Spectrum; Lecture by George McGovern on "Hope in the Nuclear Age"

Production of this is spectrum. Good afternoon. I'm Cari cheery on today's program. Former Senator George McGovern who spoke recently at Smith College in Northampton on the nuclear arms race but governs political life began like so many others in academia. At 21 years of age he left college to join the Air Force joined World War 2. He returned after the war to finish his undergraduate degree. Following graduation well-governed decided to train for the ministry and joined a seminary but left after nine months to return to school for post-graduate studies. He received his Ph.D. in history and government at Northwestern University and eventually began. Teaching those subjects there. Well he also coached the debating team following his quest for a more active political life. He helped organize the Democratic Party in South Dakota and at 33 years of age he ran successfully for the U.S. House of Representatives where he served two terms. In 1960

president elect John F. Kennedy appointed McGovern to be the first director of the United States. Food for Peace program. In 1962 he began a three term career at the U.S. Senate. And during his 18 years there he served on the Joint Economic Committee the Agriculture Nutrition and forestry committees. He chaired the Senate Select Committee on attrition and human needs also serving on the Foreign Relations Committee where he chaired that subcommittee on African affairs. But governors probably best known for his winning the Democratic Party's nomination for president in 1972. Only Massachusetts voted for him. The rest of the country voted for Richard Nixon. In 1984 McGovern again ran for the Democratic Party's nomination for president. Campaigning for a decrease in defense spending and military withdrawal from Lebanon and Central America. Since September McGovern has been teaching Foreign Policy at Duke University. George McGovern's address at Smith College was recorded on February 27

1985 and his comments are timely in light of recent events in Central America. I have been asked this being a nuclear war. You just make brief mention about another issue that is very much on my mind these days. When I got into the presidential records 1980 I did it not only because of the nuclear issue which was being. By some of the other contenders but also because of certain other issues that were not being addressed. For example on a list of 10 steps that I recommended the next president of the United States take it outside of the nuclear freeze issue almost none of those other issues on my list were being discussed at all. And one of those step one on my agenda was a recommendation that the United States terminate and all

military operations right now in Central America. I still believe that this would strengthen our standing in Central America and indeed throughout the hemisphere and much of the rest of the world. If we would confine our efforts to influence events in Central America to intelligent diplomacy and intelligent trade and economic and technical assistance program and to support. They organized negotiating efforts that have been underway there for some time the so-called Contador process. But I was astounded at this late date in our relationship to Central America. Given the long history of and satisfactory American military interventions over the decades in Central America to hear the president the United

States say when he was asked if there were conditions under which we might back away from our military pressure on Central America or on Nicaragua as a question he said well we might back away when we get them to say in a sense to knuckle under to the kind of intense pressure that we have been bringing to bear on that Sandinista government. Now it seems to me. That describes the scope of our problem once again. Times are ringing up this old obsolete gunboat diplomacy approach that has gotten us into so much difficulty over the years and our relationships with these little countries to the south of us. I'm quite prepared to concede that the Sandinista government in Nicaragua is not a model of Jeffersonian democracy.

They have never claimed to be that. But any American military and American administration that can swallow what's been going on at official levels in El Salvador hard over the last five or six years. Death squads that have killed according to the Catholic bishops. Thirty to forty thousand innocent noncombatants murdering people in their beds on the streets on the byways of that country. If we can swallow that kind of thing and indeed throw our arms around that government and back them to the tune now of almost a billion dollars in military assistance. I think we ought to be able to muster a little tolerance towards this revolutionary regime in Nicaragua. It is after all a regime that came to power after overthrowing the Somoza gang one of the most corrupt

and tyrannical regimes in all of Latin America under a regime incidentally which followed the American Marine occupation of that country some 50 years ago that was really the heritage that we left Nicaragua. These are people who in addition to tyrannizing the country stole everything in sight including the American earthquake aid that we send on a humanitarian basis. Some years ago which was pilfered used by Moses for their own personal aggrandizement. So what I would appeal for here tonight as I did during the recent campaign is that we terminated these military operations all across Central America but especially in Iraq where that we stopped this nonsense

