e launched against "international communism."
The same lack of evidence for a communist threat was reported wherever intelligence agencies were operative. So, if there was little or no communist, or Soviet, threat to the Middle East, "Black" Africa, North Africa, the Far East, South Asia, and South-eastern Asia, historian Mark Curtis writes, "there were not many areas left where communism or the Soviet Union could be supposed to be on the march."
The U.S. government’s own Bureau of the Budget refuted the alarmist thesis put forward in the NSC68 report cited above, noting in May 1950 that "NSC68 is based on the assumption that the military power of the USSR and its satellites is increasing in relation to that of the U.S. and its allies…it is hard to accept a conclusion that the USSR is approaching a straight-out military superiority over us when, for example, (1) our Air Force is vastly superior qualitatively, is greatly superior numerically in bombers, trained crews and other facilities necessary for offensive warfare; (2) our supply of fission bombs is much greater than that of the USSR, as is our thermonuclear potential; (3) our Navy is so much stronger than that of the USSR that they should not be mentioned in the same breath; (4) the economic health and military potential of our allies is, with our help, growing daily; and (5) while we have treaties of alliance with and are furnishing arms to countries bordering the USSR, the USSR has none with countries within thousands of miles from us."
The threat of a Soviet Union bent on military confrontation with the West was a giant hoax with several advantages. One benefit was that it enabled governments to secure vast public subsidy of high-tech industry through massive defense spending programs. Big business had everything to gain from responding to a terrible threat, just as big business now stands to lose massively from responding to the threat of global warming: "To a remarkable degree, containment has been the product, not so much of what the Russians have done, or of what has happened elsewhere in the world, but of internal forces operating within the United States….What is surprising is the primacy that has been accorded economic considerations in shaping strategies of containment, to the exclusion of other considerations."
Mark Curtis concludes that "Crucially, the immediate beneficiaries of the rearmament programme were to be the large corporations within the military-defense sector of the economy. With guaranteed industrial production and a guaranteed market (the Department of Defense) they were able to achieve high levels of output and reap large profits."
The apparent contradiction between the public hysteria and the private admission that no threat existed can also be explained, Curtis argues, by a further advantage of a giant "red scare": its utility for hiding the fact that "Britain’s (and the USA’s) <@145>economic interests’ in the Third World in the post-war period have been synonymous with the systematic exploitation and impoverishment of local populations."
Since the end of the cold war, the propaganda system has searched long and hard for new threats which, unlike global warming, justify vast public subsidies to high-tech industry. Though strenuous attempts have been made, the world appears to have developed terror fatigue for international drug dealers, "New Hitlers" of the Middle East, single mothers, immigrants, and other demons. Spirits may have been partially lifted by a recent report in the London Sunday Times: "The Pentagon," Roger Dobson reports, "is to spend $500m developing a new defence system against cruise missiles. The decision, taken in the past fortnight, is to counter warnings that will be made this week by leading military experts who claim that high-tech cruise missiles costing as little as <@163>500,000 will soon become a threat to western nations."
Terry Taylor, assistant director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies based in London, says "In Iraq they fitted out a pilotless plane and were planning to put biological w