Alternatives to the H-Bomb

...No policy conceived in narrower terms promises better than catastrophe...

...Second: an authoritarian ideological structure, committed to a single system of truths, not open to challenge from within or correction from without...

...but as we stumbled through the jungle of the postwar world, secure in this self-imposed delusion, we gradually lost our own sense of direction...

...Because we failed to single him out...

...Each radioactive element is, as it were, a time-bomb whose operation cannot be turned off once the clock itself is wound up...

...From 1941 onward, the United States fought a global war without identifying the real enemy and therefore without taking precautions against him when, under temporary pressure from the outside, he appeared in the guise of an ally...

...and, finally, with the Marshall Plan...

...Our frozen official minds have not yet thawed sufficiently to realize that we cannot hope to transform official Soviet hostility and curb Soviet conquest without the active aid of millions of people who now loyally subscribe to the ideal of communism: the Welfare State writ large...

...Following the theory and practice of our fascist enemies, whose moral nihilism destroyed the very principle of restraint, the democratic powers took over genocide...

...It will require intelligence, imagination and audacity, all on a heroic scale but by no means of a superhuman order...

...the only freedom not open to any people is that of choosing fascism, for the sole reason that by its very nature it undermines and corrupts the possibility of human cooperation...

...and, at the end, we find that we have nothing left by way of an effective answer to our fears except the magic of a silver bullet: first the atom, now the hydrogen bomb...

...Many readers will undoubtedly recall his prescient articles on the Nazi menace, in The New Leader and elsewhere, and on the illusion of atomic omnipotence, primarily in Air Affairs...

...Instead of proceeding on the morbid assumption that we are the victims of processes we cannot control, we must produce sufficient flexibility of mind not to be irrevocably bound to old errors, and sufficient imagination to work out a fresh plan of campaign on a radically different series of premises...

...When this method was first used b\ the fascist powers in their bombing of Madrid...

...but if we require a reminder of the imperative need for a more disinterested approach, we need only ask ourselves how much free enterprise would be left after a total war between Soviet Russia and the United States, or how much of the "American way of life" would remain operative in a world left totally in cindery, radioactive ruins...

...The deep appeal behind Communism is that of abolishing the exploitation of human beings through the private control of the means of production...

...In this situation lies our strategic opportunity...

...Eventually, we must bring forth within the United Nations proposals for promoting the welfare of humanity as a whole which will make as much sense to the Russians as to ourselves...

...and we will awaken only jealousy, envy and resentment if we associate our international policy with the forces of monopolistic capitalism at home and reactionary class interests abroad...

...Though we have begun the headlong exploitation of atomic power (prompted partly perhaps by the hope that the positive uses would nullify the negative ones), the fact is that we have not yet found a practicable way of disposing of the fissionable by-products of atomic energy, even in small quantities, without any ultimate fear of regrettable consequences...

...But, before the war ended, the military forces of the United States had multiplied the technical weapons of mass extermination and had employed them on an even more devastating scale than the Fascists had done—if one leaves out the mass-production statistics of the Nazi crematoria...

...if that were so, all our schools would be run privately, as they were in England early in the nineteenth century, and only the wealthy could afford an education...

...But the fact that they exist is no excuse for American inertia and inaction...

...Unless the American people brings into this situation leaders capable of halting our present fatal automatisms and making a fresh start, the outlook will grow increasingly darker...

...quite the contrary...

...and, despite the fact that history has completely discredited the Chamberlains and the Borahs, their ghosts go marching on...

...Used in unlimited quantities, augmented by the hydrogen bomb, our new weapons offer as great a threat to the rest of mankind, including ourselves, as they do to our enemy...

...After 1945, the peoples of the world had a "safe" period of three years that should have been devoted, exclusively, to transforming the United Nations into an organ of world cooperation capable of safeguarding mankind from war and atomic genocide by promoting justice...

...Warsaw, London, Rotterdam and Coventry, almost every American regarded genocide as the monstrosity it actually is...

...One ordinary bombing raid on Tokyo caused 180,000 casualties in a single night...

...We believed, officially, that the atom bomb made us invulnerable...

...If we had enough instruments of genocide to make continental Russia uninhabitable, we should also automatically bring disaster to the rest of the human race, including ourselves...

...Although throughout history mass extermination had indeed been practiced on a limited scale, it remained for the Second World War to replace the ancient art of warfare with the general practice of random and unrestricted extermination...

