Peace and War-1962
HUNTINGTON, MICHAEL HARRINGTON/DAVID MARQUAND/MORTON H. HALPERIN/SAMUEL P.
PEACE AND WAR - 1962 The New Peace Movement By Michael Harrington From the outside, the American peace movement must appear chaotic. It is made up of almost a dozen basic groups, some...
...While varying in the importance they give to formal negotiations, the Unilateralists agree on the need to begin with American military actions not based on formally negotiated agreements with the Soviets...
...began investigating charges of Communist affiliation which had been leveled against certain members of the New York chapter...
...It is here, I believe, that the most valuable moral for our own day is to be found...
...Though his reasoning was fallacious, his conclusions sometimes were surprisingly sensible...
...For another, it must understand the connections between the civil rights movement in the South and the question of war and peace...
...Among this group there are no sharp and clear dividing lines, yet it is fair to say that the views of two individuals stand out...
...Some disarmers argue, however, that limited steps of this kind probably cannot succeed in breaking through the barriers of mistrust between the major powers...
...Army and Marine manpower have been expanded...
...His opposition to sanctions and rearmament was not based on a moral condemnation of war in all circumstances...
...In fact, the results of the Ballot showed very nearly the opposite...
...Both groups are interested in altering the enemy's image of U.S...
...Osgood is interested in scoring a breakthrough which would make possible the negotiation of formal arms control agreements leading to comprehensive, if not general and complete, disarmament...
...True, they still do not constitute a serious political force...
...They desire to use changes in military force to influence political attitudes, and they share the fundamental assumption that the U.S.-Soviet conflict is not a real one—or at least that the real points of conflict should be submerged in the mutual interest in avoiding a massive thermonuclear war...
...On the American side the quantitative increases of the past year seem relatively moderate and unlikely to spark an upward spiral...
...His unilateral initiative plan would call for such steps as lifting trade and travel restrictions with Communist China, de-nuclearizing overseas bases and making the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line available to the Soviet Union...
...and the future belongs to the Soviet bloc...
...They insist that only a decisive U.S...
...The old apathy and indifference were permanently shattered, however, and the newfound energies were focused on other problems...
...In truth, it showed nothing of the sort...
...In any discussion of the peace movements in Britain in the '30s, and of their possible effect on foreign opinion, the 1935 Labor party Conference must have a central place...
...Still another, if somewhat different, indication of the academy's increasing involvement in the problems of peace and war has been provided by the reception given to Amitai Etzioni's proposals for a "gradualist" approach to disarmament...
...of Right against Wrong...
...But there is at least one major difference in emphasis between the Unilateralists and the Government...
...People rarely asked themselves what would happen if "deterrence" failed...
...Both had ties with a handful of non-pacifist radicals, mainly Democratic Socialists from the Socialist party and the Independent Socialist League...
...Consequently, its direction and infiltration of peace activities in the United States became much less important...
...But since the Left not only failed to support rearmament, but actually opposed it, the Government could claim that a more courageous policy on its own part would, in any event, only have been rejected by the British electorate...
...Osgood sees the arms race as the result of reciprocated increases in arms budgets, based on misunderstanding between the major powers...
...It opposed the Boer War when middle-class Socialists like Bernard Shaw and the Webbs favored it...
...And just as Cripps could not be bludgeoned out of his position by mere denunciation so they must be reasoned with—and not just shouted at—if they are to be convinced of the error of their ways...
...It also opposed World War I in 1914, and went into the wilderness because of the stand it took...
...An arms race is quantitative to the extent that it involves the multiplication of existing weapons and forces and the progressive transfer of resources from civilian to military purposes...
...Left-wingers did not want to defend the British Empire—they wanted to liquidate it...
...In 1960, SANE faced an internal crisis over the question of what attitude the organization should adopt toward Communists...
...the Air Force has added tactical air wings...
...At that time David Riesman, Erich Fromm and H. Stuart Hughes became active participants and were instrumental in setting up one of the leading intellectual peace groups, the Committee (now Council) of Correspondence...
...American military spending remained at a low level of about $13 billion through 1949, then increased rapidly after the beginning of the Korean War, reaching a peak of $49 billion in 1953...
...In conclusion, let's return briefly to the position of the unilateral disarmers...
...To achieve these goals, TTP has set itself up as a coordinating center, encouraging other peace groups to endorse its program, or simply to "cooperate" with it...
...That time, of course, came in Spain...
...Either the side which amasses a lead uses its superior power to force a showdown, or both powers, faced by exhaustion, turn to war or a negotiated agreement to bring the race to a stop...
...Indeed, the political situation in the late '30s was in many ways the exact opposite of the situation today...
...It is qualitative to the extent that it involves innovation and the progressive replacement of old types of weapons and forces by new varieties...
...It is sometimes said that the activities of the pacifist Left helped to convince Hitler and Mussolini that Britain would not resist them, and thus helped pave the way for World War II...
...This was followed by a 20 per cent drop back to a level of $39 billion in 1955...
...Arms Control and Disarmament Agency dates only from 1961, but throughout the cold war the United States has had two other powerful disarmament agencies: the Bureau of the Budget and the United States Treasury...
...There have been similar misconceptions about the notorious "King and Country" resolution of the Oxford Union...
...The sit-ins set off sympathy demonstrations and engendered civil rights organizations among students across the nation...
...Cripps' position was very different from Lansbury's...
...Since this is exactly what the British Government did in the case of Abyssinia and again in the case of the Spanish Civil War, Cripps' argument cannot be dismissed out of hand...
...The U.S...
