The Profits of Fear

Here's an excellent read for all you conspiracy folks out there in ATS land. Boing Boing released an exclusive article called The Profits of Fear yesterday. The 10,000 word article is an interview with Sam Cohen, the inventor of the neutron bomb, and dives deep in to topics like how the people in charge love keeping us all in fear because it keeps them in power. In this article you will read how the neutron bomb was rejected because it didn't cost enough to feed the defense contractors, and it didn't damage buildings. Is the object of war to get rid of the enemy or to get rid of their buildings and towns? The army tends to want to do both.


He also brings up some very good points such as the acts that religious extremist have carried out, aren't nearly as devastating as automobile accidents, and nothing like the threat we faced in the cold war. Never-the-less, defense contractors and the congressmen that they have in their pockets love to hype the fear of the enemy because it's a huge profit to them.

Don't let the topic of nuclear warfare throw you off. I started this thread in War on Terrorism instead of weaponry for a reason. You'll see as soon as you read it. I promise you'll love this article as much as I did. It's very informative and it really draws you in. The article is available in PDF, Text, or Palm doc.

Here's a few juicy selections from The Profits of Fear

Senator Thomas Dodd liked the neutron bomb mainly because he hated communism. He presented a memo endorsing the bomb but John F. Kennedy wasn’t interested. When Dodd persisted, he reminded Cohen that although the fight against communism was important, “the first duty of a politician is to be elected.”

Elected representatives on committees that established policy at the highest level were motivated by base self-interest, expediency, and petty rivalries. They were not only ignorant, but uninterested in educating themselves. Given a choice between saving public money and spending it, they preferred to spend it.

George Orwell suggested in his novel 1984 that a totalitarian state would benefit most from a war which seems threatening yet is never sufficiently dangerous to defeat the nation and can be prolonged almost indefinitely. An ongoing conflict of this type provides an outlet for destructive energy and justifies material sacrifices while discouraging dissent.

I saw George Bush Junior standing on an aircraft carrier, dressed like an Air Force pilot, shouting “Bring it on!” And unlike his father, he didn’t look depressed at all, even though he was ordering thousands of young soldiers into a conflict that was quite capable of killing them, while threatening to undo all the prosperity that we had created for ourselves during our freedom from fear.

My only question is why this fear-based charade still works, and I guess the answer is that the fear makes us stupid enough to allow it to work.

[edit on 17-8-2005 by dbates]

I prefer the Cobalt bomb to the neutron bomb.

Here are the properties of the cobalt bomb:

A "salted" nuclear weapon is reminiscent of fission-fusion-fission weapons, but instead of a fissionable jacket around the secondary stage fusion fuel, a non-fissionable blanket of a specially chosen salting isotope is used (cobalt-59 in the case of the cobalt bomb). This blanket captures the escaping fusion neutrons to breed a radioactive isotope that maximizes the fallout hazard from the weapon rather than generating additional explosive force (and dangerous fission fallout) from fast fission of U-238.
Variable fallout effects can be obtained by using different salting isotopes. Gold has been proposed for short-term fallout (days), tantalum and zinc for fallout of intermediate duration (months), and cobalt for long term contamination (years). To be useful for salting, the parent isotopes must be abundant in the natural element, and the neutron-bred radioactive product must be a strong emitter of penetrating gamma rays.

Cobalt Bomb

Such a weapon would make two cities in Saudi Arabia unvisitable by pilgrims for decades to centuries...could be a far more useful tool in the war on terror than the neutron bomb which was attractive in a hypothetical war against the Soviets where clearing out a city to later occupy and use could be helpful.

Such a weapon obviously would be more civilized than large-scale hydrogen bombs, and would also be more humane than conventional bombs, because it would create an all-or-nothing, live-or-die scenario in which no one would be wounded.

Humane and moral genocide? How very interesting.

I remember Cohen in his study, as amiably irascible as I expected and had hoped he would be. I have an image of him lurking in a room of many windows, with a lot of dark varnished wood. I think of him on a La-Z-Boy recliner, scowling at CNN. He was ironic, funny, fatalistic, but still fundamentally an idealist and very much a patriot.

Looks like the religious extremists and patriots have a lot in common. Both have been abused as children in some way and have an unnatural urge to kill a lot of people.

I remember a scene from a movie Under Siege 2 where a scientist stole a particle beam weapon and was demanding 1 billion dollar ransom or he'll blow up Pentagon.
Admiral Bates asked CIA guy why did they let this kind of lunatic work on such a project and he replied:

Admiral, sane people don't build that kind of weapons.

BTW a good read. Makes you wonder if there is a need for mandatory psych evaluation every 6 months for all top people in administration and their advisors.