The Cold War Lie That Built the Nuclear Weapons Industry – Paul Jay

Michael Smith
This is Law and Disorder.

Maria Hall
Today on Law and Disorder, we welcome back award-winning journalist Paul Jay, who is working on a new documentary titled How to Stop a Nuclear War, based on extensive interviews with Daniel Ellsberg.

Jim Lafferty
It connects the dots from the economics and mindset that drove the Cold War to the precarious state of nuclear policy today, including the recent expiration of the Start Treaty.

Maria Hall
Stay with us.

Michael Smith
I’m a New York City attorney and author, Michael Stephen Smith.

Jim Lafferty
I’m Jim Lafferty, a decades-long political activist and once the National Director of the National Lawyers’ Guild.

Maria Hall
I’m Maria Hall, a Los Angeles Civil Rights Lawyer. Two weeks ago, we spoke with award-winning journalist and filmmaker Paul Jay about his upcoming documentary, How to Stop a Nuclear War. Scheduled for release in the Fall of 2027, the film draws on in-depth interviews with Daniel Ellsberg and is narrated by Emma Thompson. It examines just how close humanity has come to nuclear catastrophe and why Ellsberg’s decades-long warnings about nuclear policy and power remain urgently relevant today.

We ran out of time in that conversation, so we’re very glad to welcome Paul Jay back to the show to pick up where we left off. Today, we will continue our discussion about the ongoing nuclear threat, how it’s shaped by political and corporate interests, and what the public needs to understand in order to push for meaningful change.

In addition to his work as a journalist and filmmaker, Paul Jay is the founder of theAnalysis.news. For decades, he has investigated the inner workings of government, corporate power, and military policy, bringing together deep investigative reporting with a storyteller’s clarity, helping audiences make sense of complex and often hidden forces that shape our world. Paul Jay, welcome back to Law and Disorder.

Paul Jay
Happy to be back.

Maria Hall
Great. Well, before we get into questions, on February 5th, that signaled the end of the New Start Treaty. Can you just very briefly, before we get into our other questions, let listeners know what that means?

Paul Jay
Well, in some ways, it’s more symbolic than anything. The New Start Treaty, which limited the number of nuclear weapons Russia and the United States had, was more or less effective in reducing the numbers. It is actually more importantly involved inspections, ongoing discussions, and negotiations as to what was going on with each side’s nuclear weapons, but that ended already anyway.

In 2020, during the pandemic, the Russians said they didn’t want any more inspections, and the Americans said, okay. Then, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, most of the process broke down. They weren’t inspecting, and they weren’t even talking about it. So today is somewhat more symbolic because the treaty had more or less run out of steam, although both sides claimed they were keeping to the numbers. As Dan Ellsberg often said, “It isn’t so much about the numbers.” It’s not irrelevant. But even at the “lower numbers,” we still face existential threats, especially from miscalculation and accidents. The worst part of the treaty ending is the stopping of the process itself. They don’t even talk to each other, and that’s very dangerous.

Maria Hall
I wanted to start back at the beginning, just after World War II. What were the economic factors that led the U.S. to expand its nuclear weapons complex during the Cold War?

Paul Jay
Well, with this kind of question, I always have to decide where to start. Where’s the beginning? And yes, no question, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sort of introduced the nuclear era, but if you’re talking about the economic roots, you have to go back, and I’ll go back a little further.

There are several issues playing out when you start looking at why we’re allowing this massive nuclear infrastructure that could end all life on Earth. Why does it still exist? And you need to go back, especially if you’re talking about the economic factors, and there are several at play here. So let’s start, “at the beginning.”

The beginning is the American elites, and of course, elites throughout the world (mostly), they hate socialism. That didn’t begin with the Cold War in 1945, ’46, and ’47. It didn’t even begin with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, or the hatred of socialism in the United States, in particular. It begins on the record in the first speech in Congress in 1848, I’m going back, a rant against socialism and denouncing this attack on private property. What was the private property under attack? Slaves.

So it goes back, the Red Scare, the first big Red Scare in the United States was 1871, at the time of the Paris Commune, when the workers of Paris took over and developed the most democratic form of socialist state you could imagine. Well, that was front-page news all over the United States, and they were screaming blue murder that these European Socialists are coming to the United States and they’re going to attack our private property.

