Cold War Paranoia

   In the 1970's Team B was set up, after being heavily pushed for by a younger Donald Rumsfeld. It served as an ideological weapon with which the Neoconservatives would drum fear into the American people and so pave way for their election (in the form of Ronald Reagan with his missile gap).
    One of the most disgraceful pieces of distortion was with regard to anti-submarine warfare. The CIA believed that the Soviets were not putting large amounts of resources into a submarine detection system. Team B in an incredible leap of paranoid logic took the same facts and concluded the following - the fact that the evidence was lacking was evidence in itself!
   The reasoning? Clearly if there were no clear signs of a submarine detection system it meant that the Soviets had developed a system completely indetectable to the U.S.! This reminds me of a wonderful scene in the fantastic book A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick when the main character and his friends return home, paranoid about whether or not their home was broken into in their absence.

    "When they rolled to a stop in the driveway, parked , and walked warily toward the front door, they found Barris's note and the door unlocked, but when they cautiously opened the door everything appeared as it had been when they left.
     Barris's suspicions surfaced instantly. "Ah," he murmered, entering. He swiftly reached to the top of the bookshelf by the door and brought down his .22 pistol, which he gripped as the other men moved about. The animals approached them as usual, clamoring to be fed.

    "Well, Barris," Luckman said, "I can see you're right. There definitely was someone here, because you see—you see, too, don't you, Bob?—the scrupulous covering-over of all the signs they would otherwise left testifies to their—""

    In precisely the same fashion as the paranoid drug addicts above, for the Neoconservative, a lack of evidence is evidence of a still greater crime. One has to wonder how much this influenced Rumsfeld and Bush when they considered WMDs in Iraq. And as they sought to instil fear in the American people as Reagan did with his missile gap.