Introducing Tim Kelly.
He's a columnist and policy advisor at the Future Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Virginia.
That's FFF.org.
And he's a correspondent for Radio America's Special Investigator, as well as a political cartoonist.
You can find his piece, The Mad Myth, at FFF.org/comment.
Welcome to the show, Tim.
How are you doing?
Not bad.
Yourself?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us.
So it's an interesting thing to me.
It's sort of a side issue to your article in a way, but isn't it interesting how little anybody cares about nuclear weapons policy at all?
And if they ever think about it at all, the actual conventional wisdom is nuclear weapons will never be used as long as everybody has lots and lots of nuclear weapons.
So don't worry about it.
I'm not going to go back to worrying about anything but the issue of the H-bomb.
Yeah, considering that governments, many governments, have assumed a godlike power to destroy the world over what I would think would be relatively trivial issues, trivial issues, it is something.
And the irony is that there's so much ink spilled about Iran and its supposed program.
There's nothing said about the thousands of missiles that the United States retained.
Russia still has.
They still have many still on hair-trigger alert.
And I think your interview last week or a couple weeks ago with Daniel Ellsberg spelled that out very well.
It's hard for me to improve upon that, about the insanity and the immorality of retaining our land-based ICBMs when we have a submarine-based arsenal that was more than adequate to do what matter deterrence is supposed to do.
So why are these things retained?
And you all got into the fact that billions of dollars are spent in these states.
And that's what's horrifying.
It's just the inertia of all the money that goes into these programs that maintains them.
And it's just pork-barrel politics.
That's horrifying to consider.
I mean, that policy can be driven by such blind greed.
But that's politics.
What can I say?
Yeah, well, as much as I don't want to believe that's true, I know how it goes.
And I still just want to believe that, come on now.
When it comes to hydrogen bombs and how many we're to have and what's to be done with them and which services would use them and where they're to be deployed and these kinds of things, it couldn't possibly be that it just comes down to lobbying and getting congressmen drunk and steak dinners and this kind of thing, measly bribes to create a pro-H-bomb industry policy.
It just can't be.
It just can't be.
And, yeah, I know it's true.
Well, it feeds on stuff.
I listened to an interesting interview with – I wish I could get his name.
But he gets into the science of alternative nuclear energy, which involves thorium, I believe.
And I'm not an expert on this.
I don't want to get into that.
But what he was talking about, how the arms industry drove the civilian nuclear industry, because they both wanted to develop fissile material.
And they kind of warped the development of nuclear power in the 60s and 70s into what some people believe is an unstable source of power, with the advent of Fukushima and Chernobyl.
And, you know, I don't think there's a Rosetta Stone answer to this.
There's one issue.
Like any of these, there's overlapping agendas here, none of which I think are legitimate on their own.
But going back to the essential nature of nuclear warfare, it's important to point out – and, again, I want to point out that interview with Daniel Goldberg a week or a week or so ago.
It was basically based on a hope, a lie, that these weapons were never necessary to defend the country.
They were designed because scientists got together, and they were endowed with billions of dollars from the U.S. government during the war.
And as the program developed throughout the war, by the time the bombs were ready to be tested and used, the Axis powers had been defeated.
But they wanted to test the bomb.
And many within the government, James Byrne, within the Truman administration, wanted to use it as kind of something to show off to the Soviet, because they anticipated a showdown with the Soviets after the war.
It's kind of funny, because they had already anticipated the Cold War before the war had ended.
If you deal with the literature on this, the studying on this, they were planning a conflict with the Soviet Union before Germany had even surrendered.
And the horrifying thing about our use of nuclear, you know, the horrifying thing is the United States is the only country ever to use a nuclear weapon.
And you get it in a country that was essentially defeated, and it had already been tried to stand for peace.
But that's been covered up, and a lot of Americans don't want to face up to that.
And that's something that the American people should have to contend with.
But they blot it out.
Or they're not ever taught it, you know.
So that's the horrifying reality of the situation.
Yeah, Daniel Ellsberg, in reference to Hiroshima, talked about how whatever atrocities had been committed in America's past, at least people were rhetorically committed and ideally committed to human rights and that kind of thing.
But with their kind of internalized apology and acceptance of the nuking, well, before that, the firebombing, but especially the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that they really changed into accepting a different kind of people, accepting a brand new, a different morality altogether, that said that actually killing women and children can be noble and good and great in certain circumstances if your government decides so and that kind of thing, which really makes beasts out of Americans where before they weren't quite that bad.