This attack on the basic form of economic organization of the United States, and of course, in the rest of the capitalist world, was one of the most critical factors driving everything. Of course, we had a Civil War. It turned out that wage slavery was more effective than slavery. Then the United States conquers the West and wages genocide against native people, and then plunders and attacks in the most brutal colonial way in the Philippines, throughout Latin America, Cuba, Guatemala, China, you name it.

So this rise of U.S. imperialism, which is a combination of a plantation culture based on slavery, stealing land from the indigenous people, and then not only plundering the world, but finding out, boy, isn’t war profiteering great? And this is where, in the First World War, J. P. Morgan and others found out, boy, look at the money to be made out of war.

I’m telling this story because when people talk about the Manhattan Project, it usually starts with, at the beginning is the Manhattan Project. But it isn’t the beginning. There’s an America that exists in which a Manhattan Project is born into.

The question with the Manhattan Project is, and why I go into this backstory, is why keep building a bomb when you know there’s no German bomb? Because that was the whole rationale for the Manhattan Project. At least that’s what the scientists were being told, and later what the American public was told. Of course, the whole thing was a secret until the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The building of the bomb was really an extension of what was going on throughout the late 19th century and what they learned from the First World War. War makes a lot of money, and if you have a nuclear bomb, not only does it create a whole massive nuclear weapons industry, where you talk about war profiteering, but it also helps you establish a geopolitical regime in the world after World War II. This is one piece of it.

There’s another piece of it. Nothing important in history happens for one reason. Even in a personal relationship, if you break up with your partner, nobody breaks up for one reason. There are always lots of reasons, and imagine something as complicated as important historical events like the nuclear era, the Cold War, and such.

But the other important piece of this was that the economic crisis of the 1930s, which was a crisis of massive hyper-speculation from Wall Street. It was a crisis of overproduction. You can’t keep lowering people’s wages and then produce like mad, especially as the Industrial Revolution is giving rise to enormous productive capacity. You can’t produce like mad and lower wages like mad and think everything is going to be hunky-dory.

So, of course, we have a crash for various reasons, but one of the reasons is the lack of purchasing power. The New Deal helped plug the hole a little bit. It helped mitigate the crisis, at least to the extent that it subdued the rise of a really powerful socialist workers’ movement in the United States, which was certainly one of the objectives of the New Deal. Also, I would credit FDR. I think he actually really did want to avoid fascism in the United States. The New Deal model was also a way to avoid that, but it didn’t really deal with it.

By 1938, ’39, unemployment was rising again. It was back up at like 20-25% levels. The spending that really dealt with the crisis of the ’30s was World War II. It was massive government spending at the level of that war that’s what created full employment. That’s what plugged the hole that was inherent in the way capitalism worked.

Anyway, jump ahead. The war ends. There are now two things that have happened. One, you’ve had this massive government spending, creating a kind of purchasing power that sort of put off the day of what had happened during the ’30s, and you had a massive aerospace industry that had developed. Lockheed, Bell Aircraft, all the big companies, and DuPont became much bigger. All the major companies, Standard Oil, everything took an enormous upswing in scale because they had guaranteed government contracts, and they made a killing.

I mean, one of the untold stories of World War II is the same kind of war profiteering that became a scandal after World War I; the same thing was going on in World War II. So they have to deal with these issues. What is the solution here?

So they come up with the problem: how do we maintain government spending, save the aerospace industry, and keep economic stimulus going at sort of World War II levels as much as you can? But how do you justify it all if you don’t have an enemy? Because the other alternative is to go back to the New Deal, but at a much bigger, deeper, broader scale. Enormous government stimulus, enormous direct government employment programs, and public ownership. In other words, you actually start strengthening the socialistic characteristics of the American economy, and there always were some, because that’s part of how capitalism develops. Even a public post office is an example of it.

They did not want to go back, they being the preponderance of the elites. The person who would have tried to go back would have been Vice President Henry Wallace, who wanted to go back during World War II. He called it… There were two contending visions of the world. Henry Luce, the guy, I think it was Time magazine or Look, I can’t remember, but he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and their vision of the world was going to be the American Century.