...Defense expenditures rose from an annual rate of $45.7 billion at the end of the Eisenhower Administration to $51.7 billion at the end of 1961, an increase of about 13 per cent...
...Ten million people voted for non-military sanctions, and of these 6.7 million also voted in favor of military measures as compared with 2.3 million against...
...Nevertheless, decisions on innovation do have direct effects on levels of military spending, and hence on the extent to which the goals to be achieved through military spending clash with those to be achieved by the allocation of resources for other purposes...
...From 1955-60 defense expenditures in constant dollars remained remarkably stable...
...In other groups, like Women Strike for Peace, there is an amorphous, somewhat confused but genuinely spontaneous response to the tensions of the time...
...But they think that we would be better off contesting these on a non-military level, and that we would realize this if we could only break through the cycle of misunderstanding...
...The British Empire was in danger and must prepare to fight its hereditary enemy...
...While its members have decisively rejected the party's discipline, they often retain certain fragments of their former ideology: a feeling that the Soviet Union, though no longer the kingdom of heaven on earth, is somehow "progressive...
...The arms controller, on the other hand, is searching for steps which, while not decreasing our ability to deter, reduce the danger of inadvertent war...
...largescale quantitative changes can...
...The more radical activists in the peace movement have criticized SANE'S approach as a fruitless search for respectability in what is essentially an unrespecxable cause...
...He announced: "I cannot rid my mind of the sordid history of capitalist deception...
...In the end, this latter group prevailed...
...and although no one knows precisely what proportion of those who opposed sanctions did so because they agreed with Cripps rather than because they agreed with Lansbury, the proportion cannot have been insignificant...
...Thus, in evaluating any individual's proposal for unilateral action one should have a clear understanding of his objectives, moral position and assumptions...
...As we shall see, this has led to serious problems...
...To be maximally effective in inducing reciprocation, Osgood writes, a unilateral act: "(1) should, in terms of military aggression, be clearly disadvantageous to the side making it, yet not cripplingly so...
...At one extreme of the spectrum are the unilateral disarmer-men like Erich Fromm, who advocate the dismantling of national military power...
...After 1954 the Soviets turned from military to political, diplomatic and economic tactics: Arms were shipped to Egypt...
...At that time, the CP had already declined sharply from its World War II strength, yet it still had more resources and followers than the pacifists...
...The direct criterion of success is whether the program succeeds in reducing the danger of war, or the potential damage if war occurs...
...There are proposals for a gradual reduction of conventional arms and proposals for the immediate destruction of all nuclear weapons...
...4) should be such that reciprocal action by the enemy is clearly available and clearly indicated...
...At its inception, as a matter of fact, SANE was not supposed to be an organization at all...
...Yet it is doubtful whether this greatly altered the course of events...
...The third position was Ernest Bevin's: "People have been on this platform today talking about the destruction of capitalism...
...Due to the expansion of the Gross National Product during 1961, however, the higher military spending did not impose a heavier burden on the economy...
...If TTP and the groups associated with it can channel the present widespread sympathy for the peace movement into a cohesive political force— or, more modestly, if they can make its impact felt within the existing political framework—then they will have achieved a decisive breakthrough...
...There are programs for multilateral disarmament and programs for unilateral disarmament...
...Only after the death of Stalin, the end of the Korean War, the division of Indochina, and the mutual, if temporary, acceptance of the status quo in the Formosa Straits, did the probability of war decline— and with it the levels of military spending...
...Indications of these strains have recently become evident...
...Indeed, Riesman's present position is an indication of the change which has recently taken place in American intellectual life...
...Michael Harrington, whose book The Other America was recently published by Macmillan, is editor of New America and a contributor to many magazines...
...The arms controllers want to convince the Soviets that we are responsible and controlled...
...Most of them, including Fromm, have taken up the cause of unilateral initiative on the grounds that it is more likely to be politically acceptable to the rulers of the Soviet Union and the United States and might quickly lead to total and complete disarmament...
...By and large they were isolated from the mainstream of American liberalism, which supported the containment policies of the Truman Administration, backed the Korean War and had not yet reacted to the ?-Bomb...
...In the process, the pacifist groups have tended to become more political and less sectarian in approach...
...The arms controller has much more modest ambitions for his program of unilateral action...
...Until last year, the only period of sustained expansion in military budgets for both powers was during the early 1950s...
...Cripps' position was no doubt perverse, but it was certainly far removed from pacifism...
...Any analysis of the arms race must start by distinguishing between its quantitative and qualitative aspects...
...The only solid evidence in existence is the result of the so-called Peace Ballot of lune 1935...
...Unless the arms race is brought to a decisive halt, we are told, thermonuclear disaster is inevitable...
...Beyond that, the organization has encouraged a wide range of opinion, and has been able to gain the cooperation of groups as disparate as the American Friends Service Committee, SANE, the United Auto Workers and the International Union of Electricians, along with the support of such civil rights figures as A. Philip Randolph...
...The very people who clamored most loudly against British rearmament clamored even more loudly for "arms for Spain...
...At that time, too, stable Soviet military expenditures were accompanied by the production of substantial numbers of middle-range missiles, the development of long-range missiles, and the expansion of Moscow's nuclear arsenal...
...The result has often been interpreted as showing the strength of pacifism among the younger generation...
...But, rather as extreme members of the John Birch Society object to paying taxes to one Communist Government in order to resist another, Cripps objected to sanctions against Mussolini if the price was strengthening the Conservative Government of Britain...
...3) should not increase the enemy's threat to our heartland...
...Behind this agreed priority for unilateral steps there lie important differences in the estimates of the nature of the danger of the arms race, and the possible remedies for it...