Even on the utilitarian level, that was wrong, Chris.
I think the Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, the U.S. government's own document, admitted that the bombing campaign over Europe, over Germany, and the nuclear bombing of Japan were necessary to win the war.
In fact, I think extensive studies have been done since then that actually the campaign over Europe, where I think the moral threshold was crossed, probably by 1942 by the British, and then the U.S. picked it up when they entered the war in 1941-42 in Europe.
But they called it terror bombing, and the idea was to terrorize and kill as many civilians as possible with the idea that that would somehow affect the government.
Of course, you know, the government, the Nazi leadership, they're the ones in the bunkers.
It was the Koi Pouoi who were being firebombed and melted in the streets and being suffocated in the firestorms.
And, you know, close to a million civilians died in that campaign.
And, if anything, it consumed immense resources, particularly from the Battle of the Atlantic, where the only chance to knock the Americans out of the war would be with submarine warfare in the Atlantic.
And it took terrific resources away from that campaign and put them over the skies of Europe, where all it did was wreak destruction and made the occupation of Europe that much more difficult and more vulnerable to the Soviets, by the way, after the war.
So, you know, the government admits that itself in the Strategic Bombing Survey.
And when I point that out to people, to the extent they're willing to listen, if I don't get a glassy-eyed stare, they simply don't care.
And it's very upsetting, because I was raised to think that killing civilians and killing women and children and killing people was wrong.
And since those wars, since the total wars of the 20th century, Americans tend to revel in it in a way, as long as it's over there, far away.
And that's the upsetting thing about it.
Well, there's no more warlike people than the American people, yet there's no people that have been so removed from warfare.
I guess that's understandable to a certain degree.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
They don't see the consequences of it.
They see old movies, and so they don't see the full effects of it.
Well, you know, part of it is just the kind of civic religion of democracy, where if there was an election and these people took power by way of that election, then whatever they decide is ultimately right, because it's ultimately what most people want.
And that's what people believe.
And they sort of, I don't know which comes first, the majority opinion or the morality of things.
Sometimes it's hard to tell.
But ultimately, anything that they do comes with that kind of acceptance.
I mean, what does it mean to live in North Dakota other than to live on a giant H-bomb target?
But why?
Why should the people in North Dakota have to have their government draw a big red target on their head, when, hell, they could just use submarines or whatever.
They don't have to deliberately make targets out of the American people the way that they do with all their silos and whatever.
And yet they persist, all their airfields.
Well, again, it's important to reiterate that, again, nuclear warfare, that genie, was released by the American government.
The government re-elected, or, you know, they elected.
Then I wasn't alive then, so I don't really accept responsibility for it.
I don't know if I really believe in collective guilt.
The U.S. government, the U.S. government created this weapon, and it was unnecessary.
It wasn't necessary for us to import national security.
It was developed as an offensive weapon, and it was tested over Japan in order to come out to impress the Soviets.
And the only problem with that is all the Soviets did was kick in and speed up their development program, a development program which was highly aided by their infiltration of the Manhattan Project.
You could say the Manhattan Project was Stalin's research and development program.
And so it did nothing.
The irony is that we supposedly went to war in order to defend the country, and we emerged from that war.
We went into that war in an invulnerable power because we had the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean.
And within a few years of that war, we were facing a power which had the ability to bomb and destroy the country, about the 60s.
And so even from that standard of national security, the war did not help national security.
It made us more vulnerable.
Well, and now, as you say, too, the vast numbers of the nuclear weapons stockpiled by the United States, they were there in the name of keeping the Russians from pouring through the Folder Gap and into Western Europe, and yet it would only take a few nukes.
I mean, even with all of those Soviet tank divisions, it still would only take a few nukes to take out some Soviet tank divisions in a big valley.
What the hell do they need 10,000 for?
But it's because of this mad theory, all capitals, mutually assured destruction, where these Dr. Strangelove, you know, math genius types are so smart, they figure out some game formula which says all we need to do is be armed to the teeth.
And I really like the way you say in the article that it could be that the lack of nuclear war since the advent of mutually assured destruction is actually, these aren't your exact words, but something like this, that it could just be a coincidence.
We might just find out that actually this policy is only kind of good for deterring full-scale war, but not that good, and we might only find out the hard way, that sometimes a politician will be bad enough to do such a thing as set one of these things off.
Harry Truman proves it.
