US defence spending - 31 January 1992

It seems ages ago but it was, I suppose, in the early 1950s that I was invited to go aboard one of the first atomic submarines and, when a trifle of a storm came up, to descend as a submarine does in a hurricane and go way down into what they call the clear element.

It's a belt of absolutely still water where you hover like a single tropical fish in a placid tank. Not the most surprising of many things about submarines, one of which I remember the commander explaining with great patience and skill, is that the aim of a submarine designer is to come up with a boat which is, in its mobile capacity, more of a fish than a boat. A dolphin, he said, was the prototype they'd aimed at.

There was, I recall, a submarine christening ceremony that, at the time and in that place, could only be called gay. Brilliant day, a smart wind, the waters of Long Island Sound flashing mirrors of light on the medals of the officers and the rows of white uniforms and the pretty girls holding on to whisking skirts. Then I spend two or three days covering the story, as we say, learning about the wonders of these stealthy ships and the crew that mans them, known as submariners, watching a tough commander instruct rookies throwing switches on a simulated bridge and when the sun went down, drinks with the captain and the officers. There was one young man whom the instructor said, rated just about 100% as a nuclear submariner – 99%, he said, will not do. I looked out for him but he never came for drinks, I understand his wife had just had a baby, but anyway he was a Southern Baptist and he wouldn't have been at home with the bent elbows and the poteen. I met him 20-some years later, very briefly. On a perishing winter day he was standing on the corner of 96th Street and Madison Avenue in New York, like a… like a beggar, like a Salvation Army recruit, holding out a frozen hand and saying something like, I'd appreciate your vote, I'm running for president, my name's Jimmy Carter.

Well that, that exciting summer naval episode was going on at Groton, a small coastal town on the Connecticut shore, facing Long Island Sound. I don't remember the name given to that christened submarine, it could well have been the Nautilus, a series which started in the '50s. Ever since, Groton, Connecticut has been home to the main nuclear submarine builder, a company with the simple – un-American, wouldn't you say? – name of the Electric Boat Company. Down 40 years, the shipyard workers, the contractors and the businesses big and small that depend on the Boat Company's employees, they've made up over 80% of the New London County's $2 billion payroll. Throughout all that time, two generations of submarine builders have come and gone and throughout all those years, at least until about 18 months ago, it never crossed anyone's mind that one day the whole company might shut up shop. But today it has crossed and befuddled their minds.

Last Wednesday, Mr Dick Cheney, the Secretary of Defense, following on the President's Tuesday speech, went before the press and the cameras at the Pentagon and spelled out what is going to be cut out of the next defence budget. The latest submarine they're working on at the Groton shipyard is something called the Seawolf. It costs $2 billion per – 29 of them are on order or were two years ago. As of last Wednesday, there are none – 28 cancelled. I suppose they'll be allowed to finish work on the first one which is now under construction. Needless to say, the congressman who represents that county and the one who represents the 4,000 workers from neighbouring Rhode Island, are sad and mad. So they are Democrats and Republicans alike, all across the country, wherever a defence plant has been told that its budget has been trimmed, its speciality has been modified or abandoned. Two great plants in California took as big a blow. There are to be finally, no more B-2 Stealth bombers and there was bad news for Boeing in the Pacific Northwest, a sharp cutback in the production of Comanche helicopters. The same with an advanced cruise missile and the plans to improve the M1 tank.

These cuts and cancellations make up a saving of $10 billion in a current total defence budget of 291 billions, which doesn't sound like much except to the thousands of people who are going to lose their jobs. There are several sombre ironies in this picture of sudden economies and angry responses, before the details of the president's budget were known, a former head of the CIA, Mr William Colby, said if he were in charge, he'd cut the defence budget in half. His reasoning was that the republics of the former Soviet Union – no matter how dramatic are the cuts in the economies they proclaim in their defence budget – they will have to strip themselves to the bone, militarily speaking if they are to avoid famine and maintain a fragile economy.

But 50% cut in our defence budget? The Democrats had a fit. For 10 years, ever since Reagan went into the White House, they've been saying, as a party, that the solution to America's economic woes, even when America didn't seem to have any, was to slash the defence budget dramatically and invest all those saved billions of dollars in people, in schools, in day-care, in hospitals. Swords into ploughshares has been the Democratic slogan practically since the Cold War began. Not quite as loud or self-righteously as the socialists in the parliamentary countries, but consistently. Then the Soviet Union collapsed. Now, they said, is the time, no more enemy. Huge defence cuts could mean an end to poverty, homelessness, illiteracy. Then something happened that the Democrats had never expected. President Bush and Secretary Cheney agreed with them and said we'll begin with irrelevant military bases and naval shipyards and Mr Cheney announced with rude despatch a list of, I don't know, 20, 30 camps and bases around the country, some of them famed in song and story. Quite right, Democrats, they said, close 'em down. And, of course, senators and congressmen of both parties who found a base closing in their constituency, it was their turn to howl.

Some liberal Democrats, especially ones who don't have a base or the Marine Corps or a factory in their back yard have gone on urging drastic cuts in defence but again they've done it as a political ploy on the unspoken understanding that the Republicans, the administration anyway, would never go so far as a liberal Democrat. Well now it's happened and they're left to quarrel with the way President Bush has divided up the money saved. Of course, you realise that when we talk about the budget or the president's budget or the total cancellation of the Seawolf submarine, we're not reported something that has happened or will positively be done. I always forget to mention this reminder until I get to Europe and see headlines saying things like, Reagan will slash social security, What that meant was he's made his State of the Union speech and that's what he proposes, it's up to Congress to dispose and across Long Island Sound there, at Groton, Connecticut, an official of the Electric Boat says the proposal to kill the Seawolf is unacceptable and we're not going to lie down and die, we're going to fight. And so will say his congressman, especially if he's up for re-election this year.

So what do the most influential members of Congress say? The men of the opposition. Well the chairman of the important committees, Military Affairs Committee, Space, Ways and Means, they've already started holding hearings. One of them, Senator Nunn, the Democrat who's the chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee was asked if the details Mr Cheney announced amounted to an end of the Cold War budget. That's what it is, he said, that's what they're doing. He didn't mention the blessed fact that among the projects that will not be trimmed is the air force's new F-22 jet fighter. Lockheed Corporation has go the go-ahead, full-steam. The F-22 will be assembled at a plant in Georgia which, by coincidence is where Senator Nunn comes from.

I'm well aware that these cuts, these closings of military bases, reduction of army strength are going on in more countries than the United States, Nowhere more than in the CIS – the Commonwealth, if it is one, of Independent States. Someone, a Kremlinologist in Washington, said the other day, that Mr Yeltsin's announcement of those deep cuts in nuclear weapons was of course good news as matching, or even going beyond Mr Bush's similar cuts. But, he said, something else. It's the best news yet from Yeltsin. The money, he says, may go a long way to provide pay and housing for all those hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops who have been brought home and wander around like a vast army of the suddenly homeless, except they have weapons and the habit of discipline and – with no housing and no pay and facing a rough winter and a possibly famished population – they could be immense trouble.

Well, remember we all cheered when the system collapsed but as the hallelujahs die down, we hear they've acquired some other of the blessings of democracy: drugs, increased crime, pornography, a roaring and very damaging black market in the distribution of food. I wonder how many millions of them and how many thousands of unemployed Americans who live near a closing camp or bomber factory, I wonder how many awake in the morning and guiltily sigh for the lovely old predictable evil empire.

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