...It was the Left, not the Right, who told atrocity stories and wrote hymns to the fallen...
...There are, of course, other analysts who do not fit neatly into either the unilateral initiative or the unilateral arms control schools...
...Virtually all Unilateralists have some interest in negotiated arms control steps, but they emphasize actions taken by the United States without formal agreement...
...Following the Chinese intervention in Korea, President Truman warned that the world was on "the brink of general war...
...David Marquand, who reports regularly in these pages on British political developments, also writes for the Guardian of Manchester, Encounter and the Spectator...
...The people who oppose this resolution ought to have had the courage of their convictions and tabled [i.e., proposed] a resolution to the effect that we should have withdrawn from the League of Nations...
...The assumption was that if all the member nations of the League behaved with solidarity and courage, potential aggressors would be deterred...
...At a SANE rally at Madison Square Garden a few years ago, for instance, Norman Thomas, Walter Reuther and Alf Landon shared the same platform...
...Ten years ago, the author of The Lonely Crowd was considered an opponent of peace efforts, a participant in the American celebration, and a thinker who was much too optimistic about our society...
...The increase in American military spending during the same period will be about 10 per cent...
...It is not the Left, after all, which can be held responsible for the Hoare-Laval Pact, or non-intervention in Spain, or the rape of Czechoslovakia...
...The debate centered around three positions...
...strategic retaliatory force (Polaris submarines, Minuteman missiles) and an increase in the readiness of that force...
...A qualitative race, therefore, tends to produce a dynamic equilibrium—a military balance which is continually changing but seldom in danger of being upset—and itself becomes a means of arms control...
...The expansion of the Soviet military budget during the past year has been of a different order...
...Not surprisingly, students soon followed their teachers into the peace movement—but via a route distinctly their own: In the winter of 1960 the "silent generation" suddenly found its full voice with the emergence of the sit-in movement in the South...
...Announcements were made of cuts in Soviet forces of 640,000 men in August 1955, 1.2 million in May 1956, 300,000 in January 1958, and 1.2 million again in January 1960...
...Schelling explicitly attacks this view, arguing that the common interest depends not on trust and good faith...
...With the temporary Russian-American nuclear test ban, however, the organization lost some of its appeal, and it became obvious that the amount of interest that could be aroused by testing alone was limited...
...Some of the people who responded were from the older peace organizations, but they were now joined by liberals and, in several cases, by people without any political background...
...The peace movements of the '30s were in Tact far more complicated than they appear in retrospect...
...stabilization in the late '50s...
...Competition in this area often generates simultaneous innovation: If one side falls slightly behind in one generation of weapons, this very fact usually results in its pulling slightly ahead in the next...
...Morton H. Halperin, a member of Harvard university's Center for International Affairs, is co-author (with Thomas C. Schelling) of Strategy and Arms Control...
...It was not until the decade's end, however, that this assumed the proportions of a major trend...
...Also, new construction in housing has been curtailed...
...Third, these more or less permanent changes in American military posture were supplemented in the summer of 1961 by the temporary addition of forces mobilized in direct response to the Berlin crisis...
...5) should be announced in advance and widely publicized to ally, neutral, and enemy countries—as regards the nature of the act, its purpose as part of a consistent policy, and the expected reciprocation...
...Osgood is concerned with altering the military relationship between the two sides in order to affect each side's political appraisal of the other, and hence lessen the danger of a war arising out of a political conflict which he feels is not real or not worth a war...
...For the Left, this analysis was jejune and even immoral...
...For traditionalists like Churchill, the situation was simple...
...Attempts to establish a national youth organization as an adjunct to SANE failed when a debate over Senator Dodd revealed irreconcilable rifts...
...The latter school is more ready to admit that this would pose grave threats to Western security, and some members (such as Amitai Etzioni, the Columbia University sociologist) argue that we at least ought to try the initiative approach in a serious way before exposing ourselves to the great dangers inherent in unilateral disarmament...
...For 15 years the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union has been both quantitative and qualitative in character...
...Realities of the Arms Race By Samuel ? Huntington FOR over a decade Americans have been bombarded with warnings about the dangers of an "intensifying," "accelerating" or "spiraling" arms race...
...For the American Communist party, the invasion of South Korea and the Russian acquisition of the Bomb were movements toward peace, while armaments in the West were aspects of the drive toward war...
...The two groups would probably agree on the need for serious military analysis before taking any unilateral step...
...More recently, the Soviets have begun to talk about the costs involved in their space programs...
...In 194950, after the first Soviet nuclear explosion, some American officials talked of preventive war...
...maybe they will take the form of a proposal embodied in unilateral action (or abstention from action) which continues if matched by corresponding action on the other side and only for so long as it is...
...While the supporters of collective security can reasonably be convicted of intellectual confusion, they cannot be convicted of moral cowardice...
...Behind the two approaches are differing assumptions about the arms race between the U.S...
...and the Soviets would benefit from our having under direct control a well-protected strategic force that does not need to be kept at hair-trigger readiness...
...The Lesson of Britain By David Marquand London On October 1, 1935, the annual Conference of the British Labor party met at Brighton for the longest, and perhaps the most momentous, session in its history...
...and an attitude that anti-Communism of any kind is "red-baiting...
...This period began with the Czech coup and the Berlin blockade in 1948, and ended with the Indochina and offshore island crises of 1954...
...The initiative school wants to convince the Soviets that we are peaceful and trustworthy...
...Now, the Soviets are attempting to reverse these cuts in military manpower while they continue to strengthen their strategic forces...
...The history of Britain in the last 30 years cannot be understood unless the distinction between these two groups is grasped...
