All right, everybody, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, 92.7 FM, Chaos Radio in Austin, Texas.
Streaming live worldwide on the Internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
Our next guest today is William J. Astore.
He's a retired lieutenant colonel, has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School.
He teaches history at the Pennsylvania College of Technology and is the author of the book Hindenburg, Icon of German Militarism.
He wrote an article recently for Tom Dispatch.
That's TomDispatch.com and also in Tom Engelhardt's column archives at Antiwar.com slash Engelhardt.
It's called Leaving Cheyenne Mountain, How I Learned to Start Worrying and Loathe the Bomb.
Welcome to the show, Bill.
Thank you, Scott.
It's nice to be here.
It's very good to have you here and what an interesting article.
I guess you bring it up in the article in there somewhere and it's worth pointing out if only to get people's mind adjusted to the subject.
You used to work at Cheyenne Mountain there in Colorado, which is the setting from that old Matthew Broderick movie War Games where the computer gets too smart and tries to start a nuclear war with the Russians and so forth, the big blast doors and the tunnel and all that.
We can picture at least that much, right?
Right.
In fact, I remember seeing the movie War Games.
I think I was about 20 years old.
I have to say that the Hollywood set they put together for the movie War Games was actually more exciting than the computers we worked with at Cheyenne Mountain.
I was there at Cheyenne Mountain from 1985 to 1988.
At the time, we were still using old IBM mainframes and our screens were nowhere near as colorful or exciting as that movie.
But it was a very interesting experience to work in Cheyenne Mountain because it is a unique site for sure.
Now, you say in the article that there's 15 buildings inside the mountain, 15 separate buildings inside the mountain.
How does that work?
Yeah.
Well, we built this back in the early 1960s.
Cheyenne Mountain is located in Colorado Springs.
It's part of the Front Range probably.
Most people know Pike's Peak.
Pike's Peak is about 14,000 feet.
Cheyenne Mountain is to the south of that at about 10,000 feet or so.
Back in the 1960s, they tunneled out a space inside of that mountain.
It took more than three years just to excavate all the granite and all the material.
Then inside the mountain, they built 15 separate buildings.
Each building is mounted on roughly 50 to 100 springs.
The idea being that the 2,000 feet of granite would protect the mountain from a Soviet nuclear attack.
The springs would help the buildings to sway without collapsing during a nuclear strike.
Then as I mentioned in the article for Tom Dispatch, there are lots of other interesting things in there.
There are the blast doors, the freshwater reservoirs, enough food and resources to survive for several months.
It's kind of the ultimate bomb shelter.
You say in the article that it may have been effective against a nuclear attack in say the early 1960s, but that later advances in Russian missile technology meant that they could drop two or three hydrogen bombs right on y'all's head there and the mountain wouldn't do you a bit of good at that point.
That's right, Scott.
You probably recall that in the early 1960s, we were just beginning to build ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The early missiles were not that accurate.
The biggest threat back then were manned bombers as kind of shown in the famous movie Dr. Strangelove where you have B-52s going out and getting into Soviet airspace and dropping basically gravity bombs.
Those are not obviously as accurate as missiles.
So when they built Cheyenne Mountain, they were thinking, well, the main threat we have to protect against is a bomb drop near the mountain.
But by the 1970s, the Soviets, just as we had developed, they developed more accurate ICBMs that could target much more accurately our facilities.
So by the time I was working in Cheyenne Mountain, instead of the ultimate bomb shelter, it had maybe become the ultimate target.
We knew that if the Soviets ever did attack, Cheyenne Mountain would be one of the first, if not the first target that they would attack because it was a major command center, and we probably would not survive.
Right, yeah, that's what I was just thinking.
All you guys are doing is drawing a bunch of fire onto the people of Colorado Springs.
Well, that's right.
I mean, Colorado Springs is a military town.
You've got the Air Force Academy to the north.
You've got Fort Carson, an Army base to the south.