Well, I admit, yeah, we don't bring that up, but I made that point several times, just talking to people over the years, because I hear that running in the circles I run in, whether it's right-wing conservative people who, I would say I identify more with them than I do with the left-wing, although I don't consider myself right-wing anymore.
I just have certain viewpoints based on what I observe and based on the values that I was raised with.
But I would say that, well, nuclear weapons, yes, they're horrible, but they kept the peace.
And I said, well, okay, maybe they didn't keep peace, it's just luck.
And one thing is we were aware of at least 20 separate instances where false alarms almost resulted in launching weapons.
And I just write about three or four in the article just in the interest of brevity.
But it just shows just because a few people didn't go, you know, kept their cool and violated standard operating procedure.
And that's why the missiles weren't launched.
It was just a mistake.
And they identified it as a mistake.
But what if they hadn't?
And, you know, that's the scary thing.
It's whoops, okay, so the theory's wrong.
I like you mentioned the idea of game theory because the MAD wasn't so much developed out of a strategic reality or necessity.
It was developed, I think, you know, was it Nash, John Nash?
And it's game theory.
And if I'm wrong in correcting it, I think he's the one that came up with game theory.
And it's interesting to point out that he was also a paranoid schizophrenic.
So, you know, he's the one developing the policy.
Yeah, maybe more of a psycho.
Well, and then, of course, there's Albert Wohlstetter, who was the former Trotskyite, like his buddy Leo Strauss, teaching at the University of Chicago, and mentor to Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who he then sent off to go work in Henry Scoop Jackson's office.
And the rest is history.
The senator from Boeing.
Yeah, his whole thing was how do you fight and win a nuclear war?
Not how you stay out of one, but how can we keep a nuclear war limited enough but still get to use nukes enough that we come out on top of the thing at the end?
Well, that was insane.
I mean, I think it was Thomas Powers who succeeded Curtis LeMay.
In fact, Curtis LeMay called him demented and a sadist.
And that's Curtis LeMay talking.
And Thomas Powers, I think he's the one that said, when someone mentioned nuclear restraint or restraint is a restraint, our idea is to win, and if there's two Americans standing, and only one Russian standing, or two and no Russians standing, we win.
Yeah.
And that idea was parodied wonderfully, of course, in Dr. Strangelove, with George C. Scott, Buck Churchill, General Buck Churchill.
The scary thing about Dr. Strangelove in the movie is that it's not that far removed from reality.
Yeah, all you have to do is define victory way, way down, and then it works.
Hey, all we're talking about is words here, right?
Not actual death and pain.
Well, now, here's the thing that I just can't get over.
And that is the story of Reykjavik.
Of course, Norman Podhoretz and the rest of the neocons denounced Reagan.
Richard Perle, too.
Denounced Ronald Reagan because he even came close to making a deal with Mikhail Gorbachev at the height of the Cold War, or one of the heights of the Cold War, there in the late 1980s.
And, of course, the only deal breaker, at least according to the myth now, is that Reagan had been made to believe in the magic of the nuclear shield, the anti-missile system that would be effective enough to actually implement to protect America from Soviet attack.
And he had promised the American people he was going to build one of those.
And so he wouldn't break on that.
Gorbachev should have just said, fine, because he knew it was all a comic book anyway.
But he couldn't or didn't.
And so the deal fell apart.
But anyway, my point being, Reagan was ready to negotiate an end to the possession of all nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union still existing.
And as far as he knew at that time, it was going to continue to exist, at least for the medium term or something.
And now here we are 20 years out from the fall of the USSR.
Eastern Europe is all in NATO now.
And instead of being willing to negotiate an end to this mad policy, we act like Russia is still the USSR.
I mean, it's not like there's a new continent with a new power for us to pretend is a menace.
We've just still got our same old enemies because we've got nobody else to mess with.
Who do we need nukes for, the Syrians or something?
Well, that's what happened.
I think that's what happened to me personally when I observed in the 90s and into the 2000s the existence of NATO, despite the fact that the Warsaw Pact went the way of the Dodo instead of the Soviet Union.
And it expanded and it showed that NATO in much of the Cold War was largely a myth or a fake conflict stirred up, I think, by military industrial complexes, you know, I guess imperialists within the American government mechanisms that were used to be dirty.
You never could call them imperialists now.
Now they openly bragged about it 10 years ago, comparing themselves to the new Rome and all that stuff.
But yeah, it's one of these things that I think what happened was that during the war, World War II, you had an arsenal of democracy kind of morphed or developed into the military-industrial complex.
