Villains in the Stockpile

One of the smug assumptions of the cold war era was that the U.S. was forearming itself with a stockpile of strategically scarce commodities to see it through a wartime siege. So when the Munitions Board announced last week that the U.S. stockpile was only 38.4% of what it ought to be (with another 12% on order), there was a rush to track down the villains behind such negligence.

Fortunately, their tracks were plain and some of them still quite fresh. When a $3 billion stockpile program was first established in 1946, a forceful bloc of Congressmen from the western metals states strapped it into a "Buy American" straitjacket, requiring that everything be purchased in the U.S. unless it was "inconsistent with the public interest" or "unreasonable" in price. It was silly, Harry Truman noted, to build up a stockpile by bringing the U.S.'s own underground reserves aboveground, and as he signed the act he invited the Munitions Board to buy abroad through the loopholes.

For such temerity, the board heard from Congress at appropriations time; the stockpile budget was whacked about $50 million every year. "We're going to see to it," said Oklahoma's Senator Elmer Thomas last year, "that [the Munitions Board] concentrates on buying stuff at home, even to the extent of paying more for it here."

Also quite agreeable to the notion that stockpiling must fit in with business as usual, the Munitions Board, during 1947 and '48, generally followed Congress's injunction to buy only items that U.S. industry wasn't buying. Reason: it did not want to disturb price structures throughout the world. Then, after reassessing the chances of war, the board got its courage up, began to buy urgently and widely, and set itself a new goal of a $4 billion stockpile by 1956. Again it stirred up a fuss. Three weeks before the Korean invasion, zinc men howled that stockpiling was driving prices too high for U.S. plants and their customers. These cries were drowned out by the lead men, bawling that their prices would fall because the board was slacking off its lead buying.

Last week Harry Truman asked that the 1951 stockpile appropriation be more than doubled (to a $1.1 billion total*), and this time there was a possibility that the country might get a stockpile without strings that became chains.

* To be spent chiefly for rubber, manganese, copper, tin, zinc, aluminum.

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