Towards Total Disarmament

...Oskar Morgenstern who has written what seems to me the ablest single book on The Question of National Defense (in military terms) is sorrowfully sure that our protection must lie in the possession by both sides of "invulnerability of retaliatory power...

...The greater probability, however, most writers agree, is that a small war or a limited war, which, they argue, we must be ready to fight, will grow into a major thermonuclear conflict, or that war may come by accident or design, the work of more or less anonymous military officers in possession of thermonuclear weapons...

...It has been supported categorically in statements by President Eisenhower of the U.S., and Dictator Khrushchev of the USSR...

...Partial disarmament, except as it is a stage to a recognized goal, will invite defeat...

...On the most optimistic estimate there can be no victors in the old fashioned sense in any large thermonuclear war...

...It is not God but the sovereign national state which says to men "Thou shalt have no other gods before me...

...He is very confident of what he can win by economic competition, and his Russia cries out for manpower for the production of consumer goods while we worry what would happen to employment if disarmament should come suddenly...

...For this progress not all the signs are bad...

...Fundamental to such a foreign policy is American advocacy of the achievement of controlled universal disarmament through progressive stages...

...LET US LOOK BRIEFLY at the obstacles in the way of disarmament which make so many good men dismiss it as impossible...

...We shall hear large generalities rather than our specific proposals for a sounder foreign policy...

...Multilateral disarmament must be total...

...To this universal disarmament down to a police level under a strengthened UN must be added a progressive disengagement from the alliances and commitments that invite conflict, and a cooperative attack on the desperate poverty of so much of mankind...

...Nevertheless in what may be called politically sophisticated circles, there is little or no hope of disarmament...

...This multilateral disarmament, though dismissed by so many of our savants, seems to me to offer our only hope in this world of risks where "an optimist is a man who believes that the future is uncertain...

...It has not tried to annex the moon or to launch military satellites—lines of action urged on us by many of our military brass...

...Essentially we face a power conflict...

...The problem is to present the issue effectively enough and to that end make use of whatever years the so-called "shield of deterrence" or "balance of terror" may give us...

...Their sucI65 cess is admittedly vital in terms of the world's health, the beginning of inspection, and in checking the rush of other nations to join the nuclear club...

...To begin with there is a traditional acceptance of war, an acceptance which goes deep into the consciousness and subconsciousness of us all...

...It has agreed to keep the arms race out of the Antarctica...

...I think Khrushchev is as serious in proposing disarmament for the sake of existence as are many men high in our own government...

...It would mean an increase in health hazards, a rush of other nations to acquire nuclear weapons, and a dangerous frustration of men's hopes...

...The USSR has consented to renew the general talks in a ten-nations committee of the UN...

...IN THIS SHORT ARTICLE, however, I am discussing what is the principal strand in most minds, and that is disarmament...

...This is fairly evident in the current negotiations at Geneva concerning the ending of nuclear tests...

...But in man's long and painful evolution he has had to learn to do what he had never done before in order to survive...

...helped to keep the peace even in times of tension...

...What beginnings we have made of supra national organization are relatively weak...

...The lifeline to peace must be braided of four strands: disarmament, the strengthening of the UN, progressive disengagement, and a planned use of a large part of what is saved on arms for the conquest of poverty...

...He dismisses without extensive discussion any possibility of effective disarma ment...

...Infinitely the lesser risks lie in persuading mankind that our own collective achievements compel us to find an alternative to the institution of war which men immemorially have so hated and yet so cherished...

...Morgenstern, to be sure, finds no real difference of principle to account for the existing cold war, despite the fact that "each side has an ideological structure of phrases which have different meaning even to people on the same side...

...Khrushchev at least temporarily is holding back his fellow Communists in the Far and Middle East...

...In point of fact disarmament is necessary precisely because we can no more trust armed nations to keep peace than armed individuals in domestic society...

...Men get what they prepare for—however glibly the makers of the Atlas missile may proclaim "we shall have failed if this weapon ever has to be used...

...History has always been written by survivors...

...The failure to make any progress in what men have come to consider the first stage in disarmament would be practically and psychologically disastrous...

...All that should be left is police power within nations to preserve order, and police power for the UN to deal with brushfire wars...

...They will systematically exalt the lesser risks over the enormously greater...

...SO DOES EISENHOWER, and so I think do the American people, although their thinking is likely to be confused rather than helped by the nature of our political campaign, and their voice muted in the clamor of politicians more concerned to belabor each other and to get out the maximum vote than to speak clearly on issues...