Henry Wallace had an alternative vision, and the same thing in 1942, he announced it at a filmed address. He calls it, “It’s going to be the Century of the Common Man,” and that will be a global New Deal. In other words, a kind of social democratic form of capitalism that would not only deal with the crisis in the U.S. but would even extend abroad.

Well, honestly, I think he was dreaming. That isn’t how capitalism works, and the reality of capitalism asserted itself. Yes, Wallace was useful to rally the working class during the war, but before the war ended, they got rid of him. And who did they replace him with, of course, Harry Truman, who’s easy to manipulate.

The short of it all is they invent an existential enemy. They claim the Soviet Union is another form of Hitler. In school, it’s always the two forms of totalitarianism, Hitler and the Soviet Union, but they weren’t the same. This is what started to turn Daniel Ellsberg’s head around. Yes, Stalinism was extremely repressive in the United States. You could say a form of totalitarianism, but a very specific one, not the same as a capitalist Hitlerite one.

The most important difference was that the Soviet Union under Stalin, primarily on the whole, almost without exception, did not have a militarist external agenda. It was not a threat, and they invented one, they being the Truman administration and the Council on Foreign Relations. They literally consciously lied. The reason I say consciously is because every year from ’46 on, the CIA was producing documents titled, Is the Soviet Union a threat to Western Europe and the United States? And every year, the CIA was telling the Truman administration, “They’re not a threat. They’re in a defensive posture. They’re afraid of us.” So they needed an existential enemy to justify a massive military budget.

Biden increased the nuclear budget by about 20% by his last year. Trump has already increased it perhaps as much as another 25%. We’re already in the midst of an unmitigated arms race, and people talk about that as if it’s the sad consequence of the policy of deterrence. But it’s actually the objective of deterrence. If what you really wanted was just deterrence, you’d have a few nuclear submarines, and that would be it. Because the current nuclear sub fleet- there are 14 nuclear subs between them- can wipe out every single city in Russia and China. So what do you need more than that if there’s such a thing, supposedly as deterrence? Deterrence isn’t the objective. The arms race is the objective, and we spend more and more and more.

So if you look at the current budget on nukes alone, it would pay for something like 200,000 teachers, just to put it in some perspective. It’s all a boondoggle. It does nothing. What Trump’s added to the picture is the so-called Golden Dome, which is supposed to be this missile defense shield that will protect the United States from incoming nuclear missiles. It’s a total fraud.

They say, hitting incoming ICBMs with an anti-ballistic missile is like hitting a bullet with a bullet. The difference between Trump’s Golden Dome and Reagan’s SDI, they’re saying, is artificial intelligence. Now, with AI, you can hit a bullet with a bullet. Even if it’s true, and there’s absolutely no evidence, there’s not a single test that shows AI can hit this bullet with a bullet. But let’s say it could. It can’t distinguish between a bullet and the bullshit, like the decoys.

One of the things they don’t tell people is a basic principle of physics. Once the ICBM hits space, say the Russians or Chinese launch an ICBM, once it’s in space, it isn’t propelled by rockets anymore because space doesn’t have any resistance. It just flies. It may have a little bit of rocketry just for some final targeting, but basically, if you attach to the capsule a whack of decoys, whether they’re balloons or anything, shrapnel or things that look like nuclear warheads, they will fly at the same speed because that’s what happens in space. There is no way AI is going to distinguish between what’s an actual incoming weapon and what is perhaps a thousand decoys. So the whole thing is utter BS.

The only thing more dangerous than this system not working at all is that it works a little, that maybe it could stop something, which scares the heck out of the Russians and the Chinese, which means they have to develop hypersonic weapons, and they have to develop more ways to get around this system. This is why deterrence theory and the supposed defense shield theory, actually, the real objective is the arms race. Everybody knows these measures only give rise to countermeasures, which is all part of the boondoggle profit-making.

So your tax money is funding boondoggles, but nobody wants to talk about it because there’s this taboo about nuclear weapons. “Oh, you can’t talk about it, or you’re a traitor, or you’re soft on communism, or you’re soft on Russia, or soft on China.” Decades and decades of this Cold War lying, Cold War economics, Cold War exaggeration of the enemy, and Cold War paranoia and psychosis that they’re out to get us.

