Fruits of the Cold War: debt and pollution

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 1995 by Llewellyn D. Howell

REMEMBER THE COLD WAR? The U.S., it is said, won that war, one that is not understood fully or appreciated by many--including politicians who have hitched themselves to victory's bandwagon.

One of the problems in understanding it is that observers and analysts have fallen too easily into using the analogy of a hot war. Just as the Vietnam conflict for years mistakenly was portrayed as being won or lost based on body counts, the Cold War was regarded the same way. In the latter case, the bodies were live ones. More bodies meant more deterrence, though tanks and ships and nuclear warheads were counted, too. In the end, it was argued, the West "out-deterred" the East with a bigger body count.

Wars are understood better, however, in terms of the damage that is done by them. Military conflicts leave battlefields strewn with dead, buildings leveled, and fields burned. The Cold War left debt and its progeny--ethnic conflict, pollution, political instability, and ideological chaos. On the American side, annual interest payments on the U.S. national debt rival the entire national budget under which Pres. Lyndon Johnson launched the Vietnam War. In the Cold War, not Star Wars, but the financing of Star Wars, drove the U.S.S.R. to its knees. The battles of the Cold War were financial and economic. They were fought by banks, businesses, and tax agencies, not soldiers, machines, or laser beams. The West--i.e., the U.S.--outfinanced the U.S.S.R. and the communist world in buying technology, quality production, and social progress. Today, the battlefield is littered with the aftermath of that war--towering debt, on both sides.

The West won not by the size of its debt, but by the nature of that debt. The U.S. financed its battles in the Cold War by borrowing against the future, constraining, but not really limiting, social spending, and restricting choices and options for decades to come.

The Eastern bloc financed its Cold War battles the only way it could--by taking shortcuts on every imaginable count, saving a ruble here (don't bother to process that chemical waste) and a ruble there (never mind that safety device) so as to stockpile another nuclear weapon that could hit the Pentagon yet again. Should we develop cheap fuel? Of course, and never mind the particulate count. Now, the Soviet side of the battlefield is strewn with those savings that came at the expense of environmental protection, and the damage clearly is immense, bordering on catastrophic.

The primary damage is in the physical environment of Eastern Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union. In the rush to keep centrally planned industry apace with that of the West, pollution controls virtually were ignored throughout the communist countries. The environmental controls that are the bane of American and Western European industry were without advocates and therefore unbudgeted. Today, the air and water of the East are becoming increasingly polluted by waste from power plants, smelters, coal mines, and chemical factories. Raw sewage being dumped into Eastern Europe's rivers and leakage from toxic dumps throughout the region additionally contribute to deteriorating health standards. Instead of being casualties from bullets and bombs, the Eastern European victims of the Cold War's battles have been poisoned.

In the area notoriously known as the Black Triangle--where the Czech, Polish, and German borders come together--power plants and industries fueled by brown coal spew sulfur and soot in an apparent effort to lead the world in the creation of acid rain. It has killed hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, which then fail to hold water and soil, resulting in floods, erosion, and loss of fertility in a previously productive land. Because of chronic respiratory diseases in the area, life expectancy for its population is said to be at least 10 years below the European average.

Some damage is economic. A recent Czech ambassador to the U.S. reported that his government was having difficulty in selling state-owned industries to foreign investors because the sites were so polluted and dangerous that it would have cost more to clean up the facilities than to start from scratch with new land, services, and structures. Throughout the region, former Soviet military bases are said to be highly toxic because of dumped fuels, chemicals, and nuclear waste. The properties thus are of little economic use.

In Russia, roughly 2,500 plants reportedly are releasing untreated industrial waste into the Neva River. One battle scar is the 12 nuclear submarine reactors that have been sunk near Novaya Zemlya in the arctic, sooner or later to leak into the world's waters. Another is spilled oil along Russian pipelines that results from untended leaks in pipes and storage tanks. It is estimated that up to 20% of 1992 oil production was lost due to such leaks. The typical Russian response apparently is to increase the pressure in the pipes to move even more oil through the system. It also is estimated that more than 15% of Russian territory is polluted heavily. If the West had intended to do this much damage in a hot war, it probably would have cost far more than was spent in the Cold War and even might not have been possible to achieve.