...b) if necessary, military measures...
...During these seven years Communist aggression took the form of military probing actions around the perimeter of the Communist world...
...The undergraduates who voted for the King and Country resolution, the local Labor parties who supported Cripps at the 1935 Conference and later elected him to the party executive, the intellectuals of the Left Book Club who worked for a united front with the Communist party—these were not pacifists in any real sense...
...The vast majority of the members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain, and of equivalent groups elsewhere, are not Communists or fellow-travelers but what might be called "moral neutralists.' Just as Cripps and his followers in the mid-'30s saw little to choose between the National Government in Britain and the Fascists in Italy, so today the moral neutralists see little to choose between the "power elite" in Washington and the power elite in Moscow...
...The aim is to alter the context in ways which improve American security, but not to change it fundamentally...
...In July 1961, however, Premier Khrushchev announced a 33 per cent increase in military spending, the largest single announced increase in the Soviet military budget for any year since World War II...
...The slaughter of World War I, the apparent injustices of the Versailles settlement, and the prevailing semiMarxist analysis which explained war as the product of "overripe capitalism," all combined to give intellectual backing to the emotional pacifism of the religious...
...In July 1961, with the armed forces still at a strength of 3.1 million, Khrushchev cancelled the additional manpower cuts designed to reduce this number to 2.4 million...
...The test of the success of the unilateral program, in his view, is whether it leads to a major détente in Soviet-American relations and the successful negotiation of substantial arms control agreements...
...Thus the last decade has seen a progressive expansion of the American peace movement...
...money came in for more ads, and local groups sprang up to reprint the ad in their own newspapers...
...Such races, consequently, cannot be maintained indefinitely...
...foreign aid was expanded...
...During the 1930s peace sentiment was fairly widespread in the United States, but a growing concern with the military expansion of Fascism in the waning years of the decade sapped its strength...
...Pure pacifism, whether religious or secular in inspiration, was rare...
...The young men who had refused to fight for King and Country showed themselves willing to fight for what they regarded as a just cause...
...The result is a tremendous increase in expenditures and consequent pressures on the economy of the Soviet Union...
...To begin with, the result of the vote taken at that Conference clearly shows that the extent and strength of pacifism in those years have been grossly exaggerated...
...In fact," he writes, "it seems likely that unless thoroughgoing distrust can be acknowledged on both sides, it may be hard to reach any real understanding...
...Nevertheless, the ILP traditions remained...
...Occasionally, though—e.g., the anti-Polaris campaign led by the Committee for Nonviolent Action, and the General Strike for Peace in New York last January —the inspiration for these actions suffers from an anarchist tinge...
...Collective security" was thought of almost entirely as a way of preventing war...
...Both the "initiative" school (Osgood) and the "arms control" school (Schelling) believe the United States should begin a series of actions, not based on prior formally negotiated agreements, designed to communicate with the Soviets...
...At the beginning of the Berlin blockade, for instance, General Lucius Clay warned that war might "come with dramatic suddenness," and the CIA refused to predict peace for more than 60 days into the future...
...The Central Committee met and reorganized the administration of agriculture, but made no major change in agricultural allotment...
...It now concerns itself not only with testing and disarmament but with the political issues behind them...
...The Independent Labor party (ILP), which deserves most of the credit for bringing the present Labor party into existence, was permeated through and through by a deep abhorrence of war...
...Schelling, on the other hand, feels that unilateral steps should focus on trying to avoid a war that might be caused by military technology itself...
...The response was overwhelming...
...They objected to Hitler on moral and ideological grounds, not on grounds of power politics...
...The test of Soviet intentions, therefore, lies not in its resumption of nuclear tests—which in themselves require little sacrifice of other goals—but rather in the Kremlin's efforts to push the development of its strategic forces at the same time that it is expanding the strength of its strategic forces and increasing the number of men under arms...
...Pearl Harbor all but decimated what was left...
...but (6) should not demand prior commitment to reciprocation by the enemy as a condition for its commission...
...It was a war of liberty against tyranny...
...here the problem of choice is minimal...
...Some were religious, primarily Protestant, and grouped around such organizations as the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker...
...They will have created a politically responsible American movement for peace...
...If the Soviets continue to opt for the former, it can only mean that they consider their foreign goals sufficiently important to pursue policies which impose real domestic burdens and which consequently increase the likelihood of crisis and war...
...Its leaders were bell-clear in stating that the Soviet Union bore great responsibility for the cold war, though they protested the cold war activities of both power blocs...
...Fall-out is something else again...
...Bulganin and Khrushchev campaigned through the neutralist countries...
...The question was raised when Senator Thomas J. Dodd (D.-Conn...
...Sparked by such traditional peace leaders as Norman Thomas and Robert Gilmore, a group of well-known citizens placed a moderately phrased advertisement in the New York Times of November 15, 1957, which protested both Russian and American nuclear policy...
...To the liberal conscience of the '30s, the Spanish Civil War was what the Greek War of Independence and the Italian Risorgimento had been to earlier generations...
...if some people do not allow us to do so, I am ready to stand as the early Christians did, and say: 'This is our faith, this is where we stand, and if necessary this is where we will die.'" The second position, less moving but intellectually more subtle, was expressed by Sir Stafford Cripps...
...True, the ideal of collective security was extraordinarily confused, and its supporters failed lamentably to think their positions through...
...The unilateral disarmers differ from the initiative group in their estimate of the likely Soviet response to an American disarming operation...
...In fact, though, the appeasers were attacked from both ends of the political spectrum...
...In February 1933, the Oxford Union debating society voted by 275-153 that: "This House will in no circumstances fight for King and Country...
