Where the News Ends

...But they are based on fallacies which the instinctive patriotism and common sense of the free peoples of the West will quickly reject...

...This train of thinking was set in motion when I recently attended an overflow "peace rally" in a Cambridge church, addressed by the famous chemist, Linus Pauling, Harvard Professor H. Stuart Hughes, British Member of Parliament Philip Noel-Baker and Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn...

...Noel-Baker, the most attractive and reasonable of the speakers, seemed to succumb to wishful thinking when he declared that Khrushchev wants disarmament as much as the West...

...Pauling tried to make the flesh creep with pictures of the horrors of nuclear warfare, expressed a view (not confirmed by past, recent or present experience) that disarmament is quite simple and easy, referred to Dr...

...Paradoxical as it may sound, nothing contributes so much to the likelihood of war as anti-war declarations by citizens of countries which, by their records, will certainly never try to strike the first blow...

...The spirit of this meeting was in line with that of a new organization, calling itself "Committees of Correspondence" and dedicated to the goal of unilateral American disarmament...

...Among its members are three Harvard professors, Hughes, sociologist David Riesman and psychologist Michael Maccoby, as well as social philosopher Erich Fromm, veteran pacifist A. J. Muste and Harold Taylor, ex-President of Sarah Lawrence College...

...These organized resistance to tyranny...

...their modern namesake would surrender to tyranny without firing a shot...

...some lost their lives and, if they recalled that flip resolution, they probably regretted it as one of the most foolish actions of their lives...

...For nothing so encourages a dictator in arrogant aggression as signs of fear, weakness and hesitation among his opponents...

...But this organization is sadly different from the Committees of Correspondence formed on the eve of the American Revolution...

...There are more serious manifestations in other countries: the half-baked Japanese students (the great majority of whom do not know what they are doing, while the organized minority of Communist wirepullers knows very well), clamoring for a neutralism that would leave Japan naked to Soviet and Chinese aggression, the silly Britons who stage marches from the nuclear installation at Alder-maston to London and whose mood is seriously infecting the left wing of the Labor party...

...Nerve SHORTLY BEFORE the outbreak of World War II, the most famous debating society in the world, the Oxford Union, discussed and passed a resolution that its members would not fight for King and country in the event of another war...

...The consideration of how much liberty would be left in America or in the world if Soviet and Chinese aggression were not restrained by the knowledge of America's power of nuclear retaliation did not enter into his reflections at all...

...He praised the efforts of some misguided people to stage a series of "vigils," marches and demonstrations against the construction of Polaris submarines (one of our most promising deterrent weapons) at New London and called on all "peace groups" to renounce a foreign policy based on the threat of nuclear retaliation...

...That Communist philosophy and Soviet policy had anything to do with the cold war or the need for defense of free peoples with the most modern and effective weapons never seemed to enter into the mind of the distinguished chemist or of the other speakers and participants in the meeting...

...This was before the Communists walked out of the Geneva disarmament talks without even considering the new American proposals...

...When the war came most of those who voted for this resolution did fight...

...Imagine what would happen if a group of Soviet citizens even spotted the location of a Soviet nuclear or missile base, to say nothing of putting on a disapproving demonstration there...

...Edward Teller and "others who want to rely on fear and war" as "insane people who are trying to keep the cold war going...

...Hughes, who had already gone on record as preferring Soviet occupation to nuclear warfare, went all out for unilateral disarmament by the United States...

...These super-appeasement movements amount to nerve crack-ups and like other failings they are more obvious in democratic countries because of freedom of expression and communication...

...The Committee is, at least, frank...

...Certainly this would be the easily predictable result of its recommendation: "A deep-rooted, immediate and total break with the policy of military deterrence...

...it concedes that a possible consequence of unilateral American disarmament, which it advocates, would include "Soviet invasion, conquest and tyranny over the United States," but this, it comfortingly reassures us, would be "within the limits of human experience...