It’s an understatement to say that much of the world was devastated by its second war, but the United States got off relatively easy. As one of the two superpowers left standing, America was responsible for rebuilding its half (or third, depending on whom you asked) of the world, and that meant getting money to flow through the global financial system again. The Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and develop occupied Japan moved some cash, but the execution wasn’t big or fast enough. In a memo titled “NSC 68,” the secretary of state, Dean Acheson, and the chief of Truman’s Policy Planning Staff, Paul Nitze, suggested a way to spend novel amounts of government money without appearing to crowd out private industry: rearmament. By paying for peacetime arsenals in America and western Europe (and “on behalf of” Japan), they could prepare for war with the communists as Shockley theorized it and boost global demand without driving down prices, kick-starting what we now think of as capitalism’s twentieth-century golden age. This plan also rescued military contractors in the ACE sectors who were looking at peacetime layoffs. Acheson and Nitze wanted Truman to triple the Pentagon’s budget ask for 1950.15 Of all the smart-stupid state-capitalist plans, military Keynesianism, which called for the state to finance the expansion of the global economy by building machines designed to blow up the world, was one of the smartest-stupidest. And, of course, it worked.