PEACE THROUGH DISARMAMENT
Ferry, W. H.
PEACE through DISARMAMENT by W. H. FERRY This is the first of a series of articles to be published over the coming months which will explore the general area of disarmament. W. H. Ferry, a former...
...The degrading of our common life is so far advanced that it is hard to imagine a weapon development that would occasion general public revulsion...
...You expect that some of the satellites— Poland, Hungary, Rumania, others —will pull away—but you expect also that they will return before long...
...The alternative to disarmament is war...
...Add also the elimination from the face of the earth of the whole of Great Britain, large parts of West Germany, France, Turkey, and other countries serving as advance missile bases...
...You will offer your assistance to the United Nations not only in getting an international Peace Force under way but in the far more immediate task of keeping down the distribution of atomic weapons and gas and microbes to other nations...
...The last five billion is to be set aside—and, Prince, if I do say so myself, I think this is rather a pretty suggestion—this final five billion will be set aside for the use of the United States and its allies—to be thought of as a reverse Marshall Plan...
...For it is now clear that to continue to prepare for war is sooner or later to bring war on...
...We are well content to know that we now have the ability to overkill Russia eight or nine times...
...Theirs has not been the good fortune to live in a rich nation, geographically insulated from the wars of recent generations, theirs not the sensations of inherent superiority that such luck has engendered in the American people...
...If any system of restraint and non-recourse to arms can be made to work in the face of this versatility, it will have to be self-imposed...
...What for...
...In a reversal, many Americans today believe that peace is unthinkable...
...Kenneth E. Bould-ing remarks that "unconditional national security...
...If the Soviet were to disarm tomorrow, would we know how to set about running things throughout the Red bloc, assuming for the moment the desire to do so...
...The object is peace, not scoring points on Russia...
...The letter says, "One of my earliest memories is a film about the Lidice massacre, in which the population of one village was wiped out...
...With no important exception they stand in pious adoration of present policies...
...You have a considerable accomplishment in the field of peaceful economic competition...
...it is merely the only practical, and the only moral, alternative...
...The inspecting and controlling and policing will have to be done by each nation as a matter of honor and good politics...
...The result is a dehu-manization of society and the brutalizing of us all...
...But negotiations are bogged down everywhere in the marshes of suspicion and hate...
...You will make plans for shifting missile and arms factories into civilian goods...
...They are merely frightened, and hoping against hope that the two great threatening brutes will find a way to live together before the worst occurs...
...It is instructive to speculate on what the press will do if, as strategists are suggesting, it becomes politic for this country to ally itself with Russia against the awakening leviathan, China...
...There are many dramatic ways of posing the moral issue...
...Unilateral disarmament is far from a perfect solution to history's most tangled conundrum, but there is no perfect solution...
...No one has shown how thermonuclear war can assure the survival of American institutions and values...
...Yet it would take great courage and vision and confidence in American ideas to put down our arms for the sake of humanity...
...My opponents might, after all, be right...
...and the other scientific developments of the utmost significance to mankind will likewise be denationalized and turned over to the United Nations...
...They have the direct testimony of former President Eisenhower on this point...
...The borders of the U.S.S.R...
...The assent of China, and its cooperation in this action, has been obtained...
...This is an even more curious argument...
...It is the press that demands of candidates an irreproachable ferocity toward Russia, Since it has abandoned its own duty to criticize the so-called defense effort, the press looks on other critics as crazy or disloyal...
...Alas, because of the suspicions which have been converted into the way of life called the Cold War, the West cannot be expected soon to follow your lead...
...W. H. Ferry, a former newspaperman and public relations consultant, is vice president of the Fund for the Republic...
...I favor unilateral disarmament by the United States...
...though I must confess that they appear to be far easier to satisfy than I would be...
...Russia offers to take a leading part in the formation by the United Nations of a multi-nation Peace Force...
...Presumably the world would then be ruled by terror alone...
...Now, at the height of its power, demonstrably able to excel in this frightful competition, Russia chooses to act for humanity...
