Population control becomes a U.S. national security issue

One of the most targeted countries for this new Anglo-American antinuclear offensive was Germany. While France’s nuclear program was equally if not more ambitious, Germany was deemed an area where Anglo-American intelligence assets had greater likelihood of success, given their history in the postwar occupation of the Federal Republic. Almost as soon as the ink had dried on the Schmidt government’s 1975 nuclear development program, an offensive was launched.

A key operative in this new project was a young woman with a German mother and an American stepfather, who had lived in the United States until 1970, working for U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey, among other things. Petra K. Kelly had developed close ties in her U.S. years with one of the principal new Anglo-American antinuclear organizations created by McGeorge Bundy’s Ford Foundation, the Natural Resources Defense Council. The Natural Resources Defense Council included Barbara Ward (Lady Jackson) and Laurance Rockefeller among its board members at the time. In Germany, Kelly began organizing legal assaults against the construction of the German nuclear program during the mid 1970s, resulting in costly delays and eventual large cuts in the entire German nuclear plan.

POPULATION CONTROL BECOMES A U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUE

In 1798 an obscure English clergyman, Thomas Malthus, professor of political economy in the employ of the British East India Company’s East India College at Haileybury, was given instant fame by his English sponsors for his ‘Essay on the Principle of Population.’ The essay itself was a scientifi c fraud, plagiarized largely from a Venetian attack on the positive population theory of American Benjamin Franklin.

The Venetian attack on Franklin’s essay had been written by Gianmaria Ortes in 1774. Malthus’ adaptation of Ortes’ ‘theory’ was refi ned with a facade of mathematical legitimacy which he called the ‘law of geometric progression,’ which held that human populations invariably expanded geometrically, while the means of subsistence were arithmetically limited, or linear. The fl aw in Malthus’ argument, as demonstrated irrefutably by the spectacular growth of civilization, technology and agriculture productivity since 1798, was Malthus’ deliberate ignoring of the contribution of advances in science and technology to dramatically improving such factors as crop yields, labor productivity and the like.12

By the mid-1970s, as an indication of the effectiveness of the new propaganda onslaught from the Anglo-American establishment, American government offi cials were openly boasting in public press conferences that they were committed ‘neo-Malthusians,’ something for which they would have been laughed out of offi ce a mere decade or so earlier. But nowhere did the new embrace of British Malthusian economics in the United States show itself more brutally than in Kissinger’s National Security Council.

On April 24, 1974, in the midst of the oil crisis, the White House national security adviser, Henry Alfred Kissinger, issued National Security Council Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), on the subject of ‘Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.’ It was directed to all cabinet secretaries, the military Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as the CIA and other key agencies. On October 16, 1975, on Kissinger’s urging, President Gerald Ford issued a memorandum confi rming the need for ‘U.S. leadership in world population matters,’ based on the contents of the classifi ed NSSM 200 document. The document made Malthusianism, for the fi rst time in American history, an explicit item of security policy of the government of the United States. More bitterly ironic was the fact that it was initiated by a German-born Jew. Even during the Nazi years, government offi cials in Germany were more guarded about offi cially espousing such goals.

NSSM 200 argued that population expansion in select developing countries which also contain key strategic resources necessary to the U.S. economy posed potential U.S. ‘national security threats.’ The study warned that, under pressure from expanding domestic populations, countries with essential raw materials will tend to demand higher prices and better terms of trade for their exports to the United States. In this context, NSSM 200 identifi ed a target list of 13 countries singled out as ‘strategic targets’ for U.S. efforts at population control. The list, which was drawn up in 1974, is instructive. No doubt, as with other major decisions of Kissinger, the selection of countries was made after close consultation with the British Foreign Offi ce.

Kissinger explicitly stated in the memorandum, ‘how much more effi cient expenditures for population control might be than [would be funds for] raising production through direct investments in additional irrigation and power projects and factories.’ British nineteenth-century imperialism could have expressed it no better. By

the mid-1970s, the government of the United States, with this secret policy declaration, had committed itself to an agenda which would contribute to its own economic demise, as well as bringing untold famine, misery and unnecessary death throughout the developing sector. The 13 target countries named by Kissinger’s study were Brazil, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia.13