Life, or Death? « The Burning Platform

Life, or Death?



Guest Post by Robert Gore



On July 16, 1945, a plutonium implosion atomic bomb was detonated in the desert north of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Within a month, a uranium-based and a plutonium-based atomic bomb were detonated above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. Atomic fission, and later fusion, became the basis for the most deadly arsenal ever assembled, giving the US government the power to destroy the world several times over, making it history’s most powerful institution. The Soviet Union’s development of its own potentially earth-destroying nuclear arsenal in the 1950s challenged US power. Per Lord Acton’s famous dictum, absolute power produced absolute corruption on both sides of the Cold War.



Their leaders saw the world in terms of an amoral chess match. Other nations’ governments were pawns in their strategies for global domination and individual lives were of no consequence. Intelligence agencies rose to preeminence, employing sabotage, deception, propaganda, political manipulation, revolution, regime change, and assassination in foreign countries, supposedly excused by the imperatives of fighting the other side’s nefarious designs. Although there was a fair amount of playing one side against the other, brutally repressive autocrats willing to ostensibly align with either side received diplomatic, financial, intelligence, and military support from their benefactors.



Vietnam fully displayed the immoral depths the US government had plumbed. It engaged in regime change, assassination, deception of the American people, drug running, secret bombing of countries with which the US was not at war, false flag terrorism, torture, and war crimes—including rape and murder—against civilians. None of this was unique to Vietnam, either before or after. Estimates of the total dead range from 1.3 to 3.8 million. After spending trillions (in today’s dollars) and with 58,000 military deaths and 153,000 wounded, US forces left Vietnam having accomplished none of their objectives (its remaining partisans still refuse to use the word “defeat”). South Vietnam was eventually conquered by North Vietnam.



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