Disarmament as a Weapon of Defense

...In any case the composition and procedure of the committee requires revision if success is to be reached in the future...

...With a different chairman each day and no orderly agenda it was impossible to subject any particular issue to continuous and exhaustive scrutiny...

...Negotiations on disarmament are diplomatically unique because they imply cooperation between political enemies on the most delicate issues of military security...

...Its own program envisages a force level for America in the first stage which is actually higher than the present level and fixes no limit whatever for the forces of Britain and France—mainly because France has half a million men tied up indefinitely in Algeria...

...Nevertheless, the West did at first make some impression by exploiting the vagueness of the Soviet provisions for control and, in particular, by proving the necessity for some international enforcement agency once disarmament is completed...

...There is total confusion even in NATO itself, with General Lauris Norstadt claiming that the aim of his strategy is to enforce a pause in any local attack and simultaneously trying to persuade the European countries to accept Polaris atomic missiles for use against targets beyond Moscow...

...But the West is not prepared to reduce its own conventional forces at all in the first stage of disarmament...

...Until disarmament is seen as the only reliable way to security in the atomic age—as an instrument of defense, not as an alternative to defense—nothing will stop the military from committing their countries to types of strategy and forces which make disarmament agreements impossible...

...The decisive obstacle to negotiation on such regional agreements, however, is the chaos in Western military strategy...

...Yet, though this would relieve NATO of heavy military burdens and unwelcome political decisions, so far France and Germany have been unwilling to negotiate for such an agreement—France obsessed by the dream of her own military grandeur and Germany by the illusion that arms control in Europe would make it more difficult to change the political status quo...

...The obvious answer is to go back to the Anglo-French proposals of 1955 which were dropped by the West the moment the Russians seemed ready to accept them as a basis for negotiation: More than any proposals put forward before or since, these did succeed in relating advances in control with corresponding measures of physical disarmament at every stage...

...There are also measures which might be undertaken to deal with the dangers inherent in the existing global pattern of military power...

...This work must be done some time, whatever the context in which it is ultimately used...

...The precarious stability of the bipolar balance of terror under which we have lived for almost 10 years is threatened primarily by the mutual fear of a surprise attack either at the global or the local level...

...Each side is tempted to use them for propaganda advantage in the political struggle and for military advantage in the arms race—thereby aggravating the mutual mistrust in which the negotiations inevitably start...

...There is an overwhelming case for agreement between NATO and the Soviet bloc for the inspection and control of forces in Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain so as to make a surprise attack impossible...

...There is probably enough agreement between scientists on both sides about the main lines of future weapons development to make a standstill agreement possible, while the colossal cost of continuing the technological arms race gives their governments a strong incentive to make such agreements...

...The only reliable way to prevent atomic war is to see Disarmament as a Weapon of Defense By Denis Healey LONDON Until the Communist members walked out last week, the 10-nation disarmament conference in Geneva was a fiasco as depressing, if not as dramatic, as the summit that never happened...

...But in Geneva the Russians have shown infinitely more finesse than in Paris, while the West was paralyzed by a negotiating position which allowed no room for maneuver...

...These are essentially measures of arms control whose purpose is to prevent the existing situation, after the failure at Geneva, from rapidly becoming worse...

...The West, however, can rightly argue, as David Ormsby-Gore did, that it cannot forego its bases overseas unless there is also a substantial reduction in Russia's conventional forces...

...The main protection against local surprise attack at present is the threat of thermonuclear retaliation...

...Finally, the committee must grasp the nettle of Chinese representation as soon as possible...

...The most obvious of these—already publicly admitted by both America and Russia—is to stop the spread of atomic weapons...

...And there is a strong case for changing the committee's composition to include some neutral countries whose presence would inhibit both sides from propaganda extravagances...

...it is reasonable enough to link this with the question of foreign bases, which are more important for the West than for the USSR...

...In fact, there is not a moment to lose, since more than 40 countries have now begun to operate atomic reactors which will produce fissile material as a by-product...

...Part of the trouble stems from the appalling procedure in the committee...

...An agreement to ban atomic tests would help considerably towards this and Britain might help to overcome the remaining obstacles by offering to provide its own atomic bombs for the joint study program on underground explosions —America is forbidden by the McMahon Act from using its bombs under conditions acceptable to Russia...

...Thus, instead of putting forward reasonable and concrete counter proposals, the West had confined itself to asking questions on marginal aspects of the new Soviet plan and had steered all too obviously clear of the real issue...

...Certain interests have recently emerged on which the protagonists of the cold war can only hope to strengthen their security by cooperation instead of conflict...

...In the first few weeks, therefore, the Russians were able to evade nearly all the attempts to get their proposals spelled out with precision...

...And whatever might happen among the participants in any future negotiations on general and complete disarmament there should be immediate agreement to start a joint scientific study of the means of controlling a ban on the production of weapons-grade fissile material and on delivery systems for atomic weapons...

...There must be an impartial, permanent chairman—perhaps nominated by the United Nations—and an order of discussion must be arranged so that there is some chance of reaching conclusions, instead of the chaos which obtained this time...

...Apart from all the general arguments for admitting the existence of Peking, Communist China is now one of the world's greatest military powers, but the pattern of her military strength differs so much from that of the other nations that were present at Geneva that any agreement they reached with one another would have proved technically inappropriate for China even if it were politically acceptable...

...The resulting Soviet propaganda victory is tempered only by the nightmare memory of Khrushchev's performance at the Palais de Chaillot...

...But surprise attack at the local level is equally possible and might be equally dangerous since it could lead to global war...

...There is an overwhelming case for immediate action to tackle the delivery problem before it becomes even more intractable and since at the moment the abolition of delivery systems would involve greater concessions by Russia than by the West...

...The new Soviet proposals of June 3 go much further toward correcting the balance on these issues, but their main purpose was to dramatize the crucial weakness of the Western plan by taking up the French proposal for abolishing the means of delivering atomic weapons and putting it in the first stage of disarmament along with liquidation of foreign bases...

...It is possible to conceive general lines of agreements between the West and the Communist bloc which would enormously reduce the possibility of surprise attack...

...Moreover, since official minutes of the proceedings became available only long after they had ceased to be news, the public impact of what happened depended on tendentious accounts leaked out day by day from the interested delegations...

...So the Russians have held the initiative from the outset, allowing themselves a bold flexibility which is never in danger of being tested since the West is precluded from asking any of the really embarrassing questions...

...Protection against surprise attack at the global level is mainly a problem for America and Russia alone...

...There is, therefore, much to be said for not confining negotiation to the search for general and complete disarmament and for working also for agreement on specific aspects of the problem where mutual interest in cooperation has a chance of overriding the general suspicion...

...There are also equally strong arguments for an agreement between Russia and the West on controlling arms supplies to the Middle East and Africa...

...This was the fundamental cause of the hopeless Western negotiating position in Geneva and only a firm assertion of political authority over the military will ever change it...

...But nevertheless most of the NATO countries are committed to enormous expenditures on ground forces in Germany in case the deterrent fails...

...At the level of global thermonuclear war the danger of surprise attack lies above all in the technological race for new atomic delivery systems and new means of air defense—for if either side made a breakthrough in either of these fields, it might be tempted to use its advantage before its opponent caught up—or the opponent might be tempted to preempt such an attack before his inferiority became complete...