Who the hell wants to commit suicide? It’s ridiculous. None of the leaders in any of the nuclear powers wants to commit suicide, and everybody knows that starting a nuclear war is precisely that. So the real danger is nuclear war by miscalculation and accident. Nobody’s discussing it, and some very concrete things we could do to reduce the risk of that are not even on the agenda. Nobody pays any attention to it. There are some real things we could be doing.

Maria Hall
If you’re just tuning in, this is Law and Disorder. I’m Maria Hall here with my co-host, Jim Lafferty. We’re speaking with Paul Jay, award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and founder of theAnalysis.news, and he’s working on a new documentary called How to Stop a Nuclear War.

Well, Paul, both the U.S. and the USSR were famous for their Cold War propaganda in controlling the media and artists in order to promote their own agendas and, of course, demonize the other country. What role did the government propaganda play in Daniel Ellsberg’s decision to leak the Pentagon Papers in 1971?

Paul Jay
Well, he came to realize that the Vietnam War was based on a lie. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, when supposedly the North Vietnamese had attacked an American ship, was a lie. An even bigger lie, he came to realize, was that the American government, Lyndon Johnson, the president, knew very early on that this war was unwinnable, that the Vietnamese people had been fighting against the French. They fought against Japanese occupation. Again, they fought against the French. They fought against… that this was a National Liberation Movement, and it wasn’t going to give up. It didn’t matter what the Americans did. The vast popular opinion was against American intervention and against the puppet regimes in South Vietnam. In fact, I think in the Pentagon Papers, it’s acknowledged in one of the studies that if there had been an election after World War to, Hồ Chí Minh would have won the election. So he came to realize the extent to which this was based on a lie.

The second thing was that he came to realize, and I’m not so sure it’s part of the Pentagon Papers, but it’s one of the most important big lies of the Vietnam War, that the Cold War mythology, the basic story, was that the Soviet Union was going to use its military might to control the world. That’s the underlying lie of the Cold War. NSC-68, which I mentioned, is this thing Nitze wrote, which became, essentially, after 1950, the official doctrine of American foreign policy. “The Soviet Union is going to militarily expand and take over the world.”

But hang on, the Vietnam War didn’t fit that mold at all. Everybody who knew anything about it knew this was an indigenous National Liberation Movement. It was not an extension of Soviet militarism. It wasn’t an extension of the Chinese militarism. It had nothing to do with Soviet military expansion. This was a people who didn’t want to be dominated by the United States or its puppets.

This is a pattern that was actually established in the war nobody really wants to talk about, and that’s the Korean War. They call it the Forgotten War. The short of it is, the Korean War, you had this guy, Rhee, who the Americans installed as president after the Japanese surrendered and left South Korea. They install this guy, Rhee, who arrives there on an American plane, becomes president, and installs a vicious dictatorship, killing left-wingers, socialists, communists, thousands and thousands. People’s Democratic committees that spontaneously arose after the Japanese lost were slaughtered in South Korea. This is the guy the U.S. intervenes in a civil war, almost identical to what happened in Vietnam.

So what happened in Vietnam followed the pattern of the Korean War, which essentially was that the Soviet military threat was exaggerated or even invented, and it was used to install pro-American governments when possible through elections and when not, install dictators through coups or even direct military intervention like Vietnam. This was part of the model of how you establish what the Council on Foreign Relations called the Grand Area.

The fundamental thesis plan was not to allow any countries that are not already part of the Soviet sphere to enter the Soviet sphere. That was mission one coming out of World War Two. The objective was, by any means necessary, whether it’s manipulating elections in Italy, whether it’s funding the fascists in Greece, invading and getting involved in a civil war in Korea or a civil war in Vietnam, or backing the fascists in Indonesia who killed something like a million people inside of about four or five weeks, installing perhaps as many as 200 dictators between 1945 and 1990.

Jim Lafferty
Paul, finally, given all of that you’ve told us about, can you remind our listeners of some very concrete steps that people can take, I mean, individually and collectively, to protect ourselves and our world from this ongoing threat of nuclear war?