...We are not seeking in the beginning the kind of trust that exists between sworn friends but rather a common recognition of the necessity of disarmament if we are to continue any decent existence on this earth...

...The question is one of balance of risks, and the risks of no agreement are enormous...

...We ought not to trust ourselves with such dangerous and costly toys...

...In this power conflict, given the present state of our technology, the establishment of adequate fool-proof controls by inspection is impossible...

...It is of course necessary that disarmament be under a strengthened UN made capable of substituting law for war along such lines as Messrs...

...There can be no fool proof inspection...

...The logical reaction to these facts should be universal and controlled disarmament...

...He wants the summit conference or conferences...

...It has been an inspiration of literature and art...

...This statement ignores such facts as Lord Grey's statement that the naval rivalry between Great Britain and Germany was a principal cause of World War I. On this continent the disarmed border between Canada and the U.S...

...It is absolutely certain that in a world of accident and passion that precarious shield will not protect us forever...

...Clark and Sohn have persuasively laid down in their very important book, World Peace Through World Law...

...There is as yet no sufficient power in the UN effectively to sub stitute law for war...

...The number of men capable by mistake of precipitating the worst kind of war will inevitably grow as more and more nations acquire thermonuclear weapons...

...As I have often said, if some greater Savonarola should by his eloquence persuade all nations to throw down their arms as the passionate monk persuaded the Florentines to renounce their luxuries and vices, the nations, like the Florentines, would pick them up again unless in the meantime they had provided themselves with the alternatives that a properly constituted federation would afford them...

...The question to raise with Khrushchevand to an almost equal degree with many of our own military men and congressmen—is the effectiveness of the control that they will accept...

...It is a pretty hopeless view of humanity which believes that we cannot escape destruction by our own scien tific achievements...

...He is reducing the size of his armies...

...To these basic considerations must be added the usual observation, only partly true, that armaments are not a cause of wars and conflicts but rather the consequence of them...

...For millennia of time war has been a final arbiter of disputes...

...At the end of his argument that such power must rest primarily on "an oceanic system" in which submarines will be the principal bases for the use of missiles of the Polaris type, he concludes that "the probability of thermonuclear war's occurring appear to be significantly larger than the probability of its not occurring...

...Along with suffering and woe—even to victors— it has brought glory, profit, and power...

...To this fact must be added the even more serious fact that the moral code which men have painfully evolved for their personal relations does not apply between absolute sovereign nations which can and do sanctify whatsoever seems necessary for their power...

...This our nation must work for with a combination of devotion, energy, imagination and a grasp of realities of the thermonuclear age far greater than anything heretofore displayed by our government or either of our big parties...

...This is not to be dismissed by the blanket statement that "you cannot trust Russia...

...While most Americans insist that they renounce any advocacy of preventive war, one can hear talk of such war under its new name, "preemptive", if circumstances arise in which we believe that we might prevent a probable attack by attacking first...

...This logic of universal disarmament has made some progress in the desire of men and of nations...

...The disputes which may cause war unquestionably would admit of easier settlement in the general framework of disarmament...

...This general lack of confidence which characterizes the mutual rela tions of sovereign national states is heightened by the profound distrust between the principal adversaries in the cold war...

...Former president James Conant of Harvard in a recent address made a plea that we awake to the realization that our only hope of safety lay in much greater military expenditure to the end that the Russians might know that if they could destroy half of our "complexes" in one attack we could in retaliation destroy three-quarters of theirs...

...There is a grim logic in this position...

...Success—even qualified success—in agreement on ending the tests would be very valuable, but only as a first step in a rapid and orderly progress to universal disarmament under a strengthened UN...

...The establishment of adequate controls is difficult, but given an increase of power of supranational authority and a widely diffused love of peace, by no means impossible...

...It is at that point of control that men —especially those who wish to rationalize their own material interests in keeping up the arms race —will be able deliberately or instinctively to sabotage negotiations...

...I would give greater weight than he does to the evil Communist record and its extreme exaltation of the doctrine that the end justifies the means...

...According to UN statistics, the nations of the world are spending about $90 billion annually in preparation for the kind of thermonuclear war which would destroy civilization and perhaps mankind— this in a world where 70 per cent of its people live on the border line between hunger and starvation...

...STILL, THE CASE against disarmament is not lightly to be dismissed...