You've got Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, and then they've built a new space base.
I think it's Schriever Air Force Base is a little bit further to the east.
So there's a lot of military facilities there.
The military, you know, we used to call that a target-rich environment.
Yeah, target-rich indeed.
And now, so was this the center of the Strategic Air Command?
This was the main target?
Well, I mean, it would be one of the main targets.
I mean, actually Strategic Air Command was, I think, the headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, which is I think currently instead of Strategic Air Command now, or SAC, it's now called STRATCOM or Strategic Command.
Now that's where George Bush fled in cowardly terror on the day of the September 11th attacks, right?
I'm not sure I'd put it quite that way, but, yeah, I think that's where he went.
Okay, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, Cheyenne Mountain was the headquarters of, not of Strategic Air Command, which was really Strategic Air Command was in charge of basically of retaliation, if you will.
It was in charge of our nuclear ICBMs, our B-52 nuclear bombers, and, of course, the Navy had its own Poseidon and Trident submarines, you know, that would fire its own submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and that was all part of the nuclear triad, if you will.
Cheyenne Mountain was our early warning center.
You know, we had, there was the Missile Warning Center.
When I worked there, it was known as the Missile Warning Center, and that was probably the most important one.
That was in charge of, you know, we have satellites in space, the Defense Support Program satellites, which used to be, you know, top secret, but now everyone knows about them, and they detect missile launches.
They can detect the heat of a missile launch, and through, you know, by using those satellites, Cheyenne Mountain was responsible for taking in all that data and, you know, figuring out whether or not the attack was real or not and then getting the message out to SAC and other facilities that, yes, there's an attack in progress, and you need to, you know, we need to respond within 30 minutes, because if we don't, if it's a real attack, all of our assets will be destroyed.
You know, that was the great fear.
And so, but although there was that part of Cheyenne Mountain, there were other more mundane parts.
You know, to be honest, I didn't work in the Missile Warning Center.
I worked with the people in, it was called, back then it was called the Space Surveillance Center, and our task was to keep track of all the objects orbiting the Earth.
You know, that wasn't quite as, it didn't have the same terror associated with it as working in the Missile Warning Center for obvious reasons.
Well, do you know enough about the early warning systems to have a lot of confidence in them or not?
I wouldn't, no, I wouldn't call myself an expert.
You know, I know a little bit about them.
You know, I used to talk to people who worked in the Missile Warning Center, but actually I did not have the security clearance to be privy to all of what was involved there.
And even if I did, you know, I couldn't talk about that stuff even today, because, you know, some of it is still classified.
Well, would you even be allowed, if you did have one, would you be allowed to say what your opinion of it was, whether you had confidence that they can always discern between a real nuclear threat and a false alarm?
Right, well, you know, as I mentioned in my article, there were a couple of false alarms, and those were disturbing.
Now, fortunately, disturbing to say the least.
You know, fortunately, we caught the false alarms fairly quickly, but even the fact that they happened certainly raised a lot of questions back then about the hair-trigger nature of nuclear warfare.
And that was really the scary part about it was that, you know, with the whole mad policy of mutual assured destruction, things would happen so quickly that in many cases we didn't really have enough time to think through what was happening.
So, you know, those false alarms back in 1979 and 1980, and one of them was due to an operator loading a training tape without telling the right people.
You know, he loaded a training tape that simulated a full nuclear attack, but, you know, other people didn't know that there was a training tape being loaded, and so messages went out that we were under attack.
And for, you know, the first five minutes or so of that, you know, there were people who really believed within strategic air command that we were under attack.
And so there were crews that were, you know, air crews scrambled out to get on board their airplanes.
Engines were being warmed up.
I mean, these planes were carrying nuclear bombs.
And then in 1980, there was another computer error, this time due to a hardware fault.
And once again, in June of 1980, there was, you know, a couple of times when we thought we were, as it turns out, we thought falsely that we were under attack.
