mills, 1960a:65). His prophetic prose was intended to rally the intellectuals to fill the political vacuum. The explosion of the New Left movements in the 1960s cannot be attributed to his books alone, but they certainly contributed to it. Mills's goal was not to predict the future, but to change it. The New Left was often criticized for not following its critiques with positive proposals for change. Mills avoided this trap. Mills's pacifist manifesto of 1958 combined radical, utopian demands, such as unilateral nuclear disarmament, with prac- tical reforms that could easily be accepted by liberals such as recognizing Red China, increasing foreign aid, and augmenting student exchanges with the Soviet Union. Many of his liberal reforms have been implemented. The major impact of the book, however, was not in promoting particular policy proposals, but in helping to shape the zeitgeist of 1960s radicalism. The strengths and weaknesses of the New Left are anticipated in Mills's polemical writings. The New Left (Gitlin, 1987) valued style over substance,

This content downloaded from 128.6.218.72 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 16:11:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Causes of World War III 245 outrage over objectivity, strident demands over cautious compromises. These traits gave the moment a sense of urgency that was exciting and energizing. It seemed as if great things could be accomplished so long as people remained true to their convictions. The excitement wore off, however, when the flaws in the analysis led to a series of disastrous political defeats. Crisis monger- ing may be an effective way to rally a mass movement, but movements that depend on a sense of imminent disaster to hold their members together are likely to collapse very quickly when the foretold disaster fails to materialize. This is difficult for many of us to accept. Our peace activities seem more urgent and meaningful if we believe the world is on the brink of disaster and only we can save it from the forces of crackpot realism and the military metaphysic. A little sober reflection, however, suggests that our best hope of keeping the peace is to win over the elites of both systems, rather than to vilify or try vainly to overthrow them. We should be relieved that preventing World War III does not require overthrowing capitalism or in- stituting unilateral disarmament. Improving understanding between the Soviet and American peoples and building better mechanisms for solving regional crises that might escalate to nuclear war are much more important than stop- ping particular weapons systems. While the groups Mills called the power elite are still with us, they do not seem quite as powerful as they did in the 1950s. Mills thought Congress was a weak sister compared to the executive branch, but Richard Nixon found otherwise. Despite Mills's portrayal of the public as sheepishly following the ideological line of the power elite, public opinion is generally critical of the military. When data from national social surveys conducted from 1973 to 1985 are averaged together, the percent favoring increasing military spending is only 2607o, as compared to 61?7o for health spending, 57% for education, and 54% for social security (Goertzel, 1987). Although on a purely technical level the risk of nuclear Armageddon is much greater today than it was in 1958, it has lost its novelty value and antiwar activists are questioning the value of strategies that focus on weapon- ry. The members of the Boston Nuclear Study Group have made the following persuasive argument:

Short of virtually complete, multilateral nuclear disarmament, no change in the pace, balance, or even the direction of the arms race can make much difference in the risk of nuclear war, the damage should one occur, or the division of international political power. This includes Star Wars, the nuclear freeze, and even large cuts in or stabili- zation of offensive nuclear arsenals. (Schwartz and Derber, 1986:39)

Does the fact that World War III did not come in the thirty years since Mills's book mean that it also unlikely to occur during the next thirty years? Of course, there are no guarantees against accidental war or irrational political movements. There is no convincing argument, however, that a thrust

This content downloaded from 128.6.218.72 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 16:11:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 246 Goertzel toward war is rooted in the fundamental social institutions of either super- power. Soviet economic problems and the American budget deficits mean that military spending is likely to decline, in comparison to other spending categories, in both countries. As a result, the military is likely to continue to decline as a force in both societies. Today, as in Mills's time, the primary threats to peace are in the Third World-the Middle East, Central America, southern Africa, and so on. The United States is already involved in many of these conflicts, and there is always a risk of direct military intervention. If we expect the next thirty years to be anything like the last thirty, these issues should be the focus of antiwar efforts.

REFERENCES

Gitlin, Todd 1960a The Causes of World War III. (1958*) 1987 The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of New York: Ballantine Books. Rage, New York: Bantam. 1960b Listen Yankee: The Revolution in Goertzel, Ted Cuba. New York: McGraw-Hill. 1985 "Militarism as a sociological problem: Sanders, Jerry The political sociology of U.S. military 1983 Peddlers of Crisis. Boston: South End spending, 1951-1983." In R. Braungart Press. (ed.), Research in Political Sociology: Schwartz, William and Charles Derber 119-140. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. 1986 "Arms control: Misplaced focus." Bulle- 1987 "Public opinion concerning military tin of the Atomic Scientists 42, 3:39-44. spending in the United States: Wolfe, Alan 1937-1985." Journal of Political and 1984 The Rise and Fall of the "Soviet Military Sociology 15:61-73. Threat": Domestic Souces of the Cold Howe, Irving War Consensus. Boston: South End 1959 "Review of The Causes of World War Press. III" Dissent 6:191-196. Mills, C. Wright 1956 The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.

*Date in parentheses is the original publication date of reprinted material.

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