Nuclear Weapons and the Human Community
COUSINS, NORMAN
United States policy must win the approval of the majority of the world's peoples Nuclear Weapons and the Human Community By Norman Cousins IN approaching the crisis in U.S. foreign policy, my...
...The tragic fact about the UN now is that the central concern of too many of the major nations inside it is to avoid the primary responsibility in the eyes of world public opinion for letting it die...
...And Adlai Stevenson, in his United Nations Day message several years ago, echoed these words when he said: "We see the UN as a living thing, and we will work and pray for its full growth and development...
...can talk frankly about the actual requirements of a world agency equipped to create and maintain those conditions without which workable peace is impossible...
...Clearly, this is too much power for imperfect man...
...The principal shortage in the United States today is a shortage of survival knowledge about the rest of the world...
...I do not believe that any prescription for a nation today makes sense except as it is part of a larger consideration that has to do with the general condition of man...
...Communism believes it NORMAN COUSINS, Saturday Review editor since 1942, worked with the Office of War Information and is a leader of United World Federalists...
...Our first front, therefore, is the good will and support of the largest possible number of the world's peoples...
...We can fill the skies with intercontinental ballistic missiles and saturate the air with the products of nuclear tests...
...We may not be able to win a nuclear war...
...Unless we are qualified for world leadership, we can lose to Communism on the human front...
...But we will be left all dressed up with our nuclear weapons, with no place to go, if the Soviet Union ever speaks for or represents the majority...
...We want it to become a world society of nations living under law—not merely law backed by force but law backed by justice...
...We can say that we believe the conquest of space should be carried on in the interests of all the world's peoples...
...Consider the sum total of all that bombing—all that destructive power—and we only begin to approach the amount of destructive power that is now contained in one bomb that can be carried by one plane or one missile...
...It is important to understand exactly what a hydrogen bomb is...
...but it is important at least that the questions be asked...
...This article is based on a talk at the recent Tamiment Institute Forum on "The Crisis in U.S...
...That we will support with all the means at our command the attempt to develop the United Nations to the fullest and to strengthen it as it has to be strengthened to replace world anarchy with effective world law...
...Few authorities, in discussing new international policies for the missile age, even mention the United Nations...
...And we are not going to control these weapons with theories or with strategic concepts of balance of power...
...A 20-megaton hydrogen bomb has been tested by both Communist Russia and the United States that is 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan and killed 230,000 people-not 75,000 people, as we had supposed, but 230,000 people...
...The preamble to the Charter was taken seriously, as it should have been...
...Yes, we would still have our allies in Europe...
...Also, there is one problem of even greater importance than figuring out a way to make the ICBM and that is the need to figure out a way to get rid of it—wherever it may exist...
...If the majority of the world's peoples feel we have nothing to say to them, if they sense no communitv of aspiration, experience no common connections with us to the future, then no military or diplomatic strategy will come to much...
...We can recognize fully the incredible complexities in the way of a structured peace, but we can make it clear that these complexities actually define the nature of the challenge rather than the reason for avoiding it...
...This in turn means not only an all-out arms race but the elimination of such power vacuums as may exist outside the maj or parties...
...We can say that we pledge everything we have to the cause of a meaningful peace on earth—that there is nothing we will not give., nothing that we will not sacrifice in helping to create a planet safe and fit for human habitation...
...We are in a battle for the majority...
...foreign policy, my frame of reference is not the national community but the human community...
...Anything else we do is merely a manipulation, a perilous dance on the periphery...
...The UN has become a good cause, like the International Red Cross, worth preserving if possible but not really central in the making of tomorrow...
...As concerns the United Nations itself, we can say: • That the UN is still our best hope for peace...
...What, then, do we say to the world's peoples...
...We will never find the perfect answers to these questions...
...Indeed, unfettered national sovereignty today is the enemy of life on earth...
...We can say that no nation on earth has the right to lay claim to outer space, that man himself must be sovereign in this area, and that the United Nations is the proper agency to represent him for this purpose...
...That the state must serve the natural rights of man and not expunge them, and that, if existing agencies do not serve those natural rights, new agencies should be created...
...I see no prospect for peace with freedom through the old approaches —balance of power, coalitions, massive retaliation, limited retaliation— or the usual strategical manipulations...
...Or the assumption that we can have peace through disarmament...
...What obstacles are in the way...
...There is no defense...
...In any re-definition of the UN's purposes, it is important, I think, to attempt to get outside the framework of the cold war and to think in historical terms...
...Can you imagine the situation that might exist three years from now or five years from now, if the United States should find itself cut off from, Asia and Africa—not so much because of what the Soviet Union has done in Asia and Africa but because of what we have failed to do...
...The world is looking to us not so much to put up bigger and better satellites but bigger and better ideas that are directed toward a workable peace...
...We must begin by liberating ourselves from the burden of dead assumptions...
...Today there is the assumption that we can have peace through armaments...
...How can these obstacles be removed...
...Not rational decision but accident could lead to their use...
...Instead of having its lifeblood drained off in rearguard actions against irresponsible detractors, the UN today should be defining a mighty challenge: Do the peoples of the world want peace...
...As concerns nuclear explosions, whether with respect to their use in war or their use in tests, we can say: • That we would rather die ourselves than use these explosives on human beings...
...What these commentators seem to forget is that the American people probably would not have sanctioned participation in the UN if they felt it was considerably less than described...
...President Eisenhower put it concisely when he first came into office: "The United Nations must become not only an eloquent symbol but an...
...If an attempt is now made to deal with their growing disillusion by saying that the UN was never meant to be truly effective in the first place, the result is likely to be greater indifference, not less...