And on the one hand, the system didn't work, and I guess on the other hand, thank God, there were enough checks in the system so that we figured out that we really weren't under an attack.
And you may know, Scott, that I think a few years ago, the Soviet system, or I guess now we call it the Russian system, I think there was some kind of a space launch that triggered their system into thinking that the Soviet Union was under attack, or Russia, you know, Russia was under attack.
And fortunately, once again, they were able to catch the mistake.
But, I mean, these kinds of mistakes really highlight the dangers of the whole system of, you know, the mutual assured destruction and the hair-trigger nature of the nuclear deterrence that we operated under in the 1970s and 1980s.
Well, and even today, we have tens of thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at each other, us and the Russians.
Well, that's true.
I mean, we are making an effort, not enough of an effort, but we have been making an effort over the last few years to decrease the number of missiles and warheads.
I think we're down to about 20,000 now.
You know, it used to be that we had, I think, something like, oh, I think it was more like 50 or 60,000 warheads.
I know, to your listeners, it sounds crazy.
You know, whether it's 50,000 or 20,000, it's still far too many.
And, obviously, part of what I'm trying to argue in my piece for Tom Dispatch was that we should be working toward a nuclear-free world.
We should be working, you know, we haven't used nuclear weapons in combat since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and there's a good reason for that.
It's because, you know, nuclear weapons really are so huge and so devastating that there's not really that great of a reason to have them from a military perspective.
You know, thinking of that famous book, thinking about the unthinkable, well, it is unthinkable.
Therefore, in a way, we shouldn't think about it.
We should work to eliminate nuclear weapons so we don't have to think about it.
Well, that's such an important point, too, about how obsolete these things are.
I mean, there's really no good purpose for a hydrogen bomb other than killing a city full of men, women, and children.
I mean, it's not like we're going to have the Red Army pouring across the Fold of Gap sometime soon here.
Right, right.
No, I agree.
Yeah, and now back on the accidents there, there's a couple of things.
I was going to make some kind of stupid joke about, you know, war games with Matthew Broderick based on a true story.
The computer's playing chess and we all almost die over it or tic-tac-toe or something is what it sounds like loading a training tape and everybody starts warming up their engines on their bombers.
But also I wanted to point out that I read a news story about the Russian false alarm, I believe the same one you referred to there, where the only reason that we didn't all die that day was because this one officer, a pretty low-level officer, I believe, too, in the Russian military just refused to do his job.
He saw the alert and thought, you know what, my gut tells me that something's going on here and that I should not pass this on to my superiors who are much more likely to react all crazy and do something stupid.
I'm just going to sit on this for a minute and see what happens.
Right.
And that's the only reason that everybody, at least in the northern hemisphere, wasn't blown off the face of the earth that day.
Well, that could be true, Scott.
I hadn't read that.
But that point to the importance of keeping the human beings in the loop, that you have somebody there who's not going to panic, who's going to make sure that whatever the computers are telling him actually reflects reality.
Because all of us work with computers and they're only as good as we program them to be.
And computers are so complex that there are often errors that we can't predict.
I mean, I worked in Cheyenne Mountain, as I said, from 1985 to 1988.
And our computer system in the Space Surveillance Center had constant problems.
I remember being a duty officer and being on call, having to carry a phone around with me.
And I was in contact 24-7.
This was before cell phones, obviously.
And sometimes the computer system would fail.
This was when software was still fairly unstable.
And we just had to work with the instability of the system.
So you really needed that human presence.
And that's one of the reasons, as I mentioned in my piece, that Cheyenne Mountain, what I always remember about it was there was always at least a flag-rank officer, meaning at least a Brigadier General on duty.
In other words, someone there who is, at least in theory, someone there who is very experienced, very highly trained, someone who won't panic, somebody who will confirm as best he or she could before taking any incredibly rash action that could really threaten our Earth, obviously.
It's interesting about the technology.
