Disarmament: A Moral Issue
Murphy, Elmer
April 7, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 603 DISARMAMENT: A MORAL ISSUE By ELMER MURPHY IN spite of dismay caused by the failure of the League of Nations to adjust its membership in conformity with the...
...Mandatory powers who are playing the role of international policemen, need weapons that might be regarded as a menace in law-abiding nations...
...The building of warships had to stop and the immediate business of the conference was to find where to stop it...
...Strictly speaking, the Washington Conference did not deal primarily with a naval, but an .economic question...
...They are immeasurably greater in Europe than in the United States...
...From the viewpoint of the forthcoming deliberations it is probably fortunate that virtually all European nations stand on common ground, struggling to rehabilitate themselves...
...Gas was looked upon with horror by the world at large when the Hague Conferences were endeavoring to draw the line between legitimate fighting and wholesale murder, but since the establishment of chemical warfare as a branch of the military art it has come to be viewed in a different light...
...It will be directly concerned with the shaping of formulae to bridge the gap between good intentions and good deeds...
...When does scientific research pass from the stage of economic enterprise to the stage of praiseworthy development of defensive strength, and eventually to the stage of militaristic aggression...
...But, however strong the economic incentive, no economical formula will fit the case...
...Gradual as the approach to peace is, those who are preparing to chart the course are already impressed with the practical difficulties that will be encountered...
...This conclusion is formally recognized in the Washington treaties...
...The deeper one delves into the technical side of warfare, the more complicated the problems become...
...The role to be played by the United States will be not unlike that of the chorus in Greek drama which interpreted dramatic events in the light of common destiny...
...In Washington, despite the general attitude of hopefulness, frank recognition of the difficulties that lie ahead might be misinterpreted as scepticism...
...Diplomatic and military ingenuity will be put to the severest kind of test to find a common denominator for the wide variety of conditions prevailing in different countries...
...A defensive military establishment in France might be regarded as an offensive establishment in the United States...
...A manoeuvre might be nothing more than a prudent test of fitness in one country and a hostile threat in another...
...Where is the line to be drawn between offensive and defensive chemical warfare...
...The great powers had become convinced that navies were bankrupting them...
...It met the issue, upon the initiative of Mr...
...If gas is to be permitted at all, the United States and Germany have in their factories and laboratories weapons of enormous potentiality compared with industrially undeveloped countries—and experience supports the view, however cynical it may be, that, once war is under way, the combatants will seize any weapon at hand, rules or no rules...
...April 7, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 603 DISARMAMENT: A MORAL ISSUE By ELMER MURPHY IN spite of dismay caused by the failure of the League of Nations to adjust its membership in conformity with the spirit of Locarno, the stage is virtually set for the preliminary conference at Geneva which, if all goes well, is to be the curtain raiser for the real disarmament drama to be performed later under the League of Nations' auspices...
...Necessity paves the way for agreement...
...Nevertheless, this government will be expected to subscribe to whatever general principles of conduct may be evolved...
...Here lies the trouble...
...Some countries are in a better position to maintain standing armies...
...It might be doubted that anything will be accomplished if the deliberations are kept on this level...
...It is to deal not only with a political and military, but an economic problem...
...The use of gas, which will probably be one of the centres of discussion, is one of them...
...The Geneva Conference will have this as a starting point also...
...This being true, there is a host of intricate questions to be answered if the limits of gas fighting are to be fixed...
...There are military men who assert that it is more humane to asphyxiate one's opponents than to shoot them to pieces with cannon...
...A perfunctory look ahead discloses the multitude of perplexities the conferees will face, if disarmament is to be considered a political and military matter— perplexities more baffling than those with which the Washington Conference had to deal...
...General AmOs Fries, chief of the Chemical Warfare Service, holds that gas formulae have no military value until the possibilities of quantity production have been determined and a field test has been made...
...But that is only one viewpoint...
...This self-contained country is not harassed by the proximity of neighbors whose political and economic motives are to be viewed with distrust, although relations are maintained upon a basis of conventional politeness and mutual respect...
...What the United States and other governments that are to participate in the preliminary conference at Geneva are more concerned with is not what they are to do at the disarmament conference—or, to be accurate, the conference on the limitation of armaments—but how they are to go about it...
...In the present state of things these questions may be interesting but they are not to the point...
...These are some of the more obvious difficulties...
...The Geneva Conference is not America's affair...
...Hughes and the American delegation, by drawing the line at the water's edge and scrapping the ships on the ways...
Vol. 3 • April 1926 • No. 22
