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chapter one A World Apart? On May 28, 1987, a “bombshell” launched from Western Europe flew by the windows of the Kremlin and landed near Moscow’s Red Square. This bombshell was not an errant Soviet, U.S., or North Atlantic Treaty Organization test missile, but a young West German pilot named Mathias Rust flying a small Cessna airplane that had evaded the vaunted surveillance systems of the Soviet Air Defense Forces. Like the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, however, the Rust incident further stoked perceptions that Soviet military might was hardly as invincible as claimed. As William Odom, former lieutenant general in the U.S. Army and director of the National Security Agency, writes, this bombshell “catalyzed a palpable change in public attitudes toward the military, replacing the services’ iconlike status in the Soviet popular mind with a sense of betrayal for all the economic sacrifices made to it.”1 Adds Anatolii Chernyaev, special assistant to President Mikhail Gorbachev, the Rust incident symbolized a deeper, more enduring “moral rot” in the military stemming from the Communist Party’s penchant for turning the armed forces into a “closed zone, beyond any criticism.”2 Once the Cold War ended, all could see that the Soviet military’s “warrior culture ” left more than moral rot in its wake. Coining the term ecocide to convey the massive environmental and natural resources (ENR) devastation wrought by the Soviet military, two eminent observers write that “the armed forces’ role as polluter was almost as secret as most of their weapons development program. Only a few officers were even assigned to monitor the army’s treatment of nature.” They add that the military had an “ingrained view of environmental protection as an unimportant, secondary business, and [were] convinced that shortcomings . . . would [only] be punished by a mild reprimand.”3 Was this the logical consequence of an ossified, resource-strapped, and morally bankrupt totalitarian state? Hardly, if the experience of the Soviet Union’s principal democratic adversary, the United States, is any guide. Wrought was a sorry toxic legacy from the Cold War that, depending on what cleanup standards are applied, will cost U.S. taxpayers between $330 and $430 billion to clean up between now and 2070.4 Nor should anyone have been surprised. As the noted military historian, John Keegan, writes, “War is wholly unlike diplomacy or politics because it must be fought by men whose values and skills are not those of politicians or diplomats. They are those of a world apart, a very ancient world, 2 Chapter One which exists in parallel with the everyday world but does not belong to it. . . . The culture of the warrior can never be that of civilization itself.”5 Until late in the Cold War, most U.S. citizens placed great faith in their own military’s culture of the warrior. They wanted the services to do whatever it took to counteract Soviet aggression and ask questions later. When they did ask questions, however, they too came to appreciate Cicero’s encomium, Inter arma silent leges: In a time of war, the law falls silent.6 Apparent, too, was the source of the Pentagon’s toxic legacy. Metastasizing within the U.S. military’s own “closed zone, beyond any criticism” during the Cold War was a warrior culture of sovereignty , secrecy, and sinecure that thoroughly marginalized ENR values. In terms of sovereignty, military leaders argued that they, not regulators, knew best how to reconcile environmental protection with military readiness. As such, the armed forces and their allies in Congress persistently challenged on national security and constitutional grounds the authority of federal and state regulators to hold the military accountable to ENR laws. In terms of secrecy, the military tenaciously tried to make its operations as opaque as possible to regulatory and citizen scrutiny. Among other things, the services decided what information about their activities should be released and adopted a “decide, announce, and defend” posture when taking actions affecting ENR protection. Finally, in terms of succor, the services treasured and protected their protean ties with defense contractors and subcontractors, members of Congress, and local communities near military bases, the epoxy of which was the political, financial, and psychic succor that President Eisenhower famously labeled the “military-industrial complex.” Prompted by these revelations, the first decade of the post–Cold War era (1991–2001) witnessed the most concerted, sustained, and persistent effort of the past half century to complete what several U.S. presidents...

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