It almost seems like as the computers get better, it could put us actually even in more danger because the confidence level in the computers is so much higher, that the principle of garbage in, garbage out kind of gets put aside because we sort of assume that nobody put any garbage in.
It's good code.
Right.
Well, it's interesting, too, that nowadays it seems like instead of some kind of an accident, nowadays a lot of our movies seem to be premised on the idea that our computers are becoming so smart that they end up taking over with artificial intelligence.
And then instead of humans nuking other humans, it's now our machines wiping us out.
And, of course, the most famous movie with this theme of the Terminator series, the idea of our artificial intelligence, so-called Skynet, becomes activated and decides that we human beings are getting in the machines' way and the best thing for the machines to do is to get rid of us.
That's sort of the new theme that you've seen emerge in the last ten years or so.
Yeah, well, really that one came out about 20 years ago.
That was right around the same time as War Games, the first Terminator.
That's not true.
You're right.
And this is the stuff I grew up on, right?
The idea that the computers could at some point just realize, wow, we really only have one enemy.
That's the humans who might try to unplug us one day.
And, of course, there's the Matrix.
It's kind of based on that premise, too.
Right.
The computers winning out over humanity.
And I don't even know how implausible that is.
I mean, it makes a ridiculous science fiction movie on one hand.
But then again, if a computer really was that smart, I could see it deciding that.
Right.
Well, I hope not.
But you probably grew up like I did.
I remember seeing 2001 A Space Odyssey with the computer HAL and the fact that HAL turns on its creators as well.
So I think movies like that remind us, in a way, well, they kind of reflect our unease of our technology.
The fact that technology is so complex nowadays that it does behave unpredictably.
And in some ways almost with human-like unpredictability.
And it is definitely a cause for some concern.
Something else you bring up in this article.
Again, it's Leaving Cheyenne Mountain, How I Learned to Start Worrying and Loathe the Bomb by William Astori and Tom Englehart.
It's at tomdispatch.com and at antiwar.com slash Englehart.
One of the things you bring up in here is the encapsulated man, the Air Force and Army and Navy and whoever officers walking around this place, formerly including yourself, so wrapped up in professionalism and so wrapped up in the mundane details of carrying out their tasks that it seems like it sort of escaped you guys that this is absolute insanity manifest sitting around planning for the destruction of the human race.
Yeah.
No, you're right about that.
And I've often thought about that.
Obviously now, this is more than 20 years ago for me.
And now I teach history at Penn College.
Looking back more than 20 years ago, I try to think, well, what was I thinking back then?
And I think when you're in the military or maybe almost even in the business world or any job, you get focused on the mission.
You're told what your mission is.
I mean, obviously we did face a Soviet threat.
Some of it, it was very real in some ways, and some of it was kind of driven by our own fears of communism.
But I was a low-ranking military officer, and my job was to do my job.
And when I was working in Cheyenne Mountain, I never really thought, to be honest, I never really thought a lot about what we were doing.
I thought this is the mission, this is what I have to do.
I have to make sure that I get the information to the right person.
I have to make sure the sensors are running correctly.
I have to make sure that we test the software, et cetera, et cetera.
I wasn't thinking, well, today might be the day that Cheyenne Mountain disappears.
Today might be the day when nuclear war begins.
And I think that's kind of a natural thing that a lot of your listeners will probably understand because obviously if I went to work every day thinking, well, today is the day that Cheyenne Mountain might get nuked, I probably couldn't do my job.
You know where I'm going with that.
Sure.
Might not show up at all.
Right.
Yeah, well, but at the same time, I mean, this is something not unique to Cheyenne Mountain.
This is something that happens, as you said, in pretty much everybody's daily life.
You've got to figure out ways to filter out the things that are going to prevent you from getting what you have to get done done.
I'm reminded of Daniel Ellsberg's book, Secrets, a Memoir of the Pentagon Papers or Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
Right.
I read his book.
That's a good book.
And he talks a lot about this professionalism kind of taking over and displacing humanity among the people in the executive branch.