...They had only to examine the policy pursued by the predominantly Conservative Government...
...Quantitative arms races tend to be much more dangerous than qualitative ones...
...If this were all that were involved, the implications for international stability would not be important...
...His fundamental assumption was that there was little to choose between the British Conservative party and the Fascists', and that if it came to a choice the British Government would betray the anti-Fascist cause in its own class interests...
...With neither side able to achieve a decisive lead, there is no individual incentive to attack the opposing side...
...For one thing, it must concern itself with the economics of disarmament in order to win labor support...
...Announced figures rose slowly from 1949-51, and jumped significantly in 1952 to a spending plateau of about 107 billion (old) rubles a year, which was maintained through 1955...
...The purposes of the increase were essentially threefold: First, it permitted a speed-up in the development and production of weapons for the U.S...
...This was followed by the appearance of the Student Peace Union (SPU) at the University of Chicago...
...On the other hand, other members insisted that nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of achieving the organization's paramount task: building the broadest and most effective instrument possible for peace education and action...
...Until then, pacifism had had a long and honorable history in the British Socialist movement...
...The initiative program either succeeds or fails—it breaks through the arms race to a peace race or it has accomplished nothing...
...His steps will not necessarily pave the way for more comprehensive arms control agreements, though many see this as a possible result of a vigorous unilateral arms control campaign...
...The technological race exerts continuing pressure on military budgets, which is met in part by the increasing effectiveness of the weapons (usually this allows a reduction in number), and in part by the sacrifice of older, conventional forces and manpower...
...But Hitler and Mussolini scarcely needed to take account of the British Left to discover that Britain would be slow to fight...
...But most significant of all, it was a war...
...On one side they were attacked by Tory anti-appeasers like Churchill, in the name of traditional patriotism...
...They differ, however, on the steps to be taken...
...The overall increase in American military spending has not only been moderate, therefore, but a temporary situation was responsible for part of it...
...Second, all those who voted against sanctions were by no means pacifists in the true sense...
...It was a vote not against war as such, but against a "patriotic" and imperialistic war like that of 1914...
...The original Soviet defense appropriation for 1961 was 9.3 billion (new) rubles...
...he did not underestimate the Fascist threat...
...This difference influences the kind of steps in the military field which the two schools propose, as as well as the criteria which they use to develop these steps...
...Cripps was not a pacifist...
...The issues of disarmament, disengagement and détente are global in scope...
...ability to perform the competitive role of military forces while at the same time it reduced the likelihood of inadvertent war, or the damage should war occur...
...foreign policy...
...The following year, in response to the creation of NATO and the Berlin airlift, the Soviets began to increase their military spending...
...They were simply supporters of collective security and the League...
...The Columbia University sociologist's plan, which centers around a phased reduction of arms beginning with conventional weapons, has found partisans in many of the nation's larger universities...
...In addition to campus developments and the better known national organizations, many diverse and independent peace groups have sprung up...
...Therein lies the source of instability...
...The Soviet Union has thus reversed the policy which it, like the United States, followed during the late '50s...
...In the intervening 10 years, however, larger and larger numbers of Americans—for the most part, from the middle class—have been joining its ranks...
...The crucial question at present is whether the "intensification" of the arms race in the past year means simply a quahtative speed-up, as reflected in the resumption of nuclear testing, or also significant increases in the resources allocated by both sides to military purposes...
...While arms controllers tend to focus on changes in military postures, the initiative school combines these steps with actions in international politics...
...The unilateralist and pacifist movements of the '60s undeniably contain a small minority of Communists and fellow-travelers who will not be persuaded to shed their prejudices by anything any Western government could possibly do...
...He opposed the foreign policy of the National Government, not because he feared that it might lead to war with Germany, but because he did not trust the British Right to oppose Nazism wholeheartedly...
...Actually, there were three important currents of opinion in the '30s, not two...
...By and large Washington's unilateral military policy has focused on arms competition with the Soviet Union...
...Thus the leading figures in the pacifist peace movement of the early '50s—among them A. J. Muste, Dorothy Day and David Dellinger—were from an earlier political generation...
...The ordinary, and even the not so ordinary, citizen feels a sense of helplessness and confusion in the presence of diplomatic proposals and counter-proposals, claims and counter-claims...
...Ten years later, the few who had stubbornly clung to their beliefs provided one source of opposition to the Korean War...
...Schelling has suggested such measures as pointing up the development of second strike weapons, eschewing certain types of intelligence activities, and emphasizing the difference between nuclear weapons and conventional weapons...
...It was comparatively rare for supporters of the League to admit to themselves, at least in so many words, that collective security might have to be defended with guns as well as with words...
...In the process, TTP has underlined a common principle: Those who work with it are committed to the urgency of the problem of war and peace, and are willing to explore alternatives to present policies...
...Last fall there appeared a new organization which epitomizes this development, Turn Toward Peace (TTP), under the chairmanship of Norman Thomas...
...But it would be equally foolish to forget that their strength varies in inverse ratio to the liberalism displayed by Western governments, and particularly by the Government of the United States...
...Perhaps the best method for imposing some order on the confusion surrounding today's peace movement is to look at it chronologically, noting the events—and the responses they provoked—which have contributed to its development...
...On balance, the Left's record was, even then, no worse than the Right's...
...In general, all this confusion is a sign of life...
...The United States has tried to design its military force as a deterrent to Communist aggression...
...The thing that is being wiped out is the trade union movement...
...Before the meeting of the Communist party Central Committee in March of this year, it was frequently reported that a significant increase in agricultural investment was in the offing...
