For the past century, human beings had the agricultural capacity, the technology and the organizational skills to feed every last person on the planet. Yet, marching along into the 21st century, 80 percent of the world's population lives in absolute poverty - economically defined as missing one or more of the five fundamental necessities of life, i.e., food, clothing, shelter, health care and education. Millions of people have died of neglect, disease, malnutrition and starvation. In large part they have died because precious funds went instead to feed the war machine, also called euphemistically as "military expenditures" or "milex." More recently these costs are referred to not even as military expenditures but as "defense expenditures." This change was wrought in 1947 when the extant Department of War was renamed to Department of Defense. George Orwell referred to these nefarious terminological twists as "doublethink" and "doublespeak."
The driving force behind the Cold War, which was continued by Ronald Reagan through the 1980s and continued to the extreme with 9/11, was fear. If a government can manage to instill high levels of fear into the populace, that government can do anything it wants, in the name of alleviating that fear. Hence the American people always said 'yes' to wars.