Particularly, he talks about the at least, what, hundreds and hundreds, thousands of people who knew from 1961 or at least 1964 that there's no way that the Vietnam War can be won, that this policy is absolutely broken.
I guess McNamara himself later admitted that he knew at least as early as 64 that this was absolutely hopeless.
And yet everybody just kept their mouth shut and everybody only says what they know their boss wants to hear them say.
And the hope is that someday they'll get a little bit higher and make a little bit more difference or something.
But meanwhile, the American people's sons are being sent off to die in a needless war for another, what, 15 years after that or something?
Another 10 years?
Yeah, it is.
Yeah.
I know.
I know.
I hear what you're saying.
And I thought about this myself.
And a lot of it is, you know, there's some groupthink working there.
There's some conformity working there.
Sometimes people sort of suppress their own dissent because they rationalize.
They think, well, I'd rather not resign or I'd rather not protest or speak out.
I can effect change.
You know, I can do more within the system.
But the longer they stay within the system, the more they get co-opted by the system.
Yeah, and the less they end up wanting to change it anyway.
Right.
Yeah.
And of course, we're seeing a little of that, if not a lot of that, with the current situation in Iraq today.
I mean, I wrote another piece for Tom Engelhardt a few months ago where I quoted a friend of mine.
I had a friend who served with the Coalition Provisional Authority, the CPA, in the Green Zone, you know, back in 2004.
And he wrote to me at the time.
He said, you know, even before the so-called transition of sovereignty by Bremer to the Iraqi people that occurred back in 2004, he was writing to me before that saying that this is a mess, that we see civil war coming.
We've really screwed up a lot of things here.
The Iraqi people have lost faith in us.
You know, a lot of us sort of mid-level and low-level people here in the Green Zone, we really see disaster coming.
And of course, they were right.
But you really didn't hear a lot about that in 2004.
You know, people were – you know, it's sort of like, almost like we really think the worst is going to happen here.
But everyone crossed their fingers.
And if we don't protest too loudly, maybe it'll turn out okay.
And unfortunately, it hasn't.
It's really been a tragedy, you know, not just for us, but for the Iraqi people.
Yeah.
Now, tell me about – you bring up Reykjavik, where Reagan and Gorbachev almost struck a deal to get rid of all the nukes, at least in American and Russian hands.
Most people don't even know that story at all.
You tell that story and say, at the same time, you were participating in a nuclear war game while they were negotiating.
Yeah, not – I don't think it was at the same time.
But I think it was the same year.
But no, but you make an excellent point.
At Reykjavik, you know, Reagan and Gorbachev came very close to striking a deal to gradually to eliminate all superpower nuclear weapons.
But unfortunately, I think the sticking point was, you know, Gorbachev wanted President Reagan to give up the whole Star Wars or, you know, the Strategic Defense Initiative.
And Reagan refused to compromise on that, and therefore, you know, the deal fell through.
Which is funny because when you think about – you know, you talk about these little green print on black screen DOS computers.
Like they were going to actually be able to make some sort of effective Star Wars defense system back in 1983 when they can't even make one now.
Yeah.
86, whichever.
Yeah.
You're right, though.
I mean, I still – and if you'll allow me to reminisce a bit, I remember that in 1986.
I remember that war game because I had never actually, you know, sat through – in the command center, I'd never sat through a scenario when we – you know, where we exercised the idea of being attacked.
And I remember, you know, sitting or – and actually, I think I was standing, and there was another guy who was – I think an enlisted guy who was sitting at one of the consoles as the scenario tape played out.
And again, our consoles were old.
They were monochromatic green, but you could see the missile tracks coming from, you know, the Soviet Union terminating at American cities.
And I remember he sort of said – you know, everyone around, as I mentioned in the piece, you know, we all grew kind of reflective.
It wasn't funny.
And I just remember him saying something like, wow, you know, just imagine if this was real.
You know, Chicago was just hit.
Just imagine if this was real.
