Fruits of the Cold War: debt and pollution.

• Author: Howell, Llewellyn D.

REMEMBER THE COLD WAR? The U.S., it is said, won that war, one that is not understood fully or appreciated by many--including politicians who have hitched themselves to victory's bandwagon.

One of the problems in understanding it is that observers and analysts have fallen too easily into using the analogy of a hot war. Just as the Vietnam conflict for years mistakenly was portrayed as being won or lost based on body counts, the Cold War was regarded the same way. In the latter case, the bodies were live ones. More bodies meant more deterrence, though tanks and ships and nuclear warheads were counted, too. In the end, it was argued, the West "out-deterred" the East with a bigger body count.

Wars are understood better, however, in terms of the damage that is done by them. Military conflicts leave battlefields strewn with dead, buildings leveled, and fields burned. The Cold War left debt and its progeny--ethnic conflict, pollution, political instability, and ideological chaos. On the American side, annual interest payments on the U.S. national debt rival the entire national budget under which Pres. Lyndon Johnson launched the Vietnam War. In the Cold War, not Star Wars, but the financing of Star Wars, drove the U.S.S.R. to its knees. The battles of the Cold War were financial and economic. They were fought by banks, businesses, and tax agencies, not soldiers, machines, or laser beams. The West--i.e., the U.S.--outfinanced the U.S.S.R. and the communist world in buying technology, quality production, and social progress. Today, the battlefield is littered with the aftermath of that war--towering debt, on both sides.

The West won not by the size of its debt, but by the nature of that debt. The U.S. financed its battles in the Cold War by borrowing against the future, constraining, but not really limiting, social spending, and restricting choices and options for decades to come.

The Eastern bloc financed its Cold War battles the only way it could--by taking shortcuts on every imaginable count, saving a ruble here (don't bother to process that chemical waste) and a ruble there (never mind that safety device) so as to stockpile another nuclear weapon that could hit the Pentagon yet again. Should we develop cheap fuel? Of course, and never mind the particulate count. Now, the Soviet side of the battlefield is strewn with those savings that came at the expense of environmental protection, and the damage clearly is immense, bordering on catastrophic.

...