...Despite Lansbury's immense personal popularity, despite the ancient pacifist tradition of the British Labor movement, sanctions against Mussolini were supported by a majority of better than 20-1...
...Yet there is no question that SANE has made, and continues to make, an extremely important contribution in broadening and adding political content to the American peace movement...
...Osgood proposes that the United States make a series of unilateral military moves designed to induce reciprocation by the Soviet Union...
...The initiative school would argue, however, that a step is acceptable if it does not seriously jeopardize the ability of American strategic forces to carry out their military functions and seems like a peaceful step leading to a reduction in military capacity or activity...
...In the short run, a purely technological race cannot produce any significant change in the military balance of power...
...The Right can be blamed for failing to act, the Left for failing to think...
...This reflects a very specific response to the unique moral and political problems posed by the Bomb, rather than the growth of traditional pacifist sentiment in this country...
...Should the Soviets halt their present military build-up and settle back into a technological race whose increasing costs are compensated for by reductions in the size of their armed forces, this will be a reasonably good indication that they do not seriously intend to risk war over Berlin, Laos or any other controversial issue in the near future...
...Originally, SANE, which soon became one of the nation's most important peace organizations, concentrated almost exclusively on nuclear testing...
...In other words, well over half the people who answered the Ballot— and they might reasonably be presumed to be more inclined toward pacifism than the rest of the population—were willing, if necessary, to fight for the League...
...Thus, it is wildly perverse to blame the Left for the follies and tragedies of the late '30s...
...For them war was an evil to be resorted to only in the event of a good cause...
...intentions rather than U.S...
...In part, this can be attributed to general political developments: the settlement of the war in Indochina, Khrushchev's policy of coexistence, Eisenhower's trip to Geneva in 1955...
...and he was willing to use force against it...
...At the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the '30s, the one proposition on which all Socialists and almost all Liberals would have agreed was that a world war must never be allowed to happen again...
...Its passing was formally signified by the Geneva conference of 1955, Eisenhower's declaration that there is "no alternative to peace," and Khrushchev's denial of the "fatal inevitability of war" at the 20th Party Congress in February 1956...
...The empty and hollow excuses of 1914 which I was then fool enough to believe echo through the arguments of today...
...2) should be such as to be clearly perceived by the enemy as reducing his external threat...
...It is we who are being wiped out and who will be wiped out if Fascism comes here...
...If potential aggressors had actually read them, they would have discovered that the British people were more deeply committed to the League of Nations than their rulers were, and less reluctant to come to its defense...
...It is still too early to know whether Turn Toward Peace will attain all its goals, but it clearly seems to be on the right track...
...The Oxford undergraduates did not say that they would refuse to fight in any circumstances: they said that they would not fight for King and Country...
...Since then a whole string of college peace groups have come into being, including SANE chapters at the high school level...
...But in the mid-'30s this position became increasingly hard to sustain...
...Osgood wants his steps to be somewhat disadvantageous to the side making them, in terms of what he calls "military aggression"—but not decidedly so...
...The broadening of the peace movement in the 1950s resulted in more academics and intellectuals joining its ranks...
...However much radicals might have argued about the merits and demerits of the Kaiser's Germany, no one could doubt that Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy were forces for evil...
...When the time came, the pacifistic Left shed its illusions, and even some of its confusions, with remarkable speed...
...It is unlikely that the National Government would have behaved more resolutely than it did, even had the Left supported British rearmament...
...Maybe limited measures of arms control can be arrived at by quite indirect and incomplete communication...
...The strongest force for arms control on both sides has been the competition of other claims on resources with those of the military...
...The first was the traditional Christian pacifist position, expressed by the revered party leader George Lansbury, in a speech which, even in cold print, still remains profoundly moving: "One Whose life I revere and Who, I believe, is the greatest Figure in history, has put it on record: 'Those who take the sword shall perish by the sword.' If mine was the only voice in this Conference, I would say in the name of the faith I hold, the belief I have that God intended us to live peaceably and quietly with one another...
...But there is no longer any question that the news about fall-out, the grim figures on the Bomb's destructive capacity, and the increasing anxieties of a time in which—to use Walter Lippmann's perceptive insight—war is impossible and peace cannot be achieved, have had their impact upon our society...
...It is made up of almost a dozen basic groups, some cooperating, some competing...
...Maybe instead of arguing about what we should do, we will simply do it and dare the other side to do likewise, or do it and quietly suggest that we would like to keep it up, but only if they find it in their interest to do something comparable...
...The other major unilateral approach is associated with Thomas C. Schelling, a Harvard economist...
...A third point should also be noted...
...In 1956 Soviet spending dropped back about 10 per cent from its peak, then stabilized at about 94 billion rubles a year from 1956-60...
...This single area of agreement has led to uniformly labeling as Unilateralists a number of individuals with vastly different perspectives and, in fact, different proposals for unilateral action...
...And because the burden of the race remains relatively constant, there is no mutual incentive to end the race through either war or agreement...
...It brought Soviet military appropriations for 1961 up to 12.3 billion rubles...
...Samuel P. Huntington is Associate Director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University and the author of The Soldier and the State...
...The latter aspect, however, has predominated, with the result that a rough balance of power has developed and peace has been preserved...
...Although a minority, more often than not they are extremely dedicated and hardworking, and therefore have played relatively important roles in the development of the peace movement...
...has failed to exploit the area of mutual interest between this country and the USSR...
...in other words, they should hamper the U.S.' ability to deter a Soviet military move, but at least in the early stages they should not do so in a significant way...
...The arms control moves are made within the context of the acceptance of the inevitability of a continuation of an arms stand-off and a period of tension between the two sides...