You had certain financial, political, corporate interests developed, and not to mention the fact that even before the war, the Council of Foreign Relations, I think it was the War and Peace Studies Program, calling for American dominance after the war.
This was 1939.
So this planning goes way back, and you can go down the rabbit hole on this stuff.
I'm not sure if there's one grand conspiracy for it, but you do have this idea of corporate political interest within the Anglo-American power structure planning for domination.
And it kind of coincided with the bankruptcy and collapse of the British Empire, and the Americans took up the imperial mantle.
And the English-speaking people, as Winston Churchill would say, would continue to dominate the world.
This isn't to say that the Soviet Union wasn't an evil empire, didn't oppress its people, but they never, I don't think they ever, ever really planned global domination.
There's no evidence for that.
Their leaders attributed it to Marxist rhetoric and all that stuff.
But if you look at what they did after the war, Stalin pursued a rather traditional Russian foreign policy, vis-à-vis Turkey.
And what he seized right after the war is pretty much what FDR had given him.
And that somehow became evidence of a plan to conquer Western Europe.
And if you look at it, that's a retrospect.
They were in no position to conquer Europe in 1946, 1947.
They just suffered grievously from the Nazi invasion and the war, which they helped start with Poland.
But then, if you look at it, traditionally, German and Russian aggression against Poland was a reversion back to what Europe had been for hundreds of years.
Poland had only been in existence for 20 years.
I love the Polish people.
I love, you know, the Polish people are great people, and I like their independence, but I don't think it necessitated British or American or French intervention.
And I think Patton Kennedy did a good job of writing about that in his book, The Unnecessary War.
That whole thing was sparked because of Britain's blank check to Poland.
I'm going back to World War II, but obviously Cold War developed out of World War II.
But if you look at the map of Europe after World War II, Stalin had pretty much taken what he had been ceded to him.
It was a inevitable result of the unconditional surrender policy of the U.S. government towards Germany.
So it was not like it was unforeseen.
One looks at it and looks at what was happening and must conclude that the war planners and people within the American power structure took it as an excuse to justify American presence or, you know, continued American presence or domination over Europe.
Right.
Well, and you think about what a dangerous game they were playing when it comes to the Cuban Missile Crisis and things like that.
And even as you say in this article, all the false alarms where, you know, somebody nukes somebody else's major city, even on a misunderstanding, they might just have to retaliate for their own domestic political concerns.
And then these kinds of things, you know, once you start throwing nukes around, these kinds of things, we could guess would tend to escalate, you know, if more than one side has them.
And I remember, and this is typical of what probably Republicans and Democrats of all stripes think, too.
But I remember 1998 when the Pakistanis and the Indians were testing their nukes, as though both sides didn't already know that they had them and that they worked.
But they're just, you know, playing this brinksmanship.
And they showed this Pakistani general on one of these CNNs or something saying, you tell those Indians that we're not afraid of them and they're atom bombs.
I'm just thinking, you know, you can really, really be strong in the arms, but still that's not going to do you much good against that nuke, you know.
Come on, guys.
Yeah, I don't – they're literally – you're talking about – it's almost like a – That's – but that's the thinking that goes into the policy.
It's like, well, we're not scared.
I mean, that's basically what they – that guy was a general, you know.
Yeah, well, that's what I said.
Again, to go back to Dr. Strange, though, that's a scene where Sergey Scott from the Park Service and recognizes what's happening.
He says, well, since those planes have been sent, here's our chance for a first strike to knock out our enemy.
We may get hit.
And the general and the president responds.
You're talking about the deaths of millions of people.
And the general responds, I'm not saying we won't get our hair mossed, you know.
And that's the attitude.
Well, I think it was Curtis O'Meara who was disappointed that the Cuban Missile Crisis ended the way it did, peacefully.
And because he wanted to attack Cuba.
And it turns out that the – I think it turns out now that the missiles were ready to launch.
So it would have – you know, the missiles would have been launched if Kennedy had attacked Cuba.
Yep.
And that's for Curtis O'Meara, I guess, a few million dead Americans, as opposed to wiping out the Soviet Union.
It was worth it.
Well, and that's the whole point.
It would have been the end of both nations, you know.
Any attack upon the United States by the Cubans will mean an attack on the U.S. by the USSR and we'll respond in kind, Kennedy said.
So he had taken his word on that one anyway.
And always when these guys promise to kill people by the hundreds of millions, you can believe that, you know.
So one thing that politicians are honest about is how horrible they can be.