And it grew really quiet in the room because even though we just saw missile tracks appear over American cities, even that was sobering.
And if something that simple was sobering, just, you know, imagining a real attack is just incredibly scary, obviously.
And I still remember that day.
I can't remember a lot of days, you know, that well, but that was a sobering day for me.
Well, I'm sorry because this is sort of irrelevant, but I keep thinking of it.
It's from the book Rumsfeld by Andrew Coburn, where he talks about how every time they did one of these war games, and I guess in the Clinton years, they would have – or maybe in the Bush one years, they would bring in Rumsfeld to be the quote-unquote president in the war game, and how no matter what, he escalated it to complete nuclear holocaust, launch every single missile at every single target, every time with no exceptions.
Even when there were numerous ways that he could have de-escalated and, you know, stopped it at a few cities lost or something, he would always escalate it to kill them all.
This is the guy who was our Secretary of Defense for a while there.
Yeah, yeah, that is a scary thought to be sure, and I think, you know, there may be some people like that.
You know, I actually got an interesting email from a guy in response to my piece where he said, you know, he had often had thoughts – I think he was a bomber pilot, actually – and he said, you know, that same kind of professionalism where he rationalized in his mind if he was going to take off and attack the Soviet Union, basically the way he rationalized it is, well, they attacked us, therefore we are retaliating, and at least some of them will die in response to their attack.
And that's the way he rationalized it in his mind.
But I've also met people who, well, you know, in strategic air command you were trained to fight a nuclear war if it came to that, and the idea was that somehow we would win it.
And, you know, that's part of the – that's why people are rightly scared by things like mutually assured destruction, because it's really hard to envision any kind of scenario where anyone wins a nuclear war.
Yeah, well, yeah, it's even scarier the idea that some of these guys don't believe in mutually assured destruction anymore and believe in first strike dominance and the ability to take out any enemy on the first move and cancel out the threat of retaliation, which it seems like they're trying to work towards with the Russians right now, encircling them with all the so-called missile defenses and so forth.
Right, right.
And that is something to be concerned about.
I mean, when the Russians say that they don't like the fact that we're deploying this ballistic missile defense system, they're not necessarily blowing smoke.
They're not necessarily just spewing propaganda.
I mean, there's a long history of mutual distrust there, obviously, and from their perspective, from a sort of former Soviet Union perspective, you know, there is that – I don't know if it's a fear, but at least a concern that maybe they're being encircled.
And if we can put ourselves in their shoes, you know, we might share similar concerns if we switch places with them.
You also talk about in your article how, well, the Soviet Union is gone, and I guess we mentioned this earlier in the interview.
There's really no purpose for these weapons, and, you know, we might as well just get rid of them.
I mean, it seems to me like there's no reason that any nation-state in the world, whether, you know, the EU or China or Russia or anybody, France or anybody who could actually deliver nuclear weapons here, seems to me like they would never have any real reason to do so unless our government started it, which is more likely at this point.
And, you know, even if they were the Russians and they wanted to conquer us and turn the world all red again or whatever, there's no use in, you know, polluting North America with the, you know, remains of a bunch of hydrogen bomb detonations, and you can't even steal the country at that point.
It seems like we could just unilaterally disarm and say, hey, world, look, we don't have nukes.
What excuse do you have now?
Right, right.
Well, I've actually thought a little bit about this, Scott.
I think our goal should be, over time, and I don't know what the right time is, you know, maybe over the next 15 to 20 years, you know, to eliminate our nuclear arsenal as well as, you know, to work with the Russians, to work with the Chinese, the French and other countries that have nuclear arsenals.
When you think about it, you know, the kind of scenarios where somehow some kind of terrorist organization is able to sneak a dirty bomb, or some kind of terrorist organization is able to steal a nuke, or some other country like Iran, for example, somehow develops a nuke and then uses one or two against us, even without nuclear weapons.
Our conventional weapons are so devastating.