of waging a so-called secret war in Nicaragua to sabotage and overturn that government to whatever extent revolutionary governments have a tendency towards authoritarianism. And towards that paranoia you exacerbate all those tendencies when you engage in the kind of Sabbath. We have funding in Nicaragua in recent years. So I agree with the speaker of the house from the state Tip O'Neill when he said yesterday to the House of Representatives instead of playing the role of an uncle trying to twist the arms of the people in Nicaragua where they heed our particular Well we ought to begin playing the role of a brother. Towards these little countries to the south of us what the

late President Roosevelt called the Good Neighbor Policy how much better that would be in terms of our own interests if we were perceived not as someone trying to make the government of Nicaragua work cry uncle. But as one following the chorus of the good neighbor in trying to come to terms with this young revolutionary government and helping to influence them in a moderate and constructive direction I can assure you that if part of our policy is to minimize Soviet and Cuban influence in Nicaragua and I think that's a legitimate objective of American policy we would be far more successful in that in trying to cooperate with the Sandinistas than in cooperating with this contra rebel group which 90 percent represents the old Somoza regime there are a few. The contra

forces that are doubtless disillusioned revolutionists who once were with us and the nation but the overwhelming majority of these contra forces are all discredited elements of the Somoza National Guard and other elements of that regime that do not merit the backing and support of the American people. And if you want to maximize Soviet and Cuban influence in Nicaragua where the best way to do it is to tie in with this discredited conferee group against the revolutionary government that is now in power in Nicaragua which I'm convinced will still be there 10 or 20 years into the future that is the group with which we ought to be identifying American influence and power in Nicaragua rather than this hopeless rag tag element to which we have attached our our prestige and power. Well so much for that. We're going to be observing the 10th anniversary

of the American pull out from Vietnam on April 30th 1975. The older people here in the auditorium will recall the pictures of the American ambassador and the last Americans in Saigon being lifted off the roof of the embassy. As we said goodbye to a failing. War in which we had been involved for many years when we have those 10 year decade long observations near the end of April. I hope we will think seriously of the lessons that costly experience has to teachers and one lesson applies in my judgement of what's going on in Central America and that is to avoid the mistake of assuming that you can divide the world in two groups.

Moscow on one side and war and Washington on the other this kind of bi polar approach to all foreign policy problems in which the assumption is made. That if there's a revolution going on somewhere in the world the Russians caused it. And therefore it's in our strategic interest to oppose it. Now that really is what happened. In Vietnam. We didn't see Hoshi in Manhattan. As a nationalist attempting to throw off a hundred years of French imperialism which is what he was trying to do although admitted later we didn't see him as the man who stood with us in the war against Japan although he did and some of the some of my fellow pilots. In World War Two were rescued in the South-East Asian jungle by men's

underground. And brought back to the American lines. I'm not under any illusions that he was a Jeffersonian Democrat he was a communist and a hard bitten one. But the fact remains that he was also a nationalist whose driving ambition and he's likely to get other people out of his car. Free the foreigners the French the Japanese. And later the Americans. But we had this bipolar bipolar view of the world. If there was a revolution going on. Against the friends. And it was being led by a communist era Marxist that had to be the Russians. Or worse yet the Chinese became And so I think it's fair to say we went into Vietnam and stayed there all those years because we thought we were turning back a challenge from Peking or Moscow or both

and we didn't look at the local conditions. We didn't look at the Hundred Years of French colonialism. We didn't look at the poverty of the misrule and I think the same things going on today. In Central America you remember shortly after this administration came to power four and a half years ago Secretary Haig was then calling the shots in Central America. And he said of El Salvador and Nicaragua these are the first two hits on the Soviet hit list for Central America. In other words if we don't stand up in El Salvador if we don't stand up in Nicaragua the Soviet Union is going to take over the place never recognizing the fact that Moses misrule. In Nicaragua might have had more to do with that Sandinista rebellion than anything that mosque was built. And I think those are the kind of considerations we have to have in mind if we're going to