And, again, I guess that moral threshold was crossed in World War II definitively.
You could see shades of it in the American Civil War and in World War I.
But I think World War II was the first war where the civilian casualties far outweighed the combatants.
And the thing is, you know, I really appreciate your Cold War revisionism too, and we don't get nearly enough of that, and I'm with you on it.
When I was a kid in the 80s, you could look at a globe, and at least there really was a USSR that dominated a third of the world, whatever their intentions, characterize them however you want, at least such a thing existed.
Now it's just plain old Russia again.
They don't have an offensive policy of any kind whatsoever, and we still got thousands of nukes 20 years later.
So where the hell does that leave us, you know?
What is this?
It's completely out of control.
You'd think they'd be down to just a couple of hundred, which is still enough to kill us all.
Nuclear winter and everything.
I think given the special interests that do exist, that are ensconced in the various bureaucracies, it's hard to, you know, again, I don't think there's any distinction between U.S. government and corporatism, the corporations and all that stuff, whether, you know, Wall Street, CIA, Pentagon, they're all interlocked.
And you can really get on the rabbit hole on that one, if you want.
And I don't know the answer to that.
It's a field of study that's worth studying.
I like to read about it.
But there are, I think, pieces that's a business.
You don't want to, you know, if you're making swords, you don't want to make prowl shares anymore.
And there's less money in it.
Given the financial military structure of the United States, it's based on sort of this warfare, I guess, warfare corporatism.
Sure.
Well, you know what, at Movies Found Online, people can watch The Merchants of Death, all about the proto-military industrial complex during World War I.
And that's just the taste of, you know, where we're headed for the rest of the century.
You know, and it was put together, I think, in 1930, something like that.
Yeah, and it goes into whether the issuance of bonds to pay for the war, the armies that ultimately collect on the bonds or enforce the currency.
You know, you really, there's no one explanation for it because there's so many interests involved in this.
But if you look at the countries that have been at the receiving end of U.S. military power in the past 12 years, these are countries that have challenged the petrodollar, the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency.
And if you challenge it to undermine the dollar, you undermine the ultimate financial power of the U.S. empire, the system we live under.
Yeah, and we'll inflate trillions of dollars to pay for wars to destroy you if you dare.
That'll get our work done.
And the misery that causes globally, the ripple effect of that is hard to track, which is what makes it politically hard to criticize in electoral politics because the economic understanding of the American people is abysmal.
Their historical knowledge is abysmal.
They're too busy working, raising their family to keep up with these things.
If you look at U.S. foreign policy, and you just casually mentioned whether it's the explosions of the sides of JSOC and all these clandestine operations all over the planet, how do you keep track of this stuff?
How does an American citizen who's supposed to vote in her government, vote as an elected representative to decide policy, make those decisions if they don't know what's going on?
And we've had this huge explosion of clandestine operations, whether it's the CIA or even the Pentagon.
I think JSOC has expanded from like 18,000 to like 80,000, and they're doing all types of daring-do secret operations all around the world.
We don't know what's going on.
They're stirring up all types of trouble, waging war in various parts of the world, low-grade war in various parts of the world, and we wonder why people do bad things to us, why they resent the U.S. government and U.S. policy.
But then we're supposed to admire this stuff because they make movies about this stuff.
What was that movie that recently came out last summer?
I didn't see it, but yeah, I think I know the one you're talking about where they use actual special forces guys instead of pretend special forces guys for the movie.
But all this is great.
This makes us feel good about being Americans.
We can feel tough.
We can watch war on our flat-screen TV set and think this is great.
We can't go to any sporting event anymore without some flyover and some military parade.
It's very uncomfortable for me because I disagree with all these policies, and I like baseball.
Well, that's the thing.
There's a lot splendid about our isolation over here in North America, and people ought to be able to live their lives if they want.
There's a lot of people in Texas, I promise you, who never leave their county their whole life long, and that's just fine, and they shouldn't have to care about what the hell is going on in Mali right now.
The only reason they have to care about what's going on in Mali right now is because it's their government's fault.
So they've got to take some time to take a little bit of responsibility to try to stop them anyway, it seems like.
I wouldn't make them, but I'd suggest it.
Yeah, when government assumes the responsibility to provide national security, whatever that means, that's a pretense for a huge boondoggle, right?
And they're in a position to define what is national security, and when you have a foreign policy established, and the experts have studied foreign policy, well, then I can, by and large, foreign policy experts aren't going to argue for an America first or a genuine foreign policy geared towards real interests or protecting the country, because doing that would cut into their budget, and there'd be a lot less jobs out there for foreign policy experts.
