Arms and the Man: Arms Control: The New Defeatism
Melman, Seymour
A new theory for the international arms race has been invented in the United States. It bears the equivocal tag "arms control." One might think, from the ordinary meaning of the words, arms...
...He replied, "Maybe they can teach us how to take care of the unions...
...The gruesome statistical estimates of varying millions of casualties prepared by Herman Kahn of the Rand Corporation are the ultimate and logical development of the primary resort to military strategies, and a complete failure of confidence in political ways of competing with the Soviet system...
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...ament strategy assumes the strength of democracy and gives hope to freedom in society...
...in the political sphere it hands over victories to totalitarian methods at home in the name of stemming them abroad...
...Disarmament is feared by many as a policy that would "leave the United States naked...
...The ultimate counsel of political despair by the militarists is expressed in their proposition that, for American society, it is better to be dead than unfree...
...The strategy of disarmament is a polar alternative to these negative prognoses...
...Democratic institutions, they feel, are doomed before a Soviet offensive...
...I asked...
...Military deterrence 12...
...10...
...Logically then, the same policy tendency includes estimates of what would happen to the United States under various forms of World War III...
...Theirs is the council of despair for political victory...
...If acceptable political methods are rot available to these men, then the extension of the Soviet system must in their view be contained by military methods...
...This insistence comes directly from what they believe to be true—that democratic institutions cannot compete for allegiance against the Soviet system...
...These include: surprise attack on the enemy...
...Disarmament involves a process of international commitment and mutual control that would strengthen the capability for operation of democratic institutions...
...Actually, as world wide desire and hope for disarmament mounts, this new, essentially military plan, is being elaborated as a policy alternative to disarmament...
...What use is then served by military strategies— which include deterrence as well as plans for "first strike" surprise attacks on the enemy...
...A year ago in Moscow this writer was advised by a visiting American that "now that relations are getting better between Russia and the United States, perhaps we can learn something from them...
...Warfare has generally served political goals...
...Thus, American conservatives have been unable to represent the democratic alternatives to the Soviet system...
...Arms control is the latest of these military policies of containment...
...They make a compensatory attempt to undo such political humiliation by emphasis on military power alone...
...The latter conditions afford the basis for political democracy...
...The last ditch opponents of disarmament, with their negative estimate of the efficiency of democratic institutions, oppose even the very first stages of a disarmament process with insistence...
...The pro-disarm...
...In industrial life, for example, this means the right of workers, and other employees, to form independent organizations, separate from the management and from government, and the use of these organizations as vehicles for their own decisionmaking, paralleling that of management...
...Economic development there must take place under conditions of major initiative through government...
...9. American conservatives, because of their inability to do just this, have beI17 come too weak to cope with the problems of political and economic competition with the Soviet system...
...8. In order to propose these conditions abroad, however, Americans must explicitly understand their political importance and must be prepared to welcome these conditions at home...
...4, When the main political alternatives for industrial society are set forth, they show at once the political choice that is implied in the preference for disarmament as against arms control and other military plans...
...and now—stabilized deterrence (arms control...
...Therefore, a disarmament strategy that includes opposite assumptions, is, in their view, hopeless from the start...
...The alternative is that economic and general social development, at speed, are aided by multilateral and democratic decisionmaking in society and in government...
...Therefore, they must not let it start...
...1. A plan for "how to live with the bomb," arms control is the newest development in a doctrinal succession that purports to be hard-headed realism, while representing a most defeatist prognosis for American society...
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...One crucial feature of the democratic way is multilateral decisionmaking...
...Such a military adventure has merit to those who find unbearable the tension of a military deadlock paralleled by the successful political extension of their system by the Soviets...
...The lectures and writing of Herman Kahn set forth this theory in detail...
...Disarmament assumes a will to live and a possibility for success in democratic ways of organizing a society both in industrialized and in developing countries...
...They thus reveal themselves as ready to risk exposure of the United States and the West to an uncontrollable situation—including world wars in which the United States could not possibly win and could not escape destruction...
...arms race are the defeatists for American society...
...The danger for the United States is that continuing emphasis on the aims race, including its new form, arms control, drives us towards eventual war and towards eventual similarity to the totalitarianism we abhor in the Soviet system...
...When this proposition is formulated for the society as a whole, this reflects the casting out of all optimism with regard to a successful political and economic contest versus the Soviets...
