Paul Warnke

In fact, they hadn't even resigned.

But the war had stopped because they had gotten to the president, Clifford and Paul Warnke and others had changed his mind, and he had, uh, removed himself from the race and et cetera, what I've told you.

So the war was essentially over.

And now there was a great preoccupation then with not describing the war as evil and indeed with not learning wrong lessons from the war.

The question we're addressing tonight is, that I want to address tonight is, can we get away without a kind of concept of evil in the operational sense that I described it earlier, the meaning for what we ought to do and the questions we ought to ask and the way we ought to feel? Can the human species, let's say, survive without that? How well have we gotten away without it? How well has our system worked without that sense of obligation and challenge implied in that kind of perception of something that is not just a lesser evil, but is evil? At the time that Huntington spoke in mid-1968, actually in March '68, when they all thought that the good and able men had ended the war by changing the president's mind to get out of the race, we had dropped one point five million tons of bombs in Indochina.

That's as much as we had dropped in all of World War II in Europe.

But in the next ten months, between March of '68 and the time that Nixon came into office in January of '69, the exact period when Clifford was the Secretary of Defense and Paul Warnke was under him, and they were changing the president's mind, the United States dropped another one point seven million tons of bombs, doubling in that next ten months, while we ended the war, the amount they dropped earlier.

So that the time, time Nixon came into office to end the war in January of '69, Johnson had dropped three point two million tons of bombs, fifty percent more than all of World War II.

But it, it, it was not really a case of the United States would build a thing and the Soviets would have to build a thing, and then we'd build a thing, and they'd build a thing, and there, there would just be like, where will all this wickedness end? Um, you know, there was, there was a quantitative aspect to it, but there was a lot of qualitative aspect to the military competition.

And it was, you know, um, uh, uh, God bless, uh, Paul Warnke, the elder, for, for being, um, vivid in his ability to create metaphors, but, um, it was never apes on a treadmill, right? Um, there was a real possibility for one side or the other to gain advantage, and it varied.

Again, in the space domain, you know, Sputnik 1957, America was like, "Oh my God, we're, they're gonna crush us." Uh, and, you know, by 1980, we, we the United States were dominating the military and intelligence uses of space, despite like Streets, Country Mile, whatever your preferred, um, uh, term of art is.

Nuclear weapons, different.