Our conventional, our non-nuclear weapons are so devastating that even if we didn't have a nuclear deterrent, the ability of our military to respond in a non-nuclear way would be deterrent enough, in my mind.
Absolutely.
I mean, does anybody doubt that the U.S. Air Force could turn any capital city in the world to a pile of steaming rubble, even without nukes?
I don't doubt it for a minute.
Right.
I mean, come on, we're talking about the biggest, you know, collection of air power ever, anywhere.
And they've got what, the daisy cutters and the Moab bombs and all these bombs that might as well be nukes, they're so damn big.
Well, you know, part of what, you know, part of what the Air Force, and I guess probably not just our Air Force, but, you know, part of what the Air Force has tried to do is to develop, you know, more and more powerful conventional weapons, you know, so that we won't have to use nuclear weapons.
Of course, I guess it doesn't really matter if you're on the receiving end.
It doesn't make you feel any better.
Hey, that was a conventional bomb, rather than a nuclear bomb.
But you know what I mean.
Well, yeah, because the consequences of using a nuke, just in terms of, you know, the consciousness of people in the world is, if you use the smallest nuke you had, and it was the same size as a Moab or some, I'm making that up, I have no idea, but if you did that, the Moab doesn't get near as much attention without the atoms being split and so forth.
Right.
Well, it's funny.
I know you know this, but, you know, we seem to have developed a separate category of weapons of mass destruction.
So that, okay, so that we can all decide together that weapons of mass destruction are bad.
So nuclear weapons are bad, you know, biological weapons are bad, and chemical weapons are bad.
But as, you know, somebody once joked, and I don't think it was me, you know, probably the biggest weapon of mass destruction of the last 50 years or so has been the AK-47, you know, the Kalashnikov rifle.
It's probably killed more people than nuclear weapons and chemical and biological.
And it's probably American conventional bombs delivered from the air, probably second place, you know, I guess, after prisons, you know, if you count, you know, the killing of, you know, in war, not governments killing their own people, but battles between different groups.
Yeah.
You know, I think, you know, certainly, certainly the 9-11 attack was something that scared all of us.
And rightly so.
I mean, it was a horrible attack.
But, you know, in some ways, our current administration obviously overreacted and put into plan, put into work plans that they had been already hatching, I would say.
You know, why is it that we're attacked by Al-Qaeda, we're attacked by an organization that has sanctuary in Afghanistan, you know, most of the members of Al-Qaeda I think were Saudi, but we're going to respond to this threat by attacking Iraq.
You know, and there was no Al-Qaeda in Iraq, as your listeners know, there was no Al-Qaeda in Iraq until after we attacked Iraq.
So, you know, hopefully we will return to being a normal country in normal times, like Gene Kirkpatrick said, you know, way back in the first Bush administration.
Yeah, you know, I don't usually like to quote Franklin Roosevelt too much, or not in ways where I'm approving of what he's saying anyway.
But the whole thing about we have nothing to fear but fear itself, that, you know, everybody, you know, get your stiff upper lip on and be a man and we can get through this, sure is a different message than be afraid, be very afraid.
There's a terrorist, you know, hiding under every rock, you know, like the communists of old.
And that, you know, we have to have this permanent war and this permanent emergency because if we call off our emergency at any moment and let our guard down, we'll have another September 11th or worse.
And at some point we have to get past the fear, I think, in order to, you know, even get to the point where we can have a rational argument about how we're supposed to proceed from here.
No, I agree, Scott.
All right, well, hey, I really appreciate your time, everybody.
Professor William Astore, he's a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School.
He teaches history at the Pennsylvania College of Technology and is the author of Hindenburg, Icon of German Militarism.
Again, check out his article, Leaving Cheyenne Mountain, How I Learned to Start Worrying and Loathe the Bomb, at TomDispatch.com and at AntiWar.com slash Engelhardt.
Thanks very much for your time today, Bill.
Okay, thanks for having me, Scott.
