many, because it shut down the inefficient industries of the east. Genuine action to combat global warming has been minimal. Indicatively, the British Energy Conservation Trust set up to take action has received only a tenth of its planned funding. Energy minister, Tim Eggar, cites accidental pollution cuts as justification for opposing other measures. Eileen Clausen, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for environmental issues, admitted the obvious truth that governments were "in disarray" over climate change. There was "no clear policy direction," and "little thought" had been given to implementing and enforcing any policies adopted.
If the world has done little to date in the face of all this, what are the prospects for change? Will the world continue to play Russian Roulette with the climate? An idea of the sort of economic and political forces arrayed against change can be gained by considering the response of those same forces to an earlier "threat."
@HEAD 1 = In Deepest Peril
@PAR AFTERJ<@191>UB = In April 1950, the U.S. National Security Council Directive 68 (NSC68) stated that "The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose absolute authority over the rest of the world." The citizens of the United States, the report went on, "stand in their deepest peril," being threatened with the "destruction not only of this Republic but of civilisation itself." (Mark Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power)
U.S. hysteria about Soviet plans for world conquest was matched in Britain. For David Watt, former Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Anglo-American special relationship is "conditioned on Britain’s remaining the single most effective adjutant in the task of containing the Soviet Union and its allies."
It is significant that whereas there is now overwhelming scientific evidence for the reality of global warming, there was always plenty of evidence to show that the Soviet threat was a fantasy. In reality, few state planners believed that the Soviets intended to confront the West militarily. George Kennan, head of U.S. State Department planning, could not have been clearer when he argued in 1947 that "it is not Russian military power which is threatening us, it is Russian political power."
This is a theme that runs through the state documentary record. Vietnam, for example, is considered the defining event of the cold war: a collision between communist expansion in Southeast Asia and the U.S. determination to stop it. In reality, the CIA found that evidence of "Kremlin-directed conspiracy" could be found "in virtually all countries except Vietnam," which appeared to be "an anomaly." (Noam Chomsky, Year 501.) According to Major Patti of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the forerunner of the CIA), stationed in Hanoi in 1945, the Vietnamese at that time were possessed of "an extraordinary pro-American spirit that was everywhere at the birth of Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam." (John Pilger, Heroes) The Vietnamese, Patti reports, "didn’t regard America as an imperial power. They thought we were different from the Europeans and they were desperate not to be associated with international communism, not with the Chinese or Russians, but with us in America."
Ho Chi Minh’s repeated and impassioned appeals (as many as 12) to President Roosevelt and other senior U.S. officials for U.S. support for Vietnamese independence received no written reply<@151>only the subsequent delivery of some 3.9 million tons of bombs on the South Vietnamese "ally" alone.
Elsewhere, in 1954, referring to the "Communist threat" in Guatemala, U.S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, thanked "the loyal citizens of Guatemala who, in the face of terrorism and violence and against what seemed insuperable odds, had the courage and the will to eliminate the traitorous tools of foreign despots." (Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti)
In the real world: "No shred of evidence ever turned up after the [Guatemalan] coup establishing a secret tie to the Soviet