In the Shadow of the ICBM

...The coming UN Review Conference would be an ideal opport?unity...

...At the moment we have more to give, but they are coming up fast with an exportable surplus of tools and technicians...

...America must take the lead in proposing and developing the UN as a great alternative to Soviet world dictatorship or the present war-breeding balanee-of-power competition...

...And, should war with atomic weapons come, we are far more vulnerable than they...

...and survival the twin brother of annihilation...

...The United States thus far has scarcely started upon this all-important process...

...If we are to win this long-range struggle with the Soviets, we must realize that we can do so only if we are able to prevent military aggression, check subversion, win the loyalty of the neutralists through economic aid and leadership for freedom and peace, and, ultimately, win the consent of the Soviets themselves to an organized common peace...

...I use this last phrase advisedly...

...This creates a situation of "mutual deterrence" in which neither is likely deliberately to start an all-out, total war...

...The Reverend Donald Harrington, Pastor of the Community Church in New York, has long been active in organizations devoted to social welfare and world peace...

...The two great power blocs are at present quite evenly matched, and upon that balance rests our present precarious peace...

...It is a beginning and has accomplished much of very great value both for human welfare and for peace...

...In any case, disarmament, complete, universal and enforceable, is the key achievement for any international organization of peace...

...This is the eighth article in our current symposium on the post-Stalin evolution of Communist society...

...subsequent contributors were Adolf A. Berle Jr., Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Louis J. Halle, Norman Thomas, Dwight Macdonald, Franz Borkenau and R. H. S. Cross-man...

...When hundreds of ICBMs are built, we will have to look for a wholly new principle by which to make disarmament safe...

...This we are not using adequately at all, for we are still partially paralyzed by isolationism and self-preoccupation...

...Who can doubt that whichever side was losing would gradually use the heavier atomic weapons and thus unleash total war...

...We can use it for technological aid, develop its security agencies, increase its constabulary forces, get behind its Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development (SUNFED) in a really important way...

...To this hour we remain essentially isolationist, self-centered, unwilling to develop a clear and specific idea of effective world organization capable of maintaining world peace, unwilling to give such an organization the limited power necessary to do its job, unwilling to curtail our own sovereign power simultaneously with all other nations to that extent, and to develop a strategy with our friends for winning the consent of all nations to such an objective...

...Many experts doubt there is a way to be sure, once we are past that fatal point...

...Our present task is to strengthen the UN, to transfer to it enough power to maintain peace, and to do this in a way which will be safe and before it is too late...

...This was formally recognized by both at the Summit Conference at Geneva last July...

...We can imagine this power possessed by several national states, not just the two present leaders in atomic development...

...These are all possibilities in the age of the ICBM...

...What happens if someone is mad, or jittery, or makes a mistake...

...The only kind of peace that has any permanence is the third variety, what Woodrow Wilson described as "an organized common peace...

...One man pushes a button, and the enemy is finished...

...Finally, we should use the 1957 UN Cbarter Review Conference to advocate such changes in the UN as would be necessary for it to police and enforce a system of world disarmament...

...Economic...

...Finally, we are drawing closer and closer to the era of unspeakable horror, to the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile...

...This did not, however, in the least deter Russia from using Czech arms to woo Egypt, which could easily lead to a small war...

...There can be no world organization of power for peace, no international structure of security, without all of the nations simultaneously dismantling their competitive, national military power systems, according to a plan which all agree is safe and which can be enforced...

...At this moment in world history, the United States and its allies are engaged in an all-out power struggle with the USSR and its satellites: a struggle for military power, economic influence and political popularity with the vast and populous middle group of nations, the uncommitted neutralists, including India, Indonesia, Yugoslavia and much of the Middle Eastern world and Africa...

...Psychological...

...Perhaps we might start disarming with the weapon we don't vet have, the ICBM—reach an agreement, inspect-able of course, never to test this ultimate horror weapon, and then go on from there...

...Or peace may be the result of a stalemate or balance of power, like the present uneasy peace between the Soviet and Western blocs of nations...

...Finally, peace may result from an organization of power by mutual consent, under an umbrella of common law, administered and enforced by a single agency to which all of the nations involved have transferred authority in the limited area of their common concern, like the peace enjoyed by the 48 states of the United States, the cantons of Switzerland, and the provinces of France...

...Peace may be achieved through the domination of a single power, like the Pax Britannica which in the century up to 1914 rested on the invincible guns of the British fleet...