...We ourselves must offer the choice, not between fascist domination' by the Kremlin or capitalist domination by the United Stales, but between all forms of domination and the true alternative, active world cooperation, with the advanced nations lending their resources, their wealth, and above all their more mature political and technical leadership toward the uplift of the depressed and impoverished masses of mankind...

...If the United States had the intelligence and spirit to lead such a campaign, it could turn the cold war into a genuine peace...

...We must reinforce the Voice of America, which can be easily muffled, with the Acts of America—acts so broadly conceived that they will make allies and co-partners of those who under present fascist (alias Communist) leadership have regarded themselves as inevitable enemies...

...No change that these young men underwent to prepare themselves for combat is harder than that which we must now collectively make under equally dire compulsion in order to lay the foundations for peace...

...it is, by necessity, equally hostile to the majority of its own citizens, just to the degree that they have any tendency to act as autonomous groups or as self-directing persons...

...Not the least extraordinary fact about the postwar period is that mass extermination has awakened so little moral protest...

...Any nation or political group that hopes to achieve power and influence today must take this appeal as its starting point and show that there are better means of attaining it than through the technique of terrorism, suppression and party control that Russia has so efficiently perfected...

...On the present terms, the United States has no other course than appeasement or intensified preparation for war—a war in which there will be no victor...

...Almost as paralyzing is a kind of mental block which takes the form of saying: Politics is the "science of the possible...

...He told them that their lot would be all but insupportable and that he could promise them nothing in the way of immediate victory—nothing, indeed, except that they were about to live through their finest hour...

...Numbed by years of cold war, official Washington has not yet caught up sufficiently with the new demands of the world situation...

...we who should have led the fight for a genocide pact and asked for a world assize of scientific knowledge on the dangers to the planet from using atomic energy in peace and war...

...This safety derived from the fact that every country was too harrowed and exhausted to think of resuming a military offensive, and from the further fact that Russia could not in this limited period, even with the aid of public information and well-planted spies, produce an atom bomb...

...This valuable interval was only halfheartedly used by the United States...

...Similarly, the TVA is as characteristic of our American economy as du Pont or General Motors...

...Just as our Constitution wisely provides for a mixed system of government, with democratic, oligarchic and monarchic features, so our own system of production has, by more empirical methods, become mixed...

...The miracle of stopping our present war with Russia and averting total catastrophe is still within human scope...

...for the fact is that the use of enough atomic energy to lay Soviet Russia low could likewise contaminate the living spaces of the planet and, as Professor Herbert J. Muller has pointed out, might radically alter the genes in many lower organisms, even if it did not immediately destroy human life...

...Fortunately, Soviet fascism is not merely hostile to every country outside the Iron Curtain...

...Third: a monolithic economic structure organized primarily for the purpose of military ascendancy, with a policy of economic and military conquest framed solely to guarantee self-sufficiency and do away with the need for friendly international cooperation on a give-and-take basis...

...matters that affect the balance of life on this planet, a delicate balance already badly upset by the needless exploitation of nature that has been going on at an accelerated pace, have been treated solely as if they were military or economic problems...

...Hundreds of millions of these people live in China, and India, and other parts of Asia, in the satellite countries, above all—one should emphasize—in Russia...

...In this situation, it is useless to blame the Soviet leaders, encased in dogma and cut off from reality by ideological barriers more impenetrable than any physical obstacle...

...Countries that possess our present instruments of unlimited genocide must either bring about on open world or perish within a closed world...

...Let us put them to work before it is too late...

...By now, the cold war has produced frozen minds on both sides of the Iron Curtain—minds so numbed that they are incapable of inventing alternative plans to the ones that have failed, or only partly succeeded...

...A new book, entitled In the Name of Sanity, will be published by Harcourt, Brace this fall...

...In view of the fact that the instruments of genocide will become more universal and more devastating, the sooner a showdown takes place the better—provided that we bring to the occasion positive plans and blueprints which will bring about a constructive resolution of our difficulties...

...Under the pressures and anxieties of the war, our government overlooked this critical fact about Soviet Russia...

...Actually, England was saved (and the world was saved, too) because Churchill told the English not what they would have liked to hear, but what they needed to hear in order to bear the day's burden...

...The first step out of the present impasse, it seems to me, is to admit the existence of a whole series of alternatives that have not yet been explored...

...Used in limited quantities, the atom bomb brings no guarantee of swift, easy and certain victory...

...These qualities exist in every country...

...The childish belief that a few atom bombs dropped on the Kremlin would enable the democratic world to live happily ever after is a fairy story that should never for an instant have been seriously entertained by grown men...