...The military strategists of the West have fallen into a deeply despairing estimate of Western political capability...
...Their wide dissemination has been a major factor in a political conditioning process: making Americans accustomed to a dehumanized mode of perception of themselves and their fate...
...In the absence of one triumphant functioning social system, military victory is without political meaning and indeed has no meaning at all...
...These same men, opponents of controlled disarmament, have no ideas for preventing the spread of nuclear armaments to the smaller countries and to China...
...Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War is the wrap-up of this sort of thinking...
...5. Such alternatives are not perceived by men who themselves are avowedly apolitical or biased against democratic methods...
...They have thrown in the sponge...
...making a tidy system out of social catastrophes...
...2. Lacking a competent political theory and a will to challenge the Soviet system by political and economic methods, many American strategists have fallen into a sense of political futility...
...The militarists are the defeatists of democratic society...
...These men have supported a variety of military doctrines...
...The conservative mentality in the United States, which views independent organization by workers, and resulting multilateral decision-making in economic life, as a threat to the power of management, is incapable of proposing precisely that development as a competing and more desirable alternative to the Soviet system of monolithic decision-making...
...Such unbearable tension and feelings of helplessness to forestall "humiliating crises" and political defeats through political methods are expressed by the strategists of the arms race in a strong suicidal policy, to destroy the communists even at the cost of their own lives and the life of an entire society...
...The military-minded conservatives are driven to reliance on military methods and finally to reliance on military surprise attacks as possible ways of seizing initiative...
...The firmness with which they oppose disarmament is the firmness with which they believe in the weakness of political and economic democracy...
...Conservative political and military analysts have no coherent view on how to cope with the burgeoning Soviet political campaigns in Asia, Africa, and now in South America...
...Ironically, what parades as military realism is actually the politics of futility in estimating the competitive chance of democratic society...
...making it seem as though there is no way out but that of conservative military strategy...
...Their advice now includes World War III and mass suicide for this society...
...Theirs is the empty realism of failure and social suicide...
...The Soviet claim is that monolithic, authoritarian state control of society is the necessary condition for rapid economic growth...
...The American theorists for the schemes like arms control, however, show no promise of restraining the extension of the Soviet system when political and economic methods are used...
...The emphasis on military preparation, by its prolific using-up of materials and resources, becomes a cause of inability to accomplish the worldwide task of economic development that could forestall extension of the Soviet system...
...Its expansion has been sustained even while the United States has had nuclear military monopoly, superiority, and parallel capability...
...7. For the young nations this matter is important...
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...The main available gain from present military strategy is an effort to "destroy communism" and to "get it over with" even at the price of our own destruction...
...A military deadlock is not necessarily a political deadlock...
...The Soviets have a theory of how to use government for such decision-making...
...They proclaim that authoritarian, monolithic methods are necessary and inevitable...
...Disarmament, by contrast, requires as a precondition explicit coping with political and economic problems and includes within its methods a range of political effects that strengthen freedom in society at home and abroad...
...3. During the past fifteen years the Soviet economic and political system has shown vigor and dynamism at home and abroad...
...Arms control is a scheme for trying, by agreement, to equalize the major missile or other military capability of the Soviet Union and the United States, with the calculation that this would discourage each side from attacking the other and thus produce a condition of "stabilized deterrence...
...6. Managers of major industrial firms are unable to make a political case for the principle of independent unionization of workers when they themselves participate in a sustained struggle to restrict or even eliminate such unionization...
...This expression of weakness and implied defeat reveals the sterility of all arms race strategies...
...The democratic alternative must include the proposition that state initiative is perfectly satisfactory, but that the crucial difference lies in the existence of multilateral decision-making, the right of independent organization, in society, and accompanying democratic methods...
...theories of balance of terror...
...A military contest to the death with predictable mutual destruction of entire societies is the counsel of these defeatists whose explicit advice is couched in words of military strategy and alleged realism...
...One might think, from the ordinary meaning of the words, arms control, that this is some form of disarmament: the political-technical process of reversing the increasingly dangerous arms race...
...What do you mean by that...
...The arms race helps to confer a world victory to the Soviet system: in the economic sphere it does so by default...
...Formal victory in a major nuclear war would include gross destruction of all the societies insolved...
Vol. 8 • April 1961 • No. 2
