Alternatives to the H-Bomb

...Until quite recently, most democratic governments would not have objected strongly to such a description of their common aim...

...Congress's unwillingness to take even the first steps toward a better foreign-trade policy, the increasing tendency to treat the United Nations as an instrument for the pursuit of national ends and to ignore it when it cannot fulfil this function, the refusal to cooperate in a possible policy for Asia while failing to produce any alternative—such behavior has given wings to neutralism all over the world and has left even America's firmest allies uncertain where to move...

...It requires also the replacement of colonial attitudes by a type of political cooperation compatible with the dignity of the Asian and African states...

...Such examples could be multiplied in every field...

...But, of course, these contradictions were not discovered or invented by Karl Marx...

...Third, we must try to provide around the fringes of our new international community enough conventional armed forces to deal with local aggression on the spot...

...the cold war can be won only with the weapons of the past and the politics of the future...

...It is here, I think, that America's present adherence to the politics of the past may be disastrous...

...No objective observer of the world scene can deny that the "capitalist" world is subject to the internal "contradictions" which Marx and Lenin so often defined and exploited—the conflict of classes in every state, the conflicts of national interest among the industrialized states of the Atlantic basin, and the wider conflicts of interest and aspiration between the rich white Atlantic peoples and the poor colored peoples of Asia and Africa...

...For even a dozen H-bombs, accurately delivered, could destroy America's industrial capacity, if not her will to fight...

...Above all, a relaxation of the pressure on Red China will reveal the existence of two rival centers of power in the Communist camp...

...And one of Dulles's first statements on taking office was that the purpose of NATO was to produce EDC...

...In other words, so long as the cold war remains cold, it will have to be fought with the weapons of the past...

...Thus, the fear of retaliation in kind will exert quite as powerful a deterrent on America's use of atomic bombs as on the Soviet Union...

...To give one example: Europe welcomed NATO in 1949 not only as guaranteeing American support against Soviet aggression, but also as the foundation of a permanent Atlantic Community within which France and Germany might heal their ancient feud...

...Dienbienphu was, of course, the classic example...

...Men like George Kennan and Hans Morgenthau have undoubtedly done valuable work in exposing the utopianism which has often characterized American foreign policy...

...The democratic answer is to build a new international community by the free cooperation of independent governments...

...Atomic bombardment could have done nothing to help the French troops in the beleaguered fortress, and China itself is less vulnerable to atomic bombing than any other major power...

...compel the free nations to resort to world war...

...But it means that, though atomic strength is necessary to prevent the cold war from becoming a hot war...

...I do not think Americans realize how much their prestige in the free world has fallen since the high peak it reached in 1950 at the outbreak of the Korean War...

...In fact, NATO has not lived up to its early promise of becoming something more than a purely military alliance...

...In a way, the cold war is a struggle between two solutions to this problem...

...In Asia, policies have been designed with too little care for the real feelings of those on whom their success depends...

...But few of America's friends believe that the squalid picture America has presented in this field is more than a passing phase...

...Furthermore, the "new look" is based on the tacit assumption that the Communist camp cannot reply in kind to atomic attack...

...On the contrary, the West's readiness to use its atomic weapons in a world war is the best deterrent against the Communists deliberately initiating a world war...

...He has contributed to New Fabian Essays and edited The Curtain Falls, a collection of Eastern European accounts of the postwar Communist enslavement...

...We desperately need a return to the mood which inspired the great strides forward from 1946 to 1950, when American idealism was leading the free world toward a new international society based on freedom and consent...

...This would be an invitation to the Communists to proceed by a series of piecemeal satellite aggressions, none of which taken alone would seem to any democratic people sufficient reason for invoking the ultimate sanction of global suicide...

...Unless America can restore Europe's confidence in her readiness to develop NATO as originally planned, both the defense and the unity of Europe will be in danger...

...The Communist solution is to concentrate all power in the world at a single center, and to maintain this monolithic structure by force and terror...

...Both in its practical operation and in recent interpretations of it ex cathedra, American foreign policy now seems to be based on a sort of Machtpolitik totally inappropriate to the problems of the cold war...

...Men like McCarthy and McCarran, of course, carry a heavy responsibility...

...In a few years' time, it will be completely false...

...they also sapped faith in NATO as a means of halting Soviet aggression...

...the Dienbienphu fiasco only confirmed the lesson of Korea...

...If the "new look" really meant what Republican advertising men have said it means, it would entail the certain defeat of the West in the cold war...

...For America's power within the free world is so decisive that no country can afford to commit itself to a course without knowing in advance how America's action will affect it...

...ALTERNATIVES TO THE H-BOMB The Politics of the Future, The Weapons of the Past By Denis Healey If, as a European Socialist, I had to sum up my criticism of current American policy in a single phrase, it would be this: America is hoping to win the cold war with the politics of the past and the weapons of the future...

...Second, we must launch a general campaign to win the understanding and support of the Asian and African peoples...

...If this much can be achieved, then there is no reason why the two world systems should not coexist indefinitely...

...All this talk of peripheral strategy, with its diplomatic counterpart in the balance of power, means disaster in a world of which a third is already organized by a centralized tyranny fundamentally hostile to all other states...

