Revisiting the Seventies: The Third World Comes of Age
Abstract
During the 1970s, most young American officers were focused on our sad evacuation from Vietnam, the frightening advances in Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile warheads, or the political cannibalism then consuming leaders in Washington. They thus missed the important stories. A quarter century later, it might be well to revisit those years. Hidden in plain view lay the rise, funding, and technical enablement of certain Third World leaders who now seek nuclear arms and who may soon bring about the detonation of a nuclear device within the West. Such a catastrophe is far more likely today than the Mutual Assured Destruction planned during the Cold War. Where did these people come from, and how complicit were American leaders in their rise? As the 1960s drew to a close, kings and emirs friendly to the West ruled most of the Middle East. India was thought to be a peaceful and nonaligned-although Soviet-friendly-backwater. A glut of cheap oil was on the market. Producing states and independent drillers had to rely on the major oil companies to refine and market their product using price wars, advertising, glassware, and customer service as enticements. Nuclear weapons were solely the province of the Big Five (China, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States), who were the victors of World War II and were enshrined as the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. But then the cradles of early civilization began to rock. As it was, a grimly anti-American radical Islamic government came to power, again with the assistance of an inattentive American President. And once again, the chaos in the wake of that transition triggered another three-fold increase in the price of oil. As the 1970s ended, the stage was set for the nuclear pandemic to come. Since then, the United States has been marked as "the enemy" in Arab eyes, the once-moribund Chinese giant has revived, and nuclear weapons have been introduced into the Third World.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2008
- Accession Number
- ADA516583
Entities
People
- Danny B. Stillman
- Thomas C. Reed
Organizations
- National Defense University