My field of study is foreign policy.
I'm with the government doing a lot of things overseas.
That way I can get all the lectures and write books about it.
They say there aren't foreign policy experts that speak the truth of power, and there's Ivan Eland, and I think he does good work on this, a couple people like Cato and stuff like that.
But, you know, who are they?
No one really listens to them.
Well, that's kind of what's cool about it, is how above board the corruption all is.
It's just a simple revolving door type thing.
Any number of public interest groups could identify it for you.
You know, the companies who are making money off of the governmental policies spend fractions of the amounts of money they make on lobbying to get those policies their way.
And then, of course, there's the bureaucrats themselves and their interest in what they want to do, and together, working together, these guys make sure that each other's paid and that their policies get implemented and everybody else in the country be damned, you know?
So it's not really a big secret or a secret handshake or a big kind of anything mysterious about it at all.
It's just a plain old conflict of interest, and it's all over the place in Washington, D.C.
Well, I think a few years ago there was an article about Lockheed and Bruce Jackson, and he happened to be on the Committee for the Expansion of NATO and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
Exactly.
All these programs.
Richard Cummings.
Bruce Jackson.
Peace.
And he goes, he's the head of business development.
And, of course, those policies increase the stock value of Lockheed Martin and many other companies.
Hey, we just had a great talk with Dina Razor from Truthout.
She's the founder of the Project on Government Oversight, and she reminded us all about how the M1A Abrams tank was politically guaranteed and set up by Donald Rumsfeld back in the Ford years as simply a bailout for Chrysler because they had made the terrible and useless and overly fuel-hungry engine, turbine engine system for the damn thing.
When everybody else's tank just runs on diesel, it works.
Go along with that.
But, no, Rumsfeld did this, and it was just a political thing for Chrysler.
Of course, it's a death trap if you try to take it to war in Iraq or Afghanistan.
They'll kill you in it.
It'll be your cause.
The procurement is often used to bail out corporations.
That happens a number of times where you just pretty much give a fat contract to a corporation, and that's often admitted.
They say, well, we may not need this weapons platform.
It may be antiquated.
But we need an industrial-based producing weapon for national security.
And that's when you have the creation of a permanent military industrial complex that I've never heard of in parallel speech.
It used to be that what happened was if there was a crisis, the industrial capacity was switched over to build for the crisis, and after the war it became permanent.
You get the kept on giving.
Well, you know, I went to Virginia to a Future Freedom Foundation conference back in 2008, and I remember on the cab ride to the hotel thinking, wow, hey, look, there's Raytheon, and there's General Dynamics, and there's Military Industrial Complex Incorporated right there all around me.
It seems like it would be a shameful, covert thing that they would have just a little office park back in the suburbs.
But, nope, they got big old giant towers bragging about it.
They're making the most money anybody in the country probably right now.
Yeah, the D.C. area is doing very well, so don't worry about me.
But it's like that.
It's the new Versailles, I guess, if I can wipe out the rest of the country, the rest of the world right now.
And the clock is ticking now.
I think the game for the music playing is about to stop because I don't know if the Chinese, the Germans, and whoever's buying our bombs.
Actually, I think the Fed's buying most of the bombs now, which I guess is a signal that it could be ending soon.
And I don't know how it will end, but it's hard to say how the politics will play out.
I'd like to think we had our chance when Ronald Paul ran.
He told the nation what needs to be done, and he still does.
We need to cut, slash everything.
We need something that the country needs to do.
We need a budget cut like it got after World War II.
Two-thirds of the federal budget was just slashed, and all the Keynesians said, oh no, what's going to happen?
We're going to return to the Great Depression, and we've got a great recovery because all those resources are going to be returned back to the civilian economy.
Not to mention all the liberalization that occurred in the U.S. at the time.
Right, for about four years until Truman diverted all the profits into more bombers and more nukes.
Well, Korea saved us.
More occupation of Europe.
What did he mean by that?
Yeah, well, and the French need a hand down in Indochina.
We need to go ahead and get that started, too.
All right, I'm sorry.
Look, we're all out of time.
We're right up against the wall.
I really appreciate your time.
It's been great, Tim.
Thanks, Scott.
Have a good night.
Good talking to you.
All right, everybody, that's Tim Kelly from the Future of Freedom Foundation and a correspondent for Radio America's special investigator.