...We have achieved nothing, because of our persistent failure to identify the system that seeks to degrade and enslave mankind, and because instead we have centered our attack on the one element in Russia that is humanly defensible, whether or not it is desirable its communism...

...So, too, the transformation of the skeptical, cynical, debunked, mainly pacifist younger generation of Americans into tough fighters who beat the Nazis at their own game...

...Though our country is still drugged by official secrecy, a policy that spells eventual death to our democratic institutions, no small minority now understands that the development of atomic weapons has produced the maximum of insecurity with the minimum amount of human control...

...We cannot change the minds and methods of the Kremlin until we first change our own...

...To Russian hostility and aggressiveness we opposed the passive policy of military containment—as if a political idea could be contained by anything but another greater and more universal political idea...

...As much radioactive material as is used on a watch dial can be tolerated by the wearer of the watch...

...With the invention of the atom bomb, the United States stepped into a role on the international stage not unlike that of the Emperor Jones in Eugene O'Neill's play...

...Yet, even if they established a ratio of a thousand bombs to one against Russia, their very success might defeat their ends...

...For even the continued use of the ancient name of "Communist" is a fraud on the part of the Kremlin fascists...

...On this carefully circumscribed definition, Soviet Russia has long been a full-fledged fascist state...

...such a mobilization would shake the Kremlin worse than an earthquake...

...Perhaps the figure would be a little more accurate if one said that we have a whole cartridge belt of silver bullets, but, like so many of the magic gifts in ancient fairy stories, there is an unexpected penalty attached to their use: The result of using all of them might be to wipe out our friends and allies as well as our enemy...

...Any effective alternatives to catastrophe must be generously conceived: They must lead our one-time enemies, the Russians, no less than ourselves, to a common freedom and an open world...

...To combat the Kremlin's false ideology, we must have something equally dynamic to give to the world...

...It was we, not Russia, who should have waged peace on behalf of mankind against its active enemies—we who should have registered honest horror against the method of extermination...

...And it is a relatively new danger...

...We must replace the appeasers who have never understood fascism, in either its Nazi or its Communist forms, with militant leaders who know that we shall not prevail against the fascists of the "Left" with the aid of fascists of the Right, such as Franco, Chiang Kai-shek and the authoritarian leaders of a "united Germany...

...It is not the atom bomb, but our willingness to use any instruments of genocide, that constitutes the all-enveloping danger...

...But each time, for lack of courage and conviction, we restricted the content of what we were doing to an act of material succor and failed to grasp its ideal goal...

...His article launches a series on this theme to which The New Leader has invited more than 50 prominent political, cultural and scientific leaders...

...To the monolithic economic system of the Soviets we should oppose, not a fictitious version of our own economy in an equally monolithic form, but the actual pluralistic system which allows the greatest variety and play to whatever economic forces and institutions, private or public, will efficiently further the common good...

...If politics means anything today, it must become the "art of the impossible...

...This is not a moral but a physical problem, and it applies in the smallest instance as well as the largest...

...In holding to this view, the State Department does the Russian Government the diplomatic courtesy of assuming that its present leadership is permanent and its present policy final...

...Once we are ready seriously to canvass alternatives, we shall perhaps be surprised to find how wide a field is still open to exploration and action...

...Though our country's educational system is as communistic in the Platonic sense as Russia's, we reduce our influence in other lands by pretending that we are governed only by the belief in private profit...

...it gave us an excuse for the shortsighted policy of dismantling our army and navy instead of providing the incentive to take the lead in establishing an effective world government...

...So people kept on hoping during the period when the Nazis, like the Communists today, moved triumphantly on the path of "peaceful" aggression and domination...

...The cobalt bomb, we are told, could achieve this goal even more directly...

...Among those who have accepted our invitation are W. Averell Harriman, Senator John F. Kennedy, Denis Healey, MP, Chester Bowles, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Kohn, Edward Crankshaw and Norman Thomas...

...But if the experience of the last fifteen years proves anything, this platitude is as empty as it is mealy-mouthed...

...If we have any serious intention of enlisting the peoples of the world in the cause of effective world government, the condition for justice and peace, we must correct the naive error we have made...

...That, in its way, was a miracle—comparable to the one needed today...

...and, in the postwar revulsion, we made the mistake of identifying our enemy as Communism rather than fascism...

...To contain Soviet Russia, we must include her...

...Mumford has served as professor at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania and has lectured widely in Great Britain as well as the United States...