...They arise primarily from the will to power which is inherent in all human beings and of which economic wealth is only one of the material instruments...

...The shift in Soviet tactics seemed to reduce the urgency of the new process...

...In Europe, the resurgence of Western Germany as the strongest Continental power looks as if it may shatter a political framework which was based on other assumptions...

...Democrats aim to eliminate, or at least control, these contradictions so that they do not threaten the development of the new international community which should arise out of cooperation on common interests...

...So unless the peoples of the world can rapidly transcend crude power politics —at least sufficiently to prevent world war—the operation of the will to power is likely to produce a new and perhaps a final catastrophe...

...Much more serious is what foreign observers are beginning to see as America's drift away from the internationalism which she adopted in the years following the war and on which the behavior of nearly all other democratic countries was posited...

...This should not be a party issue in the United States, for Willkie and Vandenberg were prophets of the new approach which Truman and Acheson helped to apply in practice...

...More than that, if the democratic world will only relax some of its pressures on the Communist world, then the internal contradictions of Communism may well disintegrate that system...

...In fact, we face a long period of "coexistence" during which the Communist camp will use every means of expansion save those which might This is the third article in the series begun on June 28 by Lewis Mumford and continued by Hans Kohn and Norman Thomas, Denis Healey is the Labor Member of Parliament for South East Leeds...

...It is doubtful, however, whether the Communists will rely mainly on military force for expansion, unless the free nations are foolish enough to put all their strategic eggs in the atomic basket...

...must meet local aggression by any Communist state—or even any Communist party—with atomic bombardment of the heart of China and the Soviet Union...

...in any case of Communist aggression, America would have to choose between appeasement and an atomic world war for which her own cities were unprotected...

...Later threats that if EDC was not ratified America might withdraw her own troops from Europe and cease providing Europe with arms not only destroyed that European confidence in America on which EDC ratification depends...

...And where this is impossible, we must try to draw a juridical and moral frontier which will insure that, if a new aggression occurs, the United Nations will act, because it will appear to the whole world as a crime against international law like the aggression in Korea, as contrasted with the moral confusion in Indo-China...

...it can play little part in winning the cold war itself...

...Here America must realize that contemptuous refusal to understand the views of a man like Nehru, or support for economic exploitation by American firms abroad, smells just as much of white imperialism as the colonial techniques of the European states...

...First, we must strengthen and extend the Atlantic Community by consultation on all issues of mutual concern, by cooperation on all issues where a common interest is then accepted, and by integration on all issues, like defense, where the common interest is likely to be a lasting one...

...But, worst of all, the rest of the democratic world has been losing confidence that America is really determined to join in the international effort, much less lead it as her power requires...

...A major in the British Army during World War II, serving in North Africa and Italy, he has been a British delegate to the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe and to the Washington Conference of the Inter-Parliamenlary Union...

...But to abandon idealism because of the dangers of utopianism is to throw out the baby with the bath...

...When the Communists do use military force as a means of expansion, it is likely to be in places like Indo-China, where the use of major atomic weapons by their adversaries would be politically disastrous without being militarily decisive...

...But the strains which this new development imposes on national pride and prejudice have dangerously increased in the last few years...

...Marx simply added one valuable tool to an armory of analysis which has been growing since the time of Plato...

...But the Communists are most unlikely to provide America with cases where the use of major atomic weapons would be either militarily effective or politically wise...

...Though America will no doubt maintain a much larger stockpile of atomic weapons than the Soviet Union, once Russia has a few score fusion bombs America's numerical superiority will lose all meaning...

...What should be our general aims...

...And, to reverse Lenin's dictum, democracy may find that the shortest way to Moscow is through Peking...

...In trying to force its policies on unwilling allies by threats and blackmail, America is destroying the moral case against neutralism...

...Indeed, ordinary people have for years lumped all these "contradictions" together under the common phrase "power politics...

...Scientific developments in the twentieth century have given the problem of power politics agonizing importance by so immensely increasing the power available to states that even a small country with a moderate industry could develop the power to destroy life on this planet Simultaneously, they have shrunk time and space se drastically that all problems are global problems, and the brotherhood of man is a technological fact however much the politicians may deny it...

...This does not mean, of course, that the West should not prepare a stock of atomic weapons and be ready to use them in case of a world war...

...If the policy of "instant and massive retaliation at times and places of our own choosing" means anything, it means that the U.S...

...This requires an international development plan through which the present chasm between white and colored living standards may be reduced and Communism may lose its breeding ground of poverty...

...The so-called "new look" in American defense policy was shown to be impracticable during the MacArthur crisis in 1951...

...On the other hand, the use by America of atomic weapons to help France in Indo-China would have driven the whole of Asia and much of Europe into sympathy with the Communist camp...

...This assumption is highly doubtful even today...

...Communist doctrine since the October Revolution and Communist practice since 1952 suggest that the main aim of the Kremlin's strategy for the time being will be to exploit the divisions among its enemies...

...What particularly depresses a European is that behind the present paralysis in American policy there seems to be developing a new and dangerous mood on world affairs...

...Nor do they, as Marx claimed, arise primarily from economic causes...

...The Communists deliberately aggravate the contradictions of power in the free world in the hope that the resulting disintegration will allow them to assimilate it into their system...