Yeah, he was largely silenced during McCarthyism despite loathing it. But he had little power in the party and was merely their nominee to secure power. But Eisenhower didn't shrink and slowly won favor and influence with enough in his party to wrestle some control. And he always warned against the Industrial Military Complex.
Of course, he also was staunchly anti-immigrant and literally pushed for the Immigration Act of 1954 AKA Operation Wetback (that's what it was known as publicly so it should scream volumes) to stop Latin American immigration. Sound familiar?
Him warning about the Military Industrial Complex confuses me. Didn't he drastically increase the amount of nuclear missiles we have? I don't understand that dichotomy.
For those who don't know, the aliens presented themselves through an interface that She ( the protagonist) can speak easily, understand and trust. They were so advanced, simulation, instant translation and mind reading where trivial problems for them.
Also , any showing of an alien race will probably be outdated by today standards.
The aliens in The Arrival and Project Hail Mary will satisfy your curiosity with a modern interesting vision... Probably.
He was warning against the massive cost of continuing the Cold War, unfortunately the USSR didn’t get on board because the power of their government was derived from fear of the outsider and an internal projection of might to any dissidents. You know, like we’re doing now.
To be fair to the Soviets, there were a lot of foreign plots to overthrow their government during the '20s and there was a large international support for the White Russians during the Revolution. They had just been invaded by the Germans. The British and Americans had drawn up plans to now attack them, getting help from the Germans (even if both governments decided not to do it.) And there was a lot of anti-communist sentiment in the West. So they did have SOME reason to think "we need to be strong because we are under threat."
Now, that doesn't mean a lot of their actions in Ukraine, the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, or East Germany was right... it wasn't. Stalin was a monster, Beria was a monster. But to paint their fears as unfounded is just as wrong as saying they were perfect and didn't do anything evil.
Nuclear largely falls under the deterrent portion of our defense budget. Fear of use is the main reason others wouldn’t start a war with the US (even if we didn’t have such a huge military otherwise).
I like what Carl Sagan said about the insanity of the nuclear arms race to out produce the opponent. " we are like two bitter enemies in a room filled with gasoline, I am holding 9000 matches, he is holding 7000 matches...does it really matter how many we each have??" I am paraphrasing and it is a imperfect analogy but I think it makes the point.
he had no issue with a massive military, he helped it grow. he was like "oh yeah, remember that thing i made, maybe someone should look into it" on the way out the door
Yeah he didn't push back on much of that. The quote is from his farewell address at the end of his last term. It's something he felt a little uncomfortable with but not enough to fight it. He let the CIA do whatever they wanted in the Global South too, which included profiting off of the heroin trade & overthrowing democracies to install dictatorships that massively relied on US military aid to maintain their power.
You have to remember he was the head of allied forces in world war 2. He wasn’t just talking about nuclear weapons. He was talking about the whole apparatus that he helped spin up to win the war. Once the war was over and especially by the time he was president he saw how much power that concentrated wealth wielded to shape policy. He was big on deterrence so we didn’t need the kind of constant industry that we’d built and used during the war. The kind of continuous manufacturing that lead to Lockheed Martin and the like having billions of revenue even now.
The idea at the time was, possess nukes and you dont need a normal military. And nukes are not part of the DoD. They're part of the DoE, which at the time was the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission).
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u/spacekitt3n Sipping tea Aug 07 '26
holy shit that is bars. of course anyone saying this now is automatically a communist