Alternatives to the H-Bomb

...That the struggle which threatens us may he atomic and total renders it no less contemptible...

...Chester Bowles (right) is the former V. S. Ambassador to India and author of Ambassador's Report...

...We must never reject the opportunity to confer and negotiate, regardless of irritations and repeated failures...

...The least that the most timid of us can do is not to add to this immense dead weight that nature drags along...

...Choice, after all, is the lifeblood of freedom...

...What alternatives are left for us to choose...

...Why do we leave it to the Indian Prime Minister to apologize publicly on behalf of mankind to the Japanese fishermen who were the innocent bystanders...

...On those occasions when we deliberately exercise choice, the results have often been negative and disheartening...

...The least that the less timid of us can do is to go out into this generation and stand for the essential truths of our time—that man's future on earth need not be canceled...

...So far, we have given the harried new governments of South Asia less than a third of what we gave to Chiang Kai-shek...

...Why are we not saying the things Americans were born to say...

...else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle...

...When we discriminate against minority groups, we are not only exercising a prerogative that we can no longer afford, but we are making a moral estimate of the inferiority of a fellow human being...

...Why else, but for choice, were we placed on earth...

...Whether these alternatives are semantic or substantial, in them can be seen the handiwork of extremists who thrive on posing false choices between bitter extremes...

...Is it not obvious for all who have eyes to see that we must get on with the business of solving the fundamental problems which are at the heart of the world's sickness, regardless of what Russia says or does...

...We shall have no relief from this challenge, and we deserve none...

...The H-bomb has heightened our military insecurity in the context of this worldwide revolt, and the relation of the two problems should not be forgotten...

...The bombs are an awesome and speculative threat to all men on earth...

...that we need not resign ourselves to catastrophe...

...Men of good conscience cannot admit, even to one another, that they have reached that point until the day the bombs begin to fall...

...No one will deny that the choices we have to make on significant matters have become increasingly uncomfortable...

...Let us cut loose from the psychological grip that the Kremlin seems to have fastened upon us...

...to work with is variations on old and universal themes...

...Russia cannot veto enlightened leadership in Washington, or active good will in the hearts of the American people...

...The H-bomb has arrived at a time when much of the world is seething with revolt against the status quo...

...This does not mean that we should cease to propose plans for workable atomic control, enforceable disarmament and a stronger UN...

...Maurice Maeterlinck warned us a generation ago that at every crossway on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past...

...When the emergency refugee program is cluttered up with administrators and regulations out of sympathy with the spirit of the legislation, it is not just an administrative matter, but a moral one, too...

...Russia cannot veto a United Nations World Development Authority...

...Such efforts are called for, both by the very remote chance that Soviet leaders may eventually moderate their announced objectives, and by the necessity for repeated demonstrations to the world that our own aims are peaceful...

...From others, it has alternately been bored and dismayed by what seems to be a calculated effort to reduce major policy statements to the lowest common denominator of domestic political abstraction...

...And the essential morality involved in these dilemmas is inescapable: ?When our budget-cutters throttle Point Four, they profess to make an economic judgment, but it is a moral one as well...

...Our recent fumbling on the Communist threat in Southeast Asia shows how ineffectual a single-minded military approach is likely to be...

...Others have an excellent right to be concerned, because our current decisions must often dictate theirs as well...

...When our Government conditions our willingness to participate in a UN world-development authority on Russian agreement to a probably unobtainable disarmament program, we disappoint the hopes of half the world...

...This gives us added pause for thought, for selecting the destiny of others is a delicate business?particularly when we are not at all sure how soundly we might have decided for ourselves alone...

...He has also been an advertising man, Democratic Governor of Connecticut and head of the Office of Price Administration...

...Why did we leave it to Mr...

...Americans, fed on snappy slogans and largely on the lookout for cheap and simple solutions, may be disturbed to find that these alternatives are not new...

...What glee such confusion must create in Moscow and Peking...

...they merely exploit them...

...All we have This is the fifth article in the series initiated in the June 28 issue of The New Leader by Lewis Mum-ford...

...Let us, at long last, stop our unbecoming flattery to the Pied Pipers of Moscow...

...Despite the urgency of the hour, there is obviously no basis for a permanent settlement with the Soviet bloc as long as the Kremlin commits itself to the goal of world revolution...

...The H-bombs have simply dramatized and sharpened into immediate focus some long-standing human dilemmas...

...Russia cannot veto an atomic-energy pool agreed to by those nations which wish to cooperate without her...

...that some things, like war and injustice, may seem everlasting, but that these things are everlastingly wrong, must be everlastingly fought, and must some day be conquered...

...Even the bad men of Moscow have pitched their appeal to the poor and the disinherited...

