Alternatives to the H-Bomb

...It would be foolish to deny that, so far, the victories of the cold war have nearly all been scored by the Communist powers...

...But the weapon is two-edged, and the high proportion of economic effort devoted to armaments in the Soviet Union can hardly contribute to the popularity of a regime already undermined by its brutal oppression of the nation, its concentration camps and its secret police...

...The East has a flag...

...The Soviet Union is every day courted as one of the "peace-loving" nations assembled in the UN to prevent or repel aggression (about which she ought to know something, since she was expelled from the League of Nations as an aggressor), so that the UN is like a vegetarian society with a butcher as chairman...

...Life is more complex than mere pacifists will ever believe...

...There must be a commonwealth of free nations set up at once with strict rules of membership...

...This matter of national sovereignty is often discussed upside-down...

...For at bottom the issue is one of faith...

...It was a pity that the issue was so swiftly shrunk to "liberation" vs...

...The East knows what it wants, but the West doesn't...

...And yet it is doubtful whether sovereignty is as indispensable for an international institution as authority...

...The American President and the British Prime Minister meet and issue a statement reaffirming their sympathy and loyalty to the oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe...

...The East is absolute and uncompromising...

...Franco Spain, suffering from an intellectual oppression such as Spain has never before known, not even under Philip II, is admitted to UNESCO and signs a treaty with the "land of the free" to liberate the world from that oppression of which she is an example...

...Such a flag was there for it to raise: the true liberation of all the peoples of the world from all the tyrannies which they still endure...

...The United States has made such a huge material effort toward the defense of the West that her generosity in this respect gives her a kind of moral alibi, blinding her to the fact that her policy is morally bankrupt...

...The actual application of the rules might be allowed to vary from country to country and from period to period, but under the close, active supervision of a supranational court empowered to report on the effectiveness and sincerity of the way they are applied in each nation...

...Such is the hope of Moscow...

...For lack of a clear purpose worthy of the peril, she is not leading at all...

...containment...

...The men who look up to it have neither the power nor the will to detect its insincerity...

...If the Berlin airlift is excepted, what else can the West show...

...ALTERNATIVES TO THE H-BOMB A Free World Commonwealth By Salvador de Madariaga The hydrogen bomb does not seem to alter in any essential way the situation which we have inherited from two World Wars...

...The rest is literature, and bad literature at that...

...From this point of view, a struggle for H-bomb supremacy could have excellent effects, since this weapon is exceedingly expensive and the U.S...

...This aim would, of course, have included liberation of the European nations beyond the Iron Curtain...

...These rules might be: government by consent of the governed, freedom of the press and of political parties, respect for individual freedom...

...It corresponds to some reality...

...No one believes in anything any more...

...Perhaps not...

...And what was that victory (so significant in itself) against the conquest of huge blocks of Europe, the continuous advance in Asia, and the loss of prestige the Soviet Union has inflicted on the West by the cavalier and callous behavior of her pilots toward military and civil Western aircraft...

...If such an organism had existed at the present time, the squabbles over the Guatemala affair and the loss of faith the episode has entailed would have been avoided...

...Armaments bear on the cold war in a twofold way: From the military point of view, they keep it cold and prevent it from becoming hot in areas wider than, say, Korea or Indo-China...

...None of your long-winded, all-embracing conventions on the Rights of Man, but a simple code of rules of minimum decency not to be transgressed on pain of expulsion or, better, of intervention by the community...

...He is author of the standard history of Spain, two volumes on the Spanish American Empire, and biographies of Columhus and Bolivar...

...the West has none...

...the West is relative and ready to negotiate...

...He was a pioneer in both the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Liberal International...

...The hammer and sickle has a universal appeal...

...The West has refused to adopt a flag as universal in its scope as the "liberation" or Sovietization of the whole world...

...Sovereignty is claimed as necessary for inter- or intranational institutions, and sacrifices of sovereignty are asked of individual nations...

...Limitations of armaments need not always be a factor working for peace...

...That the rearming of the West was indispensable and that it must be maintained at the highest possible level of efficiency, no one but a moron or a crypto-Communist would deny...

...As for individual nations, the trouble with them is not too much sovereignty but too little—the big ones because their freedom of choice (which is the core of sovereignty) is too often controlled by forces of a scope and an interest that are less than national, such as some big business or some party or demagogue...

...Now there is no freedom without world order, and the leaders of the West must start from scratch, since the UN, for the reasons stated above, has no moral authority...