Paul Jay
Well, I know when people listen to this analysis, it sounds overwhelming. Some people, I’m sure, your audience knows a lot of what I’ve been saying, but a lot of ordinary people don’t. It starts to really challenge people’s identity as being American, so it’s kind of hard to listen to sometimes. But most importantly, people feel like it’s overwhelming. What can we do? If there’s a nuclear war, we’re all dead anyway. It’s like an all-or-nothing proposition, but it isn’t.

I don’t think there’s any leadership or any class or elites in any nuclear power that wants to commit suicide. I don’t think any of them are going to deliberately start a nuclear war. Let’s put it this way, it’s highly unlikely. In extreme circumstances, you could imagine the use of a tactical nuke. But so far, we haven’t seen it. The Americans didn’t, even though they contemplated it. They didn’t use it in Korea, and they didn’t use it in Vietnam. The Russians didn’t use it in Afghanistan. So right now, that kind of deliberate, conscious use, but what about accidental use? Miscalculation and introducing AI makes it even more dangerous. So, here are some things we can demand to reduce the risk of nuclear war.

Number one, no Golden Dome. People should understand why a boondoggle phony anti-ballistic missile system is not just a boondoggle and a waste of money. It’s dangerous because it makes other countries like Russia and China think, “What if it could take out some of our second-strike capacity. What if it means the U.S. could now launch a successful first strike?” So it destabilizes things.

Number two, ICBMs and launch on warning are either just sitting ducks because you either use them or lose them. So you see something coming in, and either you launch the ICBMs, or they get taken out. Well, how do you know what’s coming in is real? What if it’s geese or radar bouncing off the moon, which has happened before? What if it’s AI hallucinating? There’s only one way to know something is real, and that’s to let it hit. Why wouldn’t you let it hit? Because you can’t stop it anyway. So you might as well wait and see if it’s real, because if you fire your ICBMs and it turns out it’s not real, you’ve just guaranteed the other side is going to send something real back at you.

Number three, no first strike and no threat of first strike. All it does is create a crisis situation, again, where something can be mistaken for a real first strike and start a nuclear war.

No testing. One of the ways to freeze the modernization that’s taking place, not just in the United States, but in Russia and in China, is the whole idea that if you can’t test, it’s hard to modernize. So, no testing, which helps create a nuclear freeze.

Very important, no AI and nuclear command and control. It’s obvious how dangerous that is, but it’s proceeding at an enormous speed. If you look at the influence of Silicon Valley on the Trump administration, you can see one of the reasons why. All these AI CEOs are kissing Trump’s bum, and the reason is that the Golden Dome is going to be the biggest cash cow they’ve ever seen.

Negotiate a new arms treaty. As we mentioned a few days ago, the New Start Treaty ended. But it’s not just not having the treaty; the fact that they’re not even talking to each other is extremely dangerous. Sam Nunn made a very good point that just the negotiations themselves help to reduce risk.

Finally, Congress should get some damn backbone and finally take on the question of sole authority. If Congress is the only American entity that has the right to declare war, how does the president have the right to launch a nuclear war? It’s completely unconstitutional, and nobody wants to talk about it.

So there are some very concrete things to be done. People should educate themselves and start talking about it. When you vote, make your candidates who themselves have to get… Even the progressive candidates don’t know most of what I’m saying. So we need to start a national conversation about how to reduce the risk of nuclear war.

Maria Hall
Well, Paul Jay, thank you so much for being with us today. Can you remind listeners how they can learn more about your upcoming film, How to Stop a Nuclear War?

Paul Jay
Yeah, go to the website, which is just a place to get on the emailing list. It’s stop-nuclear-war.org, and you get on the mailing list. We’ll have some material up there you can take a look at, but mostly, if you’re on the email list, we’ll brief you on the progress of the film. If you want to help with the film, let us know.

Maria Hall
Well, again, it was our pleasure. Thank you so much for being with us, Paul Jay, award-winning journalist and filmmaker.

Jim Lafferty
Thank you, Paul.

Paul Jay
Thank you very much.

Maria Hall
Visit us online at lawanddisorder.org for archived programs and links to many of the issues we discuss.

• Michael Smith - Law and Disorder
• Maria Hill - Law and Disorder
• Jim Lafferty - Law and Disorder
• Paul Jay - Director of How to Stop a Nuclear War