...In the last eighteen months, our policy-makers have given us impossible alternatives, many of them so sloganized as to be empty of content...

...It is wiser and cheaper to help them succeed now in building healthy, strong democracies than to leap in later with giant, noisy, but ineffective restoratives when collapse or civil war is under way...

...Some have argued that greater assistance to Chiang would have turned the tide in China...

...Have we no choices but those presented by the despairing...

...Within the first six months of 1954, the State Department has come full circle from the announcement of the new-look "massive retaliation' policy to the ill-timed statement that we would not intervene in Indo-China "unless the whole nature" of Communist aggression in Asia is changed...

...Even the most partisan interpreters of Communism's victory in China should draw from this disaster one essential lesson: It is time for us to turn our united attention to the greater part of Asia which is still non-Communist, and to encourage the kind of developments there which will make further Communist victories impossible...

...There are more hopeful alternatives to an H-bomb future, alternatives more in keeping with our traditions and our principles...

...How shall good men associate to avert it...

...Security itself has meaning mostly for those who have something to preserve...

...Russia cannot veto the growth of successful UN agencies like the WHO, the FAO, UNESCO, the Children's Fund, and the General Assembly itself...

...Our hypersensitivity to our immediate military-security problem may itself seem callous to our fellow human beings, who are so largely poor, so largely hungry, so largely sick, and so largely treated as inferior...

...It would be reassuring to have their support now for constructive policies in what remains of free Asia...

...This revolt takes many forms: nationalism and anti-colonialism in Asia and Africa, intense frustration with the cold-war conflict in Europe, the struggle of the Negro against second-class citizenship in the United States, the fight for agrarian reform and industrialization in all underdeveloped areas...

...When local vigilantes become hysterical over the UN, they demonstrate not just a quirkish provincialisin but a lack of moral balance...

...Why are such words not on the lips of Lincoln's countrymen at home and across the world...

...If we shrug our shoulders and default to uncertain leadership, none of us can evade individual, moral responsibility for a historic betrayal...

...It is all the more so: Its very contemptibility makes it a more transcendent disgrace, a more universal blasphemy...

...Moreover, the world around us is mightily exercised about the choices we Americans make and refuse to make...

...They have stolen our slogans and parodied our principles...

...From some of our leaders, the world has seen a boisterous fluctuation from one untenable position to another...

...The nature of the present Communist aggression is precisely what frustrates us...

...that our political ingenuity still may rescue us from ruin...

...But who can respect power that is powerless to promote peace...

...We who have power want others to respect it...

...Promises to penalize "overt aggression" by military means are hardly adequate to deal with the more likely contingencies of internal popular turmoil, manipulated and eventually led by Communists, but with its roots deep in misery, oppression and poverty...

...The Communists do not create these popular issues...

...Let us not forget that there are some important things that the Russians cannot do...

...Our leaders have asked us to choose between preventive war and appeasement, "containment" and "liberation," "massive retaliation" and "falling dominoes" in Southeast Asia, "give-away programs" and a tariff-ridden "trade, not aid" proposal, a domestic economy "within our means" and "virtual bankruptcy...

...Russia cannot veto the peaceful use of atomic energy, nor the gift of an industrial atomic plant to India, as Justice Douglas recently proposed...

...The world has been watching all of this, and has found us wanting...

...Why did we, who dropped the first big bombs in Asia, return to practice our new ones there...

...We must expose the hypocrisy of the Communists the only convincing way we can: by ending our own...

...We cannot ignore this apocalyptic appeal, this false vision of a classless society, this hollow cry of brotherhood, this empty claim to offer a society based on justice...

...We do ill to forget this...

...Yet, there are a number of more immediate problems which for most of mankind are equally threatening and indeed may be equally deadly...

...It is a shabby stunt on their part, but it may in the long run be productive of much good...

...Whether our choices are conscious or not, we cannot avoid them...

...We must disengage ourselves from the pursuit of piques and phantoms that can never contribute to freedom or safety, and instead devote our time and talents to making the long-postponed inroads on the human problems that matter...

...It is defeatist and intolerable to say that we have reached a point of no return where all decent choice is foreclosed...

...Reacting to this discomfort, we tend to retire into the unconscious choices of apathy and neglect...

...America, once the hope of history, has lately been providing only slender fare for the minds and affections of the world's two billion people...

...ft is exactly the kind of aggression that we have not yet been astute enough to meet...

...that our moral standards still are here...

...Ideas, not threats, will stir men's souls...

...But I am increasingly convinced that the Uncommitted World deserves our main attention and our sustained efforts...

...Nehru again, at the recent Ceylon Conference, to paraphrase the words from our greatest Inaugural: "With malice toward none, with charity for all...