...No, the West must be expected to disbelieve you indefinitely, and thereafter to spend years inspecting and probing into every cave in the Urals, every snowbank in Siberia...
...The domestic economy, especially of the United States, would be thrown into great disarray—how great may be surmised by the total unwillingness of its leaders to make the slightest preparation for peace...
...Fundamentally, the question of disarmament is less practical than moral...
...This is not only a poetic but a necessary provision, since the West clearly has no plans whatever for coping with peace...
...I must confess that I do not know what to make of the moral question...
...I am sure we agree that your stockpiles of great bombs and missiles are good only for national vanity, perhaps to balance the arms of your adversaries, but otherwise far more trouble than they are worth...
...My opponents in turn must stipulate the most drastic consequences of the course they advocate, as I have done...
...This is a fiercely disagreeable prospect...
...Both sides have the capacity any day to upset the balance by creating new weapons...
...The main justification of our present policy is that arms and more arms are the only way to provide national security...
...I do not think that the Soviets would attempt to take over the United States...
...The next claim is that the theory of deterrence has proved itself...
...You expect that Africa and Indonesia will come to your side with pledges of good will, and that it will not be long before South America throws off its thralldom to the United States to join you...
...In a word, disarm to parley —and win...
...I suspect that a disinterested observer would not find much to choose between in a comparison of the performance of the controlled Russian press and the free American press in this respect...
...You will figure out how the officers and men of the Russian army can be converted into schoolteachers, mechanics, technical assistance teams for overseas assignments, farmers, civil servants, white collar workers, colonizers...
...In advocating it, I do not wish to be associated with Machiavelli...
...I do not think unilateral disarmament would be pleasant, or painless, or easy for the country to bear...
...By unilateral disarmament I mean that this country should lay down its arms, scrap its war planes, missiles, and submarines, disband its troops, and leave itself only the organization and weapons needed for local police and for normal patrols of its borders...
...The most drastic consequence seen by most is that the Communists would take over...
...What I wish to propose, Prince, is that you lay down your arms...
...Think of its international arrangements—pacts, economic aid, CIA adventurers, military bases, and exports of troops—billions in bases, submarines, warning systems, and the like...
...Military detachments are being recalled and demobilized...
...You have succeeded by infiltration...
...Anyone who cares to do so may inspect any part of Russia without hindrance...
...Behind all the thunder about ironclad agreements is the inescapable realization that there is no way of destroying the knowledge of how to make modern instruments of war...
...My answer to the moral question is that I would not vote for nor contribute in any way to the destruction of millions of people, their homes, and their civilization no matter what the pretext or provocation...
...Your encouragement of scientific development has won you respect, if not friendship, in many parts of the world...
...Unilateral action represents those virtues better than any other approach that I know about...
...Wisdom, politics, and morals have all been ousted from our highest councils by science, whose injunction is to do whatever it is possible to do...
...You do not expect that the United States or other Western nations will bomb Russia—what good would it do...
...I need not elaborate this figure of speech, for it is the picture you have sought to give your own subjects of the West...
...You may expect your good offices to be used in many places besides the United Nations, for you will now be known as the nation that broke the most vicious circle man has ever known, the circle of lethal logic...
...out of such realization self-policing becomes habit...
...I think that democracy is demonstrably the most just form of government...
...You expect that the Soviet's offer of capital and technical assistance will be everywhere accepted...
...A great impediment to consideration of unilateral disarmament—to almost any kind of disarmament—is the mass media—our newspapers and television...
...In the United Nations, Russia's voice will instantly become the dominant one...
...And what of the tremendous majority of my countrymen, equipped with consciences and moral sensibilities every bit as good as my own, whose answer to the button-pressing question is just the opposite, and on whose express consent our present policies are based...
...Evidence of peace preparations on your part, it may be confidently predicted, will be regarded in Washington as preparation for war...
...There can be no winners, only losers, in modern war...
...Machiavelli continues: "We both know also that the remarkable gains that your country has made in the last half-generation have been made not mainly by force of arms but by deviousness...