...Behind such a policy would be the great body of Americans who approved of such measures as Lend-Lease and the Marshall Plan—people who, in view of the universal danger we share, are now ready for far bolder measures, entailing even heavier immediate sacrifices...

...The first is the notion that, if only the present showdown can be postponed, some yet undetected agent will save us from the final catastrophe...

...This enemy was and continues to be fascism...

...what was that, whether viewed as a technical or as a moral achievement, if not a gigantic miracle...

...Our policy toward Russia, it seems to me, has been undermined mainly by two things: (1) an illusion of power and superiority based on our original command of the atom bomb, and (2) a commitment to the cold war as the only weapon usable against Russia, which has made it impossible for our government even to envisage the conditions necessary for peace, must less produce them...

...The great danger from this situation lies in the fact that the present stereotyped attitudes of both the American and the Russian Governments can lead, in the end, to only one outcome: total catastrophe...

...It is as if the Secretary of Agriculture had authorized the sale of human meat during a meat shortage, and everyone had accepted cannibalism in daily practice as a clever dodge for reducing the cost of living...

...It is about mankind and the future of the human race that we must now be concerned...

...In terms of the "possible," we have only two courses open: suicide by appeasement or suicide by "war...

...Thus, we persistently gave the ideological advantage back to Soviet Russia—despite its ruthless schemes for world conquest and world dictatorship...

...We must replace the hopeful romanticists, both military and political, who so consistently underrated Soviet Russia's and Communist China's present military strength by more able realists who do not make this error, but who also understand the nature of the Kremlin's potential political weakness...

...What we can offer these people, through world government and peace, is not capitalism but freedom—freedom of association, freedom of speech and intercourse, freedom of travel, freedom of movement, freedom of choice...

...First: a totalitarian political structure, governed by a permanent single party, using terrorism and enslavement as a method of political control...

...In O'Neill's play, you will remember, silver bullets killed the Emperor Jones...

...we who should have baited the Kremlin with being unwilling to take the first steps toward atomic control and should have come up with alternative proposals when Russia flatly rejected the Baruch Plan...

...That freedom of choice involves the ability to accept or reject capitalism, socialism, cooperation or free enterprise or to determine their combination...

...Now fascism can be identified under all its guises by three main characteristics, all of which must be present to differentiate it from slightly less poisonous kinds of authoritarianism and absolutism...

...policy Alternatives to the H-Bomb By LEWIS MUMFORD The explosion of the Soviet and American hydrogen bombs has brought to a head the grave issues originally raised by the use of instruments of random extermination (genocide...

...each time, we cut our aid short at the very moment it was ready to be made into an instrument for worldwide cooperation, beyond any mere act of self-preservative national interest...

...second, with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration...

...When intelligent people find themselves in the situation I have described, they do not, like an electronic calculator that has broken down, go on repeating the same frustrated operation automatically, without being able to correct it...

...The dynamic part of Soviet Communism consists of a technique of terrorism masked by an idea of human improvement...

...The clear fact is that the increase of atomic power has brought about a decrease of real security...

...They were fired by savages who had copied his magic...

...None of these data can be teased out of existence by a mere show of good will or circumvented by any diplomatic overtures...

...It is not the communism of the Soviet Constitution, but the fascism of the Soviet Government, that presents the greatest obstacle to world cooperation...

...The failure to understand the change in method and purpose that has taken place through the transformation of warfare into genocide has given an air of specious unreality to all our plans for controlling the production of atomic energy...

...They would doubtless excuse their backwardness by saying that they see no way of overcoming the deep Soviet hostility to international cooperation...

...At each critical point, our statesmanship, though capable of initiating a great idea, was unable, because of contradictory reservations, to follow it up...

...As was early set forth by the Italian General Douhet, "total war," seeking to make the fullest employment of air power, promised to bring about the results of military victory at the smallest possible risk to the aggressor—not primarily by engaging the enemy's armies, but by terrorizing and exterminating the civilian population...

...The hypocrisy of our age, which has sought to make barbarism palatable by applying traditional and honorable names to its practices (the Russians call their savage despotism "democracy"), has led us to call mass extermination by a false name: total war...

...At the end of the safe period, we had more atom bombs and less security than ever before...

...we made a series of shoddy deals with the enemy, disguised as Darlan, as Stalin, as Chiang Kai-shek, which culminated in the postwar period with our massive folly in rebuilding German power...

...The atom bomb only wrapped up this method of extermination in a neater, and apparently cheaper, package...

...but if the walls and ceiling of the room where he worked and every object of furniture and dress were coated with the same radioactive material, it would be inimical to his life...