...while the East is just playing for time or covering up a military operation (such as reinforcing a weakened front, as happened in Korea) or seeking to divide its enemies by skilful handling of divergent concessions (as happened at Geneval...

...Should we scrap the UN altogether...

...This can be no other but true liberation...

...While the Soviet Union is always ready to talk in conference in order to divide its opponents, the Western powers are always thinking of meetings "at the highest level," where, in the secrecy of the so-called Great Powers, continents are carved for the benefit of their countries but hardly for that of the continents themselves...

...The reason for such a paradoxical conclusion is that, since both sides are able to make and use this too-formidable weapon, both know that, were it to be touched off, they would suffer losses amounting to annihilation...

...from the economic point of view, they serve the interests of each side by upsetting the economic life of the other...

...The aim of the East is the liberation of all the proletariat from the oppression of the capitalists, and the shallow, indeed old-fashioned, side of this slogan is forgotten because it is overlaid by its universality...

...But its scope would have been much wider...

...Thus, when the West negotiates it is serving both its ends and its means, since negotiation is...

...and the ink of this statement is not yet dry when the two leaders sing the praises of peaceful coexistence, which means that their loyalty and sympathy for the Eastern Europeans were but empty words...

...The hydrogen bomb has therefore increased the unlikelihood of a general hot war, an unlikelihood which was already apparent owing to the lesson learned from the two World Wars and the frustration in their wake...

...All this and much more of the same nauseating character has afflicted the West with a skepticism which can lead only to defeatism...

...It dramatizes it, but that is about all...

...But let the free West cease using the UN as a pretext for not getting on with its own organization...

...But authority is not a thing that can be granted by a piece of paper...

...and, while it has not come to a proletarian revolution yet, the weight of armaments undoubtedly is one of the elements in the unrest prevailing in Italy, France and even Britain...

...The issue, therefore, is not how to find an alternative to the hydrogen bomb, but how to win the cold war-a state of affairs in which the fear of a hot war is but one of the factors...

...Therefore, the true way should be to build up a Western faith...

...The West has no common aim: The small powers want to be left in peace: the big powers want to pursue the old policy of domination tempered by "balance of power...

...For lack of such leadership, Great Britain falls back on her traditional empiricism and, instead of the banner of freedom, which made her great in her great days, raises the standard of "business as usual...

...This program implies the reorganization of the world of the "almost-free" nations to put them clearly and squarely on the road to complete freedom?and, of course, the almost-free means all the West...

...Perhaps it had better carry on its muddleheaded, ill-tempered debates, in which the arguments spring from different planes and speak mutually unintelligible idioms...

...So much for the bearing of armaments on the cold war...

...It is this real building up of a real commonwealth of really free nations that is the alternative to the H-bomb...

...But the rearming of the West can achieve no more than neutralization of Soviet armaments...

...it reflects the disorderly order of a mixed-up world...

...and the small ones because to these failings which they share with the big nations they add their own weakness, which puts their sovereignty at the mercy of the military or economic power of the big ones...

...Salvador de Madariaga, Spanish historian and former diplomat, was for many years prominent in the League of Nations...

...Now if liberation is to be more than a mere word, it must mean two things: freedom for nations, freedom for men —freedom for nations which will insure in their midst freedom for men...

...We are armed and arming," a Soviet diplomat reportedly said to a Western colleague a few years ago, "because if you do not arm we shall fall upon you, and if you do you will starve your masses and have a proletarian revolution...

...An appraisal of the situation must start with recognition of the fact that the military forces on either side cancel each other...

...so to speak, the permanent state of a liberal world...

...The East wants to Sovielize the world...

...It has to grow of itself...

...As for the cold war itself, its chief feature is the lack of symmetry between the two sides (here described, though inaccurately, as "East" and "West" for the sake of brevity...

...The free commonwealth should behave so as to promote the growth of authority...

...can afford far more expenditure than the Soviet Union...

...The free commonwealth would, of course, have to enter the field of economic relations, where often lies the secret of many a loss of national sovereignty...

...The danger is not that any day New York, Paris or London may be destroyed by the hydrogen bomb, but that Communism may triumph in the end by a patient and relatively peaceful exploitation of the advantages which the cold war is daily winning for them...

...In the end, we always fall back on the cold war...

...This is the eighth article in the series Lewis Mumford launched in our June 28 issue...