...It takes neither courage nor vision, only taxes, to keep on our present course...
...What will happen to the balance when China and other ambitious nations get the bomb...
...I think only that it is not only more moral but more practical than the alternative—thermonuclear war...
...The Editors Let us imagine that Nikita Khrushchev has recalled Machiavelli from the Sixteenth Century and asked his advice on how to achieve his main aims...
...There is a limit to the ability of any nation to run the world in the face of a unanimously adverse public opinion...
...My opponents, who favor preparing for war, must be willing to go to war, and must be willing to argue that when nuclear war comes, it will prove to be a better way of accomplishing American aims than the method I am proposing...
...I seem to hear in these phrases the accents of Micawber waiting for something to turn up, not the determination to secure peace...
...Peace is the purpose I have in mind, not domination...
...It is not disarmament that so much bothers the citizenry as the inability to imagine how arguments would thereafter be settled...
...Machiavelli stands and looks down at Khrushchev...
...Add the twenty to thirty million Russians that we might be able to destroy in retaliation...
...Peace, peace, there's the idea...
...As I read the evidence, there is little interest in Washington in any kind of disarmament, to say nothing of total disarmament...
...Russians see that the arms race can have no end except war of an immensity that will leave the world bloody and impoverished for generations...
...If we are so certain that the famous balance is the only way to be secure, we ought to make sure that the Russians are exactly as strong as we are, sharing our technologies to this end...
...A third pillar of present policy is described in those classic phrases of contemporary Newspeak, "arm to parley" and "negotiate from strength...
...We are deluding ourselves when we think that we can defend the undefendable, control the uncontrollable, and inspect the uninspectable...
...The West will, in any case, be facing the prodigious task of keeping its own economies afloat...
...Let me take two sentences from a letter to an English newspaper...
...The army is being disbanded...
...The quarrels about arms control make it evident that it will be far easier to get rid of all arms than of some of them, or a few at a time...
...But what you finally expect is that your step will lead to peace...
...As you see, my advice is simply conceived: it merely reverses the present attitude...
...The United States can scarcely be much interested in unilateral disarmament when it does not favor complete and general disarmament...
...Slogans have been so successfully substituted for the truth that efforts to peek behind them are denounced as treasonable, or as debilitating to the general "will to resist...
...Most of all you expect that the West will be thrown into the utmost confusion...
...But think what happens when, in a twinkling, this beast is transformed into a harmless dove...
...I believe peace to be better than war, survival better than suicide, civilization' better than barbarism, compassion better than vengeance...
...You will announce that, as of the date of your address, Russia is disarming down to the arms needed for domestic police...
...Against its wishes the Soviet was forced into the arms race by the West...
...Would we know how to use our arms to cope with the resistance we would meet everywhere at attempts to dominate...
...The atomic materials of the Soviets will be delivered to the United Nations, except for those amounts needed for peaceful atomic power plants in Russia and other countries...
...The weight of world opinion will be thrown to that nation that acknowledges the futility of the arms race and takes the irrevocable step toward ending it...
...The object here is to get the West to commit itself even more extensively to arms build-ups, and to enter into more and more 'defense' pacts and economic aid agreements with other countries...
...I think that few of the drastic consequences described earlier would result from unilateral disarmament...
...This will all take time but should not be a difficult problem since yours is a systematic economy whose ends and means are directed from the top...
...Neither Russia nor this country appears disposed in the slightest to take the lead in the United Nations in establishing the minimum international machinery that would be needed to prevent a disarmed nation from rearming if it decided to do so...
...One would think that by this time anyone, even a television commentator or an editorial writer, would know that there is no defense...
...Where, after all, will they have to go...
...Fourth, you will prepare your nation for peactime production and life...
...The villain in today's great melodrama is not Russia, not the United States, but the versatility of technology...
...You expect that the neutral and ambitious new nations will turn to the Soviet in gratitude...
...And let us assume that chief among these aims is eventual domination of the globe...
...Unilateral disarmament is not a simple or agreeable prescription...