learn any lessons that Vietnam had that teaches I don't think you can form an intelligent American power see in Nicaragua if you don't know something about Moses 40 year regime. If you don't know something about the role of American corporations in Central America and the impact of American military interventions This is not a partisan analysis I'm making here I don't think the Democrats have been much better than the Republicans as far as their policy on Central America is concerned although I must say Reagan has topped. Everybody that I can I can think of at the moment in terms of mistakes in Central America but the point of all of this is that I think if we were to pursue a commonsense policy in the world we have to begin moving away from this kind of your bipolar interpretation of what's going on in the world and begin to look at somebody and judge in the

circumstances that prompts these upheavals and trouble spots around the globe. All right. Well now let me move on to the nuclear question some 40 years ago. About this time of the year. In 1945 I was the pilot a B-24 bomber operating against targets in Nazi Germany and we were coming near to the end of the war and I was near the end of the spring of the combat missions. And I really believe that I was flying the ultimate or fancy weapon here was an airplane is the biggest one we had at the time that the twenty four hundred ten foot wing span and it could drop three or four times. TNT from a single there I couldn't imagine anything. More destructive than that to put a thousand airplanes up in the air each one with three or four tons. Of TNT. But we

had no sooner get back to the United States at the end of the European war when we read of the bomb. That destroyed Hiroshima. It had the striking capacity not of three times but of the twenty thousand tons. In a single bar. We dropped another one three days later in August saki and the Japanese surrendered. I think we had three times in our arsenal at the time and two of them were enough to bring Japan to its to its knees. But today we have ten thousand. Of these strategic nuclear weapons I'm not talking about the intermediate weapons which are several times that number but ten ten thousand strategic weapons. Many of them. With the destructive capacity not of twenty thousand tons. Like they wanted here Ashima but some as much as 20 million tons in a single bomb. Many

of them a million. And the Soviets have about the same. But. It seemed to me when I began to read about this new weapon that. Hitler and his that is not Legion. Were a forward that we had to bring down I've never had any any doubt about that I still don't. But and I want to make clear tonight that because of that background I'm I'm not here speaking as an isolationist or even as a pacifist for that matter although that's a perfectly respectable position for people to take. It's not one that I have ever been able to pursue. I do believe in an adequate U.S. military defense and I believe we ought to play an active role.

In international law. But I object to being called an isolationist as I was. Last issue issue with the New Republic magazine. A once a liberal publication simply simply on the grounds that the editor of that magazine seems to believe that you test someone's internationalism by the number of troops they want to dispatch into somebody else's backyard. There's more to internationalism than that. What worries me most deeply these days is that we are led by leaders who apparently do not understand the new realities of the nuclear age. I have I've lived all of my life. At least my public life in the spirit of hope.

It's the only way you can survive as a Democrat in South Dakota. But but I know that that foundation of hope is the willingness to confront reality and the reality that our leaders do not face. And I think the same is true with the Soviet leaders is that the nuclear has changed everything very fundamentally. About international relations. I talked about the plane that I flew and I do that not to ballyhoo my own military experience but simply to paint the contrast. When we were flying those bombing missions against the Nazis 40 years ago if we had a mission. Where we lost 10 percent. Of the American planes on that mission that was a catastrophic failure. Why. Because if you lost 10 percent of your planes

every time you attacked an enemy target within 10 days the whole force would be Gore. You wouldn't have any bombers left. But today. They can deliver a million tons or five million or 10 million to target and that's down the line. It doesn't represent a failure if you lose 10 percent of the weapons that you're directing against a target indeed you send a hundred missiles. Against a city the size of Boston. And if ninety nine of them are knocked down. Or never reach the target. And one of them hits the center of Boston that city is gone. So that a mission can be a 99 percent failure. And in terms of the