...For the UN must become a living organism, with ideas and a personality of its own, rather than a zone of diplomacy or a projection center for foreign policies which regard the UN as secondary rather than as central in the affairs of the world...
...That these savings should also be used to fight disease and illiteracy in the world...
...For if it is said, in defense of the UN, that it was never really intended to create wor^d peace, that still leaves open the question: Who will create the peace...
...If we are serious about peace, we shall have to look for it in the only place it exists: namely, through the rule of law in the world...
...We can propose a pooling of world science and resources for this purpose...
...The advocacy of these ideas—advocacy carried forward not for ourselves alone, but for the greater good of human beings everywhere, regardless of political divisions—such advocacy will not automatically assure the peace...
...There are basic principles of workable organization which transcend the conflicting forces in the present crisis...
...The causes of war are much older than the identities of the contending parties in the present crisis...
...The absolute weapons are becoming the absolute masters...
...That is why I say that our first front today is not ICBMs but people...
...The fully sovereign national state today is obsolete as an effective instrument for creating peace...
...We can dramatize the blood relationship between responsible authority and the machinery of justice...
...The heart of the problem is that weak world organization makes such crises inevitable...
...His books include Modern Man Is Obsolete and "In God We Trust...
...The UN must become what it should have been from the start—a world organization capable of preventing aggression and enforcing world law...
...That a large portion of the savings from disarmament should go into developing the resources of the earth for the benefit of the world's peoples...
...Unless we develop that kind of knowledge, we will not earn and keep the overwhelming support of the maj ority of the world's peoples...
...The job of the United States is to seek the largest possible consensus in the world today...
...But we can win with ideas that speak for man...
...Can such a peace be achieved without giving the UN the tools and substance it needs to do the job...
...But abolition of testing is a good place to begin...
...But advocacy of great ideas can represent our greatest strength...
...it requires the machinery of control and enforcement under the United Nations...
...That no nation has the moral right to contaminate the air that belongs to all peoples...
...It is not enough to say, as some commentators have said, that the public must learn to accept the natural limitations of the UN...
...These commentators feel that the UN was oversold in the first place, that it was an error to give the American people any exalted ideas about the potentialities of the UN in solving world problems...
...But if a penalty is attached to responsibility for any failure of the UN, a large measure of acclaim and credit would accrue to any group that takes vital leadership in helping it to live...
...For in the age of the ICBM the United States and the Soviet Union will be 12 to 18 minutes apart...
...Obviously, this can only be done by real world organization...
...Just think of all the .cities that knew bombing in the last war: London, Coventry, Birmingham, Southampton, Calais, Cherbourg, Milan, Turin, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Essen, Cologne, Aachen, Mannheim, Diissel-dorf, Kiev, Warsaw, Pilsen, Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Shanghai...
...Foreign Policy...
...If we are concerned about freedom and meaningful peace, the question, it seems to me, is not what policy we can devise that seems to make sense for America alone but rather what policy makes sense in human terms...
...Despite all the apparent surface cynicism, the Americans are a deeply idealistic people...
...As concerns the general question of disarmament, we can say: • That effective disarmament requires more than national agreements...
...That there is a serious question about the effects of nuclear testing on human tissue, and that we are therefore suspending our own tests at once and are calling upon the United Nations to institute immediate compliance by all nations...
...They responded warmly and finely to the hopes that were defined at San Francisco...
...for that matter, no nation can...
...The cold fact is that too many people see the UN as a secondary rather than a primary factor in the shaping of the peace, thus actually reflecting the positions of many governments themselves...
...The principal shortage in the United States today is not a shortage of uranium or petroleum or plutonium or manganese or iron or cobalt...
...That there is no sound basis for arms control in the world unless the United Nations is equipped and empowered to guarantee security and justice to all nations...
...Talk of retaliation, or limited retaliation, in the context of an ICBM with a hydrogen bomb in its nose is not the talk of sanity...
...Canton, Nanking, Tientsin, Kwang-tung, Chungking, Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Kiryu, Nagoya, Hiroshima, Nagasaki—just a partial list of the cities that have known bombing in our time...
...Each realizes the strong hold the UN still has on the hopes of peoples...
...Here we come to a basic fact about world organization...
...effective force...
...no one wants the onus for causing it to dissolve...
...Sometimes we tend to overlook the cruder simplicities because of our fascination with the grand complexities...
...The problem created by a weak world organization is not only that it cannot deal effectively with a major crisis when it occurs...
...That an abolition of testing does not by itself dispose of the critical problem of existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons, nor does it assure the world that fissionable materials for military purposes will not be made...
...This struggle intensifies but it does not actually create the fundamental cause of world tension and unrest...
...In defining our objectives, therefore, the U.S...
...Or the assumption that something will happen inside the Soviet Union that will cause everything to turn out just right...
...In the absence of any real framework of world security, large nations inevitably will use every means at their disposal to safeguard their positions...
...The resulting competition for national security is volatile and combustible...
...How long would they be able to resist the gravitational pull of the rest of the world...
...We can attempt to show that there must be an organic connection between foolproof disarmament and the machinery of world law...
...That unfettered national sovereignty does not serve the cause of man and should be modified as required...
...We can say that we believe the time has come for the cause of man to be put above the cause of the nations...
...This does not mean that the ideological struggle between democracy and Communism today is not deep or real...
...And the crudest simplicity of all is that we are rapidly moving into a situation beyond control...
...can win in the world at precisely the point that it speaks for the majority...
...At one time, for example, we thought that all we had to do was to keep the secret of the atomic bomb and we would have security...
Vol. 41 • April 1958 • No. 16