...Machiavelli pauses for a long moment and resumes...
...No one has yet said that he believed the Russians would bomb this country, or any other country that had been rendered defenseless by withdrawal of our atomic arsenal and military apparatus...
...At the same time anything said by the other side is condemned as propaganda...
...These arrangements can, moreover, be made publicly, for the West can be trusted not to believe its eyes...
...They have more on their plate already than they can digest...
...Related to the uncritical acceptance of the premises and programs of the cold war is the press' remorseless portrayal of the Soviets as the Ultimate Evil, now and forever-more...
...I think that Machiavelli might say something like this: "Prince, it is obvious that your weapons cannot assist you in achieving a single important aim...
...You are, I believe, spending something around thirty billion dollars a year for war...
...is a commodity which is no longer on sale, and which cannot be purchased at any price...
...You could come close to dictating in the United Nations how these controls and curbs are to be imposed...
...Much as we may deceive ourselves about more and more arms adding up to peace, we do not deceive others who know from experience that such preparations have never yet spelled anything but ultimate conflict...
...What little debate goes on is about whether we are spending enough, and on the right hardware...
...This, the United Nations learns, will be committed in the future as follows: fifteen billions to the upbuilding of the Soviet economy, and that of its neighbors and old friends...
...But I must be willing to agree on the worst results of my policy that anyone can foresee...
...First, and most difficult, you must bring China into your plan...
...The American aptitude for confusing slogans with success is at its highest here...
...Third, those people now labeled neutral and uncommitted will never trust or follow your lead...
...Under the inroad of the arms race, science has become prime minister of the realm...
...Next, your various negotiators in Geneva and elsewhere will denounce their opposite numbers from the West as intractable and thirsting only to go to war...
...The Soviet Union is confident, moreover, that in a world at peace its aims will be achieved because of the superiority of its doctrines...
...I am now asked to approve plans for the elimination of whole cities, if not whole countries, and perhaps even of the human race...
...The successful continuation of the cold war program for years ahead would be the next worst thing to war itself in its effects...
...There is some reason to expect that the reaction from other countries, including some of our allies, would be that of gratitude and thanksgiving...
...We are opposed to any brand of disarmament because we cannot imagine how we "Anyhow There's A Definite Disarmament Gap" would fare under conditions of peaceful competition...
...On close examination we see that we are setting up an impossible condition...
...I would put the best brains in the country to work on the question: How would power be used in international affairs if war were forsworn as an instrument of policy...
...These cannot be served by thermonuclear war...
...I regard freedom and justice as the navigating stars for mankind...
...There is no way, for example, of detecting arsenals of germ, gas, and poison warfare...
...If it did, it would leap at Khrushchev's repeated offer to "work out any type of controls" the West would like to have in return for our agreement to total disarmament in four to five years...
...You have provided simple Communist answers to immense problems of social organization for people who want to share in the plenty of industrial society...
...Now, if I am willing to espouse so drastic a measure, I am required to accept the most drastic consequences that anyone can think of...
...And then, Prince, you say what you intend to do with the capital set free by unilateral disarmament...
...Unilateral disarmament would be a great nation's attempt to turn away from technology toward wisdom, away from armed force toward new conceptions of politics and power...
...Prince, you end this most memorable of speeches with a statement of your expectations...
...I see nothing wrong with similarly informing the Soviets and much to gain by doing so...
...But by terms of the argument, I must accept that this might or will happen: Congress turned into a puppet, our governors replaced by functionaries from the Kremlin, jack-booted soldiers with Red Stars on their shoulders on streetcorners, and Communism replacing democracy as the American way of life...
...So far has the de-humaniza-tion of man progressed that few even notice any more that wisdom and compassion have gone, and thought dispossessed by technology...
...And despite Jieavy arms burdens you have so far managed to keep your own subjects relatively happy...
...Our choice is limited and ranges only from the repugnant to the impossible...
...President Eisenhower's dictum was that "war is unthinkable...
...And Machiavelli returned to the Sixteenth Century...
...Inspection itself is institutionalized distrust...