results it's 100 percent successful and that is the one of the fundamental differences. The only defense against nuclear weapons. Is deterrence against their use nobody's ever been able to devise a scheme under which the deeth fans. Can overwhelm the author ends. And that is why the current Star Wars. Evolution is just the notion that somehow you could build an airtight shield against thousands of metals being fired from the land from submarines. From bombers some some cases smuggled into the country. Is preposterous. I've tried to learn whether or not there are any recognized or respected scientists really working on this car wars project.

And I can't determine that any are. I think that the Star Wars concept is surely the alternate product of the mad scientist and the Hollywood the Hollywood fantasy that sometimes passes for policy these days. Now that I. I am right that of course in all fairness it is not the view of the secretary of defense or of the president here is what Mr. Weinberger has to say about it in describing the president's attitude toward Star Wars he says and I'm quoting It's the only thing that offers any real hope to the world. And the president. Will never give that up. Now writing up the same Star Wars proposal and they went here. Issue of the Foreign Affairs Quarterly McGeorge Bundy

George Cannon Robert McNamara and Gerard Smith. A Republican Incidentally these four men who have given a lifetime. To the study of strategic and security issues. They quoted Senator Arthur Vandenberg some words to describe how they reacted to the Star Wars proposal and this is what Senator Vandenberg said about a similar scheme 40 years ago. The end is unattainable the means harebrained and the cost is staggering. Now the four authors conclude and I want to quote them to be precise on this. There is simply no escape from the reality that Star Wars offers not the promise of greater safety but the absolute certainty of a large scale expansion of both authenticity and defensive systems on both sides. And I think that's

clear. If you're sitting on the other side it doesn't make much difference which one starts this. If you're sitting on the other side. And you see your potential enemy began to build and that that's supposed to intercept. Incoming missiles. And you know that that enemy still has his authentic plans he still has the capacity to destroy you. And he's building to the day when you can't presumably hit him what are you going to do. You're either going to try to build a defensive shield like that of your own which means in the normal. Expansion of the arms race on both sides or you're going to try to overwhelm it with more authenticity. Weapons and I think the latter course is probably the more likely one to expect. It's my own view that we've been living on borrowed time. For quite a while and the nuclear

age on numerous occasions our own nuclear alert system has gone into Step 1 sometimes to step 2 sometimes step 3 on the basis of what we believed were incoming Soviet missiles or bombers. Each time those fears proved to be mistaken and progression towards a nuclear retaliation on our part was halted. I think it's fair to assume that the same kind of nerve shattering misjudgements. Have been made by the Soviets there is no reason to think that their detection system is any more reliable. Or for proof than ours indeed the best evidence is that the Soviet air defense commanders shot down that

Korean jetliner a year and a half or so ago on the mistaken judgment that what they were shooting down was an American intelligence applying. Now the point I would like to make if they made that kind of a misjudgment and our best intelligence is now concluded that it was a mistake in judgment they didn't really think they were knocking down an innocent civilian airliner if they made that kind of misjudgment after trying that airplane for two hours. How much safer are we against that kind of misjudgment. Now that we have moved missiles up to within six minutes of the Soviet command and control centers where an incoming missile has to be identified. Within six minutes and their response. Period.

I think they accumulate nuclear weapons on both ears pushing a closer and closer to the trigger response that someday they're going to resolve. That was George McGovern former senator from South Dakota speaking at Smith College in not Hampton Massachusetts. This past February 27 on help in the nuclear age. McGovern also spoke to the U.S. policy in Central America which he believes is shortsighted and will end up committing U.S. troops to achieve its aims. Often referred to as the conscience of the Democratic Party. McGovern ran for his party's nomination for president in 1984 campaigning on among