...The people who sacrifice even principle to expediency, every long-range plan to immediate profit, are the people who live in a world of slippery fantasies and self-deceptions...

...and the ability to change the proportions of private, cooperative and public enterprise has made it capable of meeting situations that would have ruined a more watertight capitalist system...

...Between our present negative policy and one more generously conceived there is the difference that there is between fighting a disease and promoting health...

...None of our wild random shots has caused these frightening images to disappear...

...Instead, we have let Russia identify the United States as the proponent of war and genocide, and by our one-sided actions and preparations we have accepted that role, with a mixture of guilty anxiety and self-righteous bravado...

...At this point, anyone who thinks of the future of atomic energy in terms of the fate of his country alone has already betrayed his country...

...To achieve this state, we must cleanse ourselves of the counter-fascism we have developed in responding to Soviet Russia's challenge...

...Up to 1942, the American Army even boasted of the fact that it practiced only "pinpoint" bombing of selected military targets...

...Instead, they retrace their course and look for new openings and new approaches...

...Two current habits of mind stand in the way of exploring new alternatives...

...Decisions of utmost importance to the human race as a whole have been made as though only the interests of a single country need be taken into account...

...This is the fundamental fact that made it so easy for Stalin to collaborate actively with Hitler from August 1939 to June 1941...

...Such alternatives cannot be conceived in terms of furthering capitalist enterprise or national interest...

...If we go on piling up the blunders in judgment that began with our original exploitation of the atom bomb, not only the downfall of civilization but the possible extermination of the human race is in sight...

...In the utter hopelessness and panic of the depression in 1933, the audacious measures undertaken by the Roosevelt Administration, often in contradiction to preelection commitments, restored public confidence, encouraged enterprise and brought about production through hitherto unthinkable uses of public credit and public aid to the unemployed...

...Three times, we had such an idea within our grasp: first, with the Lend-Lease program...

...presently, as night overtook us, menacing fears and specters arose in our own minds, making ever louder the ominous beat of the distant Russian war-drums...

...That view is possibly correct?but only provided the United States remains equally set in all its present attitudes, including its opposition, more discreet but no less rigid than Russia's, toward surrendering a sufficient amount of American "sovereignty" to make world government possible...

...In other words, man is now playing with a new kind of fire, a fire that he has the power to ignite but not to put out...

...Not understanding the paradox of atomic power, our leaders have sought to achieve security for the United States by vastly increasing the production of nuclear energy and multiplying the number of atom bombs at our command...

...That kind of thinking is not good enough...

...Lewis Mumford, writer, educator and humanist, has been a life-long democrat and a profound critic of our industrial civilization over period of three decades...

...Their paranoid hostility and suspicion, their avowed plans for ultimate world conquest, their dependence upon terrorism and isolation to overcome their own sense of inferiority and insecurity, must all be taken as fixed data for future action by democratic governments...

...By this, those who take this position mean that any proposal which involves difficulties and sacrifices of a greater order than people normally accept must be carefully kept from view in order to spare the feelings of all concerned...

...Above all, we must rid ourselves of fascism's secret weapon—the cult of official secrecy, with its menacing immunity to intelligent scrutiny and moral appraisal...

...This has given Russia an immense appeal to the other nations of the world, not on the basis of performance but on the basis of verbal professions of peace...

...Only a policy broad enough to include these great masses of impoverished and oppressed people, not by offering temporary gifts and sops but by long-term plans of world cooperation, can give us the lever necessary to dislodge the present masters of the Kremlin or, at the very least, bring about a radical alteration of their long-established policy...

...As the first step toward mastering the present situation, we must understand the paradox of atomic power: The greater amount of atomic power we command, the more danger there is to those who use it...

...Once we clarified this issue honestly, we could bring about a mobilization of humanity on behalf of world order...

...An editor of several magazines between 1919 and 1936, he is the author of The Story of Utopias (1922), Sticks and Stones (1924), The Brown Decades (1931), The Culture of Cities (1938), Men Must Act (1939), Faith for Living (1940), The South in Architecture (1941), Values for Survival (1946), Green Memories (1947), and Art and Technics (1951), in addition to the classics, Technics and Civilization (1934), The Condition of Man (1944) and The Conduct of Life (1951...

...In terms of the "science of the possible," England should have surrendered to Germany between July 1940 and June 1941...

...Once the American people realize that there are active alternatives to our present policy, and a better strategy than containment and watchful waiting, they may turn the heat upon the frozen minds that have, in all good conscience, helped to create the present impasse...