It is commonplace to say that war has become so horrible that it is no longer possible to contemplate it. Yet it is being contemplated today, not only by the military, whose profession is so to do, but also by the so-called civilian strategists. And the more they contemplate war, the more possible war seems to become; and as the opportunities for manipulation of force for the achievement of political objectives become more apparent, so does the horror recede and the talk of mega-deaths take on a kind of cocktail-party unreality.
That wars should be regarded as intolerable is not new. This happened after every major war, but the horror slowly faded as the world picked up the pieces and proceeded to politics as usual. Although each revolutionary new military invention had led to the prediction that war has now become too horrible to contemplate, the world has always grown accustomed to the new horror and after a while has not known how to avert it.
The situation since the first atomic bombs were exploded differs from that of the past for quantitative rather than qualitative reasons. First, there is a new scale of destructiveness: a major city and its entire population can now be destroyed in minutes, rather than after long months of massive bombardment. Second, there is the now universal recognition by governments that science and technology are essential for the maintenance of military strength, so the pace of military technology since the end of the war has remained essentially at the wartime level. Coupled with the general explosive growth of science in the last 20 years, this has meant that the time between radical new innovations in methods of mass destruction is now measured in a few brief years rather than generations. However, there is a new aspect to the situation, the beginning of a recognition—though it has not yet penetrated to the furthest reaches of our governmental structures—that the national security of all nations may be better served by restraints, controls and agreements to limit armaments and their use than by the race for the improvement of such weapons.
But arms races have a life of their own. They are not turned off by intellectual recognition of their futility. Nor is it simple to stop governmental activity in the weapons field once started. The time must be right, the political and psychological situation—both internal and external—must be favourable. Such favourable constellations of circumstances have not occurred very often in the past.
One such opportunity occurred at the end of World War II. At that time the American Government prepared a wise and far-sighted plan for the international control of such weapons, the so-called Acheson-Lilienthal plan. There are many reasons why this plan was never accepted, and not all of these have to do with the intransigence of the Russians.
Probably the main reason for the failure of these proposals as presented by Mr Baruch was the fact that the Soviet Union , at the conclusion of the last war, was neither interested in nor ready for the freezing of the status quo with respect either to her armed strength or to the possibility for its further expansion. Stalin was not interested in any kind of agreement that would have prevented the Soviet Union from independently acquiring nuclear weapons . On the other hand, although the Acheson-Lilienthal proposals were both far-sighted and magnanimous, there was in their presentation a large element of hypocrisy—of appearing to offer the moon in the full certainty that the offer could not possibly be accepted. Certainly, there was little excuse, beyond the immediate provocations of the cold war , for the cynical dragging on of the disarmament proceedings in the United Nations until well into the fifties, in which the Western Allies piously advocated a world nuclear government and the Soviet Union equally piously proposed a purely verbal “ban the bomb” agreement, without either side having the slightest expectation of any progress. Aside from a missed opportunity, when it might have been possible to place some controls over the development of nuclear weapons before they had been produced in large numbers, or when some sort of agreement might have been reached to limit their numbers and types, the net effect of the United Nations disarmament discussions of the late forties and early fifties was to develop among politicians and people the most profound cynicism concerning the intention of the major powers regarding any possible limitation of their armaments.
An opportunity of a different kind, less spectacular but possibly as significant, was missed in the early fifties when the hydrogen bomb was first achieved by the United States, followed in about one year by the Soviet Union . At that time an important segment of American scientific opinion held that another initiative should be taken to halt the growing arms race and, by mutual and binding agreement with the Soviet Union , to limit the new development that was clearly and spectacularly on the horizon. The resulting internal struggle in the United States was not only lost by the scientists but it ended in a vicious vendetta against their spokesman, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and flagrant intimidation against any independent scientific initiative. In this case, not only was an opportunity missed, but also unreason, in the name of McCarthyism, prevailed instead.
Another missed opportunity for significant armament controls began with the launching of the first Soviet Sputnik . Unfortunately, following the initial Russian successes in the launching of satellites and owing to their obvious ability to use the same types of rockets to deliver nuclear weapons from great distances, the United States passed through a period of panic induced by the belief that our capabilities in the field of rocketry were lagging hopelessly behind those of the Russians. The scientific community was called upon for emergency aid (it was in this period that the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee was activated) and a massive and rapid programme of rocket development and missile construction was initiated to overcome the so-called missile gap. As is now well known, this missile gap never existed to any appreciable degree and, in fact, now exists in the reverse sense. American missile capabilities for long-range delivery of nuclear weapons now exceed those of the Soviet Union by a large factor.
During the late fifties and early sixties, when the potentialities for intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) development were being explored and understood, it became clear that such developments could provide a new opportunity for halting the arms race and for reducing nuclear armaments. The need for large numbers of nuclear weapons had previously been justified by the military, not because of the need to use large numbers in any conceivable conflict, but rather because American and Soviet defensive developments, in particular anti-aircraft defences , had become sufficiently effective so that a large number of bombers were required for even a few to be sure of penetrating these defences . However the same is not true of ICBMs, since there is no effective defence against these; therefore the number of missile weapons required for any possible military application is very much less than the number of bomber weapons required for the same application, most especially if the rockets themselves can be rendered invulnerable against an enemy attack.
This situation was clearly recognized by many scientists in the United States in the late fifties and a number of proposals were put forward for limiting such forces according to a doctrine now known as “minimum deterrence.” Apparently Soviet military strategists understood these arguments much better than their American counterparts, for the Soviet Union has limited her missiles to a number sufficient to ensure that under all circumstances any American nuclear attack on the Soviet Union would result in unaccepta...