...The tragedy is that no one convinced them that the British had a good cause until it was too late...
...Modern methods of sampling public, opinion had not been developed in the '30s, and there is no way of knowing exactly what the mass of ordinary British people were thinking at the time...
...The crucial question on the Peace Ballot asked: if a nation insists on attacking another, the other nations should combine to compel it to stop, by (a) economic and non-military means...
...It was the Right, not the Left, who upheld the principle of non-intervention and swallowed repeated insults to the flag...
...The purpose here is not to alter our military posture in ways that make a difference to the Soviets but rather, by means of the gesture involved, to convince the Soviets that we are peaceful...
...For them, Marxist holy writ still obtains...
...Founded for the most part by radicals, many of them pacifists, SPU nevertheless was determined to have the broadest possible base...
...The critical choices come when military needs impinge on civilian needs...
...Some, in fact, are not easily placed anywhere on the Fromm-OsgoodSchelling continuum...
...During the Korean War, when I myself first became involved in the peace movement, its organizational topography was much simpler...
...Both these factors enabled the Soviet Union and the United States to stabilize their overall military expenditures in the late '50s despite the intense technological competition...
...And being without any great political influence, they found themselves having to devote most of their efforts to defending their own political ideas: raising funds to aid conscientious objectors and draft resisters and fighting the government, particularly the FBI, which tended to confuse all opposition with support of the Soviet Union...
...These were used, of course, to promote the foreign policy of the Soviet Union under the name of fighting for peace...
...They argue quite persuasively that both the U.S...
...Here is the nub of the Unilateralists' position...
...and no accurate number for the individual peace organizations now in existence is even available...
...others have engaged in fierce, fratricidal struggles...
...General war with the Communist powers was more likely from 1948-54 than at any time since...
...While the quantitative arms race has had its ups and downs, the qualitative or technological arms race has continued at a fairly constant rate...
...In recent years, SANE has increased the breadth of its activities...
...step, one that clearly affected its military capacity, would be startling enough to be effective...
...But it was another factor which had a particularly telling psychological impact: fall-out...
...capitalism" is still doomed...
...Both reduced their military establishments after World War II, their respective budgets reaching low points in 1948...
...In December 1961, moreover, it was announced that appropriations for 1962 would be 13.4 billion rubles...
...But its primary concern—and area of greatest impact—is a basic critique of U.S...
...But this minority is small in number and insignificant in influence...
...Although it did not defend the idea of Communist influence in the peace movement, part of SANE'S anti-Communist but pacifist wing did not want to drop the members under investigation because it saw this as capitulation to reactionary pressure...
...The work of defending conscientious objection and draft resistance continues, but in a much broader context...
...The Kremlin is clearly confronted with a hard choice: either to give up many of its domestic goals, or to give up its missiles and manpower policy and the high military budgets which that policy entails...
...on the other they were attacked by the Left, in the name of collective security and democracy...
...In its unilateral military actions, however, the U.S...
...But within a year, as Southern students moved courageously forward, Northern students found the sense of excitement which had drawn them to the sit-in movement waning...
...When the issue of fall-out first arose in the mid-'50s, a new organization came into being: the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, better known as SANE...
...At the other end of the continuum, one finds an exceedingly heterogeneous group of analysts who favor changes in the American military posture which would make it less vulnerable and more controlled...
...Nevertheless, the objectives of the unilateral disarmers are largely the same as those in the unilateral initiative camp...
...the Labor party Conference that year had to decide whether or not to support possible League of Nations sanctions against Italy—and perhaps war as well...
...After 1918 the ILP declined in importance, and in 1932 it actually disaffiliated itself from the larger Labor party...
...When a person is told that the amount of Strontium 90 in his milk is increasing, or that the spring rain will produce a predictable number of genetic mutations, it hits with an immediacy which surpasses the affect of any dispatch from disarmament negotiation in Geneva...
...Each generation of weapons tends to be several times more complicated and effective, and several times more expensive, than the previous one...
...But these impassioned warnings, however sincere, obscure significant distinctions between the components of the arms race and ignore important differences in its tempo...
...Osgood is much more explicit in the steps he proposes, but also is quick to assert that these are to be taken only as indicative of the kinds of things he has in mind...
...The defense figure in the Soviet budget undoubtedly covers only part of the USSR's military expenses, but the recent officially announced changes in the budget are in themselves significant...
...He has described his position in terms which on the surface do not appear very different from those of Osgood: "Maybe arms control is destined to be something more informal than is suggested by the great diplomatic deployments in Geneva...
...capabilities...
...Charles Osgood, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, is generally credited as being the father of the "unilateral initiative" school...
...The arms controller would approve a step provided it did not seriously jeopardize U.S...
...The more secular-minded pacifists tended to align themselves with the War Resisters League...
...But in 1956-57, largely because of Khrushchev's Secret Speech revelations and the Hungarian Revolution, the American Communist movement nearly collapsed...
...In the years between the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi-Soviet pact, on the other hand, the Left was far more deeply committed to collective security than the Right, and more willing to live up to its commitment...
...a short but significant decline in the mid-'50s...
...In the past, some arms races have been primarily quantitative, others primarily qualitative...
...If governments deny resources to other goals in order to expand armaments, they must justify that denial by diplomatic or military triumphs...
...The Council's approach has been nonpartisan, and its newsletter is open to a variety of viewpoints...
...Second, it strengthened our continuing limited war capability—the number of Army divisions has been increased from 14 to 16...
...After the Korean War ended, a new kind of person became involved in the American peace movement...
...but only to a remarkably prejudiced eye would it appear much better...
