Word: rearmaments
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Johnson's "guns v. butter" explanation of what is wrong oversimplifies the case. Any rearmament program short of all-out mobilization runs into difficulties which were not fully appreciated a year ago. Half-speed rearmament is not half as hard as full-speed rearmament; it is twice as hard. Full mobilization would shut down vast sectors of civilian production, e.g., automobiles, automatically releasing materials, engineers, workers for defense production. Half-speed mobilization might be assumed to shut down half of the civilian automobile production, but this is far harder to do. In fact, the defense mobilizers did not even...
...doubt and faintheartedness settled across Western Europe. NATO was in trouble. Short of steel, coal and confidence, the U.S.'s Western allies were getting nervous about the mounting pressures of rearmament on their precarious economies. Britain, facing near-bankruptcy, reluctantly slowed down its rearmament program (see below). France, which seems to lack the moral purpose to save itself, could not make up its mind to ratify the Pleven (European army) plan, which the French themselves originated. The Benelux countries talked of pulling out of the European army: if Britain wouldn't join, if the French would neither fish...
...subdued look as he stepped up to the despatch box in the House of Commons last week. As Minister of Defense, the old warrior, whose name and appearance Britons instinctively associate with bulldog-ging it through, faced a painfully ironic task. He announced that Britain's $13.1 billion rearmament program, which the Labor government inaugurated, will have to be cut back sharply. "There will be a lag," said Churchill glumly. "We shall not succeed in spending the ?1,250 million [budgeted for] this year. Some of the program must necessarily roll forward into a future year...
Honorable Mention. "Told you so," jeered the Bevanites. Churchill could not deny it. Taunted by Rebel Nye Bevan, who insisted on quoting his own 1950 warnings that rearmament would wreck Britain's economy, Churchill sarcastically admitted: "I am giving Mr. Bevan an honorable mention in despatches, for having, by accident, perhaps not from the best of motives, happened to be right...
...inhumane, or even undesirable; it is just a certain type of policy to be used when it pays. Russia will go to war when the dozen isolated men in the Politburo decide that the time has arrived. Therefore, we must not for an instant slacken our own program of rearmament; but if her roads, railways and buildings, and what she is doing to them, are any guide, then Russia has every reason to remain at peace...