...Finally, we are told we must have ironclad arms control and inspection agreements...
...First, you will render some of the choicest industrial and building sites on earth useless and uninhabited...
...An inspection system, far from representing basic agreement, must always stand as a reminder of perilous disagreement...
...You expect that the United Nations will accept the several challenges you have laid before it: making vast new stocks of atomic materials available where they will be of the most use, enormously extending technical assistance, and forming an international Peace Force...
...Not today or tomorrow, but after preparation of the kind I shall now outline...
...Self-restraint is not difficult when we know that the penalty is death...
...It is here, it seems to me, that the argument must be joined: these are the alternatives...
...Plans for dealing with the unprecedented psychological and economic strains on our country would have to be made...
...I think not...
...If you use them, whatever the situation or pretext, three things will follow...
...Unilateral disarmament has been attacked as the counsel of cowardice...
...Interplanetary rocket research by the U.S.S.R...
...A semi-official estimate says that a "moderate attack" on the United States would kill sixty million at once, seriously injure another twenty million, and destroy about half the homes and thirty-five per cent of the industry of the nation...
...You expect that the force of world opinion will stifle such suggestions before they are even made...
...Where they are absolutely wrong is in declaring that, because they think it will happen, Communist domination is the purpose of my proposal...
...Unilateral disarmament is dictated both by practical self-interest and by a moral concern for civilization and the future of humanity itself...
...I believe in man's moral sense, in his conscience as the guide away from the evil and toward the good...
...I should want such a step to be taken only after informing those with whom we have alliances of our intentions and giving them time to make their own plans...
...Think of all of this as the response to a single image of Russia, the image of a bloodthirsty and crafty beast, all claws and fangs, waiting to pounce...
...But now I am getting into details, and I shall desist...
...How many of the effects of unilateral disarmament that Machiavelli held before the Prince's gaze would result from such action on our part I leave to your judgment...
...You do not expect that the West will attempt to take over Russia and China...
...How long has it been since any political leader has inquired whether it is wise to continue on our present course...
...But there is no statement made by "our side," no matter how self-evidently nonsensical it may be, that is not received with editorial raptures...
...will henceforth be open to all...
...This is a curious proposition...
...Your diplomacy has been wily and far-sighted...
...Hard questions for the West to answer...
...Second, you will be fearfully bombed yourself, which cannot be expected to endear you to your subjects...
...Russia is taking this unprecedented action, you will say, because it is genuinely a peace-loving power...
...Ferry's article is adapted from an address before the American Association for the United Nations and represents his views as an individual citizen, not as an official of the Fund...
...In the next step, you will call a special meeting of the United Nations and give your call so portentous a sound that the heads of state of the entire world will come to New York...
...If public discussion has already become so corrupted, think what it will be after another decade of increasing economic dependence on the arms race and increasing psychological dependence on the image of the enemy...
...Confusion is doubtless too mild a description of what would ensue in the West...
...We are nearing the half-trillion dollar mark in arms costs, and we are assured that in all the world there is none so mighty...
...There is no criticism...
...Think it over, Prince...
...So we have the unedifying spectacle of the networks first filling our eyes with puffs from the Pentagon and then solemnly denying air time to Khrushchev on the ground that they do not want Americans to be taken in by propaganda...
...They are not dazzled by technology's triumphs, nor do they have the heady sense of power that accompanies immense strength...
...Second, you must make more menacing noises at the West, more menacing even than you made at the Summit in Paris and at the United Nations in New York...
...I do not believe that this would be the outcome...
...The difficulty is in the American imagination...
...I differ mainly with my critics, perhaps, in having a higher respect for the durability of these virtues...
...We have been spending larger and larger amounts for many years, and today we feel far less secure than when we started...
...The next ten billion is to be spent, beginning at once, to meet the needs of the so-called neutral and underdeveloped countries...
...The third and last world war will produce no victor, only the vanquished...
...Should they keep on making Polaris submarines, a full line of missiles, war planes, and so on...
Vol. 25 • May 1961 • No. 5
