Instead of a welfare state, the United States built a national security state. A peace dividend expected after the Allied victory in 1945 never came; instead came the fight to contain communism, unprecedented military spending, and a new military bureaucracy. During Senate hearings on the future of the national defense, military contractors including Lockheed, which had been an object of congressional investigation in the merchants-of-death era of the 1930s and had built tens of thousands of aircraft during the Second World War, argued that the nation required “adequate, continuous, and
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