COLUMN LEFT : Defense Budget Remains on Full Alert : Bush’s timid steps on nuclear forces left useless big-money programs intact.

There’s no need to start lofting hats high in the air over the diminutive arms cutbacks promulgated by President Bush. Indeed, only a press and public brainwashed by decades of propaganda for the mad theorems of “deterrence” would regard them as anything but reluctant and timid steps made under the duress of reality.

Take the proposed unilateral U.S. withdrawal and destruction of all ground-launched short-range nuclear weapons. These have been aimed at forward Soviet deployments in Eastern Europe that no longer exist. Who needs nukes aimed at a bunch of Hungarian economists studying the works of Milton Friedman? (Come to think of it . . . but that’s a different story.)

The President also drew praise for his decision to bring down the B-52s from active alert, with crews ready to bomb the Soviet Union at a moment’s notice. How many congratulations does a commander-in-chief deserve for diminishing the chances of incinerating millions of innocent people, for conceding that the justification for “mutual assured destruction” could no longer be taken seriously by anyone outside a nuthouse?

The new short-range nuclear attack missile contracted to Boeing is also on the chopping block. This program was already mired in vast cost overruns, for which Boeing will no longer have to answer, even as it collects a hefty cancellation fee. The rail-garrison MX missile killed by the President had been zeroed out by the Senate two days earlier.

Big-money programs were left intact. The B-2 Stealth bomber, the Sea Wolf submarine, “Star Wars” and the C-17 transport plane will all continue their function, which of course has nothing to do with the entirely nonexistent Soviet threat; but it has almost everything to do with helping to stabilize the U.S. economy, which has been underpinned by military spending since 1938, when the approach of World War II bailed President Roosevelt out of the New Deal’s failure to fix the economy.

The C-17 Air Force transport nicely illustrates this proposition. When fully loaded, it is unable to fly from the East Coast of the United States to the Azores. On the other hand, its prime contractor is the beleaguered McDonnell-Douglas, which would be sorely afflicted by a cancellation. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney let the cat out of the bag on this one with a wonderful slip during his briefing the day after Bush’s announcement, when he hailed the capacity of an intercontinental bomber to “haul a large payroll--a large payload--little slip there.”

In line with this defense-in-depth of military expenditures, Gen. Colin Powell is talking about “maintaining a base for reconstitution” (i.e., keeping as much as we can today, against the chance that we might need it tomorrow), and the Pentagon is being promised “breakouts from the baseline” (as with the $65-billion extra required by the war in Iraq). Through the “merged surplus and M accounts,” jocularly known as the Lazarus fund (i.e., money brought back from the grave), the Pentagon will be able to hang on to billions in appropriated money, whose applicability will be open-ended in time.

Most significantly, the President did not announce that the United States would impose a moratorium on testing nuclear weapons, such as the Soviet Union unilaterally adopted for a substantial period in the mid-1980s. This R&D; is what propels the whole system forward, and Bush’s omission tells us all we need to know.

In the wake of the President’s speech, an unidentified Defense Department official, probably Cheney, talked about a level of nuclear weapons “necessary for deterrence.” So the axioms of the system are still unchallenged, the threat-inflaters still at their posts. These are the people who in the recent past were proclaiming that the Soviet Union was poised to break through the Fulda Gap and roll across Western Europe to the Bay of Biscay. I still have in my bookshelves wads of research from right-wing think tanks howling about the Soviet threat to the Pacific.

The threat-inflaters may be at their posts, but there is indeed a crisis. The traditional justification for a $300-billion military budget has disappeared, and there is at present no convincing substitute on the horizon. The Peruvian Sendero Luminoso and drug smugglers in the Andes simply won’t do.

No one in their right minds ever seriously imagined that the Soviet Union would attack Paris, but the Soviet threat was a great way of justifying money actually being used to prop up the domestic economy and to put down threats to U.S. interests in the Third World. What neither Bush nor Congress has any answer to is how to build a true peacetime economy.