Message of the Sputniks

November 18, 1957

The immediate service of the Russian satellites has been to shake us out of complacency. Their immediate danger is that they may drive some of us into hysterical demands and panicky action. This danger is already evident in the widespread outcry that it is “economy” that betrayed us, and that our salvation lies in spending more in all directions.

So far as long-range missiles and new fuels are concerned, it is obvious that we should spend all we usefully can as fast as we can usefully spend it. But there is a limit to what we can accomplish now merely by spending. We have lost priceless time. And that time has not been lost only by the Eisenhower Administration.

When the Russians captured Peenemünde, the East German rocket-manufacturing center, in the second world war, they stripped it, took over every German scientist and technician that they could, and secretly ordered them to keep developing the rockets and extending their range. The fatal atomic and nuclear warheads, they stole from us. We, on our side, assumed that Russia was our great ally, sincerely seeking “peaceful coexistence,” and that whatever problems couldn’t be solved through the United Nations and foreign giveaways could be easily handled by “top level” conferences and agreements on a basis of mutual trust. On these assumptions we cut our defense expenditures from a level of $90 billion in the fiscal year 1945 to only $12 billion in 1948. Not until after the Korean war partially woke us up did we take an interest again in missiles—after we had given the Russians a six or seven years’ start. It is this appalling time handicap that we must now try to make up.

SQUANDERING NO CURE

It does not follow, unfortunately, that our progress will now be proportionate to our rate of spending, or limited only by what we spend. We cannot atone overnight for all our diplomatic and military mistakes of the last twelve years. Past false economies cannot be rectified by future squandering. Because we saved on the wrong things, it does not follow that it is wrong to save at all.

This is the point that seems to be missed by those who are now so loudly shouting for a great increase in overall spending. Suppose we have to spend now a few billions more a year in missile development? Does it follow that we must increase our total Federal budget by this sum? Or could we not take the amount out of other expenditures? Our nondefense spending alone now comes to something like $28 billion a year. Among items out of which a good deal of fat might be cut are some $4 billion for foreign aid, some $5 billion for veterans’ benefits, some $3.3 billion for “labor and welfare,” and some $5 billion for agriculture, mainly for price supports and subsidies for not producing.

SUBSIDIES AS USUAL

The political apostles of spending ought to know that they cannot get a quart out of a pint jug. They ought to know that out of a given volume of resources we can spend more in one direction only by saving more in another. But none of them have had the courage to suggest that the increased amounts they insist should be spent on defense should be taken from any of the welfare or subsidy programs with powerful pressure groups behind them. They want increased spending on missiles but spending-as-usual on everything else. It is only the taxpayers who earn the funds, not the groups they are compelled to subsidize, who are being asked to make sacrifices.

And if the apostles of increased spending do not talk about cutting nondefense expenditures, they are even more silent on the possibility of cutting expenditures on many of the “defense” items that are being rendered superfluous or obsolete by the revolutionary advances in missile warfare. As President Eisenhower rightly insisted in his television talk, “we cannot afford waste.” We will need better “selectivity in national expenditures of all kinds.”

In spite of the increased amounts that may be necessary for missile development it is still possible to cut the total Federal budget. It is still possible to remove from the present tax structure inequities and deterrents to investment and production, and so to increase our national strength.