...A qualitative arms race, on the other hand, need not impose an expanding burden on civilian society...
...The expense of the tests themselves is relatively minor, and their results will eventually manifest themselves in new means of penetration and antimissile defense...
...a sharp rise in the early '50s...
...It is independent of the pressures and priorities of politics in a way in which quantitative decisions on military budgets are not...
...In a sense these critics want the Government to do precisely what it has always done: rely for security on unilateral American military moves and not on negotiated agreements...
...The move should be designed not to decrease our ability to react to unacceptable Soviet provocation, but rather to decrease the likelihood of inadvertent or pre-emptive war...
...In 1935, Mussolini invaded Abyssinia...
...In the former, either one side achieves a decisive margin of superiority because of superior resources and will, or both sides are faced with the progressive exhaustion of their strength and the sacrifice of other goals as the military establishment imposes a larger and larger burden on society...
...In almost every case, the trend has been to move away from a specifically pacifist ideology and to mobilize larger numbers for political action...
...He believes that the area of common interest so far overshadows the area of of conflict that it is only misunderstanding and lack of communication which creates the spiraling arms race and the danger of war...
...Whereas the initiative school argues that limited steps must be taken to break through the distrust to a period of mutual agreement and cooperation, the arms controllers argue that we can build on the distrust, and on the common recognition of the need to avoid certain dangers, to tacitly or explicitly negotiate various arms control steps...
...Most of those in the initiative school recognize that Washington and Moscow have some conflicting interests...
...But this combination was made possible by reductions in military manpower...
...As one would expect, the increases in the military budgets coincided with the greatest tensions between the powers...
...Because of its name, those who organized the Peace Ballot have been accused of helping to convince potential aggressors that the British people would refuse to fight...
...Changes in the structure and deployment of American military forces, they believe, should be designed to stress those points on which we have overlapping interests with the Soviets, and should be aimed at improving the chances of more general Soviet-American cooperation for reducing the danger of war...
...Three Roads to Unilateralism By Morton H. Halperin IN the past few years, a number of individuals with a wide variety of opinions on the dangers of the arms race have urged that the United States depend on unilateral actions rather than formal negotiations for fulfillment of its arms control objectives...
...In Spain the usual roles were reversed...
...You cannot be in and out at the same time, not if you are honest...
...At roughly the same time a new group, made up of people who at one point or another had been in or around the American CP, came into existence...
...Neither government can fail to push its technology along these lines...
...TTP believes that for the peace movement to be effective it must link up with the major political forces in American society...
...Nor does it normally give either side an opportunity to achieve a decisive lead...
...The response to these charges within SANE itself was divided...
...It would be ludicrous to make them the unofficial arbiters of Western behavior, or even to pay too much attention to their reactions when Western policy is framed...
...In the end the Conference supported Bevin's position, and voted for sanctions by the crushing majority of 2.2 million against 102,000...
...Such a force, it is true, might give the United States significant advantages in the event of a general war, but it can also make a major contribution to reducing the danger of inadvertent war and hence is at least partly in the Soviet interest...
...of the oppressed against their oppressors...
...It was necessary, they argued, for SANE to take an unequivocal stand on Communism...
...For Osgood, then, mistrust is the cause of the arms race, and a unilateral program must be designed to break down suspicion...
...The Left's failure to support British rearmament in time was due most of all, as we have seen, to its deep distrust of the motives and intentions of the Government...
...In addition to a differing image of what the changes in military postures should signify in the short run, the arms controller and the initiative advocate disagree on the long-run objectives of unilateral military actions...
...It is a combination of political and military moves in sequence, and assumes some kind of reciprocation from the Soviet bloc...
...Today pacifist organizations are not only much less isolated, but their leaders play important roles in nonpacifist movements...
...The claims represented in our Government by these agencies are paralleled by the claims for consumer goods, agricultural investment, housing and other needs in the Soviet Union...
...If this sum is actually spent, Soviet military expenditure will increase by 45 per cent in 18 months, from July 1961 to December 1962...
...Several have their roots in the more radical pacifist tradition of direct action, which explains their employing such tactics as sailing ships into nuclear test areas...
...The arms controller would view any change in the strategic situation which reduced the danger of inadvertent war as a success, regardless of whether it leads to arms control steps...
...Now it is the Right which fulminates against "appeasement," while the moderate Left seeks accommodation and a relaxation of tension, and the extreme Left advocates sweeping concessions...
...It is the desire for these things which has kept military budgets down and which stabilized them during the late '50s...
...If I could feel that British imperialism had turned over a new leaf, then my difficulties and doubts would largely disappear, but every one of us knows in our hearts that the driving force behind our Government, overpowering all humanitarian and liberal sentiments, is and must be the urgent necessities of the capitalist economic system itself...
...Several groups have interlocking directorates...
...Most of them were pacifists...
...In the early and middle '30s, however, the position was somewhat different...
...In the absence of major overall increases in military spending during these years, the frequent nuclear tests of the two powers from 1955-58, and the race for ICBMs and IREMS, did not significantly warm up the diplomatic climate...
...And there has been a special emphasis on unifying all who are interested in working toward a distinctive, though minimal, program...
...The other peace movement of 10 years ago, the ersatz disarmament effort of the Communist party and its friends, hardly deserves the name...
...Both Soviet and American military spending followed roughly similar curves: the post-World War II decline...
...and the USSR...
...In the conventional picture—most notably painted by Sir Winston Churchill —we see the cowardly appeasers on one side, confronted on the other by the bold and upright antiappeasers, with Churchill at their head...
Vol. 45 • August 1962 • No. 17