...our population is concentrated in a few large urban areas while two-thirds of theirs is dispersed in villages scattered over a sixth of the surface of the earth...

...The enemy has the same set-up...

...We could not fight effectively without it...

...They have the advantage of a world-wide political objective, a long-range strategy of world organization, spelled out long ago by Lenin and Stalin (which sees the ultimate joining with them of the colonial world, and the final collapse of the Western capitalist and imperial nations), and a world-wide cadre of dedicated followers to aid in bringing about their ultimate World Union of Soviet Republics...

...The experts even have a new word for this process, "escalation...

...A little war in any of these spots could quickly become all-out...

...and USSR have enough hydrogen bombs, and carriers to deliver them, utterly to destroy the civilization of the other...

...Military...

...Certain factors in this struggle are worth noting, for they may well have a decisive effect upon its outcome...

...Today we cannot detect hidden fissionable material, but could conceivably control its carriers...

...When perfected, the ICBM will travel its 5-6,000 miles in 30 minutes...

...It is not an organization of power, but a town-meeting of the world in which some of the lesser conflicts of national power can be moderated...

...The balance is threatened by the quarrels of small allies of the great powers, as in Korea, Vietnam or the Middle East...

...Both the U.S...

...We must realize that we haven't a chance of winning this long-range struggle unless we know what we want on a world scale and have been able to develop the support of most of the world in its behalf...

...We have our atomic might, now stalemated by the Soviets' atomic might...

...We can advance in the UN Disarmament Commission detailed, comprehensive, specific proposals for complete, universal, enforceable disarmament...

...And we have our greatest resource, our moral position as an example of democracy and freedom...

...Each little war threatens to involve the great powers...

...There are many things we can do to strengthen the UN...

...Political...

...Churchill summed it up in a telling phrase: "Security has become the sturdy child of terror...

...What if the firing mechanism should short-circuit or go off unintentionally (as happened with some runaway rockets recently...

...We must be hard-headed enough to realize that they will never consent to an organized peace based on democratic principles so long as they have a chance of getting it on their own terms...

...They are upset by internal revolutions, by military-scientific advances or break-throughs, by allies' switching sides, each such upset threatening to percipitate war as did Stalin's switch to Hitler in 1939...

...Balances of power somehow don't stay balanced...

...To be sure, we have the UN...

...They are able to trade for aid, in which process there is more permanent self-respect for the technologically underdeveloped nations...

...In one-power domination or in balances of power built upon alliances and armament races, there is no real hope for permanent peace...

...The tinder of war is very dry in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, the Middle East and divided Germany...

...It will be possible to hide several hundred, at widely separate points, each with a hydrogen-bomb warhead capable of wiping out a whole metropolitan area, each directed with accuracy at one of the potential enemy's cities...

...As against this, we have our great economic power, which we are not using as effectively as we could...

...We dans not count on either side's not using atomic weapons, for we have ourselves integrated the tactical atomic weapon into ever) part of our military and naval establishment...

...The series began in our June 18 issue with an article by George F. Kennan...

...The Russians' dominance of their East European satellites and of the Baltic states mars this picture, but they maintain their control through national Communists who take their orders from Moscow, thus maintaining at least a national appearance and identity...

...They occupy with Communist China the heartland of the great Eurasian-African land mass while we are an island continent thousands of miles away from most of the world trouble spots...

...They can also manipulate their aid far more arbitrarily...

...No nation has preserved its hegemony for long, and the so-called Pax Britannica was punctuated by wars with Russia and Germany, not to speak of perpetual colonial engagements...

...They have the advantage of being a non-colonial power, whereas our allies still hold many colonies in Asia and Africa and are at this moment in many cases busily suppressing native nationalist groups seeking self-determination in Asia and Africa...

...In case neither side uses atomic weapons for fear of annihilation, the Soviets can always bring a preponderance of conventional military forces to bear at any point on their long Eurasian perimeter, tying us up in small, costly wars far from home with which they are involved only through subversion and through supplying weapons...

...Both we and the Russians have given top priority to the 5,000-mile-range ICBM, the ultimate weapon which will inaugurate an era very different from the age of atomic bombs conventionally carried...

...In this kind of struggle, the Soviets have certain definite advantages: -Geopolitical...

...Once it is perfected, we may no longer be able to inspect an agreed-upon disarmament...

...It can be too late very easily...