sts, her as yet untapped mineral reserves, and above all . . . the ingenuity and daring of her people [were] always more than enough to secure her indebtedness to Europe, just as the potential value of the western lands was always more than sufficient to secure the loans made against them" (wiltse, 1961, p. 150). The economic growth of the U.S. inured to the benefit of its security as a whole throughout the 19th century; U.S. national security was not really in question even during the Civil War. The popular and political mentality of the government appears to have changed with the Spanish-American War (1898), in which Spanish aggression was played up by the American press, especially after publicity about an explosion on the American battleship Maine in Havana. There is evidence that the public opinion favoring U.S. entry into a war against Spain was generated and manipulated by newspaper coverage in the service of presumably damaged American business interests and that indeed the Maine may not have been sabotaged at all (Panton, 1983, p. 54). Thus although U.S. natural security was not really in question, the Spanish-American War marked the first use of the national-security rationale either to intervene abroad or to justify dramatic policy shifts at home.
In the modern period of American history, the issue of national security has surfaced persistently in a variety of ways. Technology, military capability, and internal factors of governance and political persuasion all make an appearance in the government-security debate. During the Cold War, the issue of government security was connected principally to the nuclear arms race, although there was also a view that security involved more than military muscle:
National security does not and cannot depend on military power alone . . . There is no technical solution to the paradox of growing military power and decreasing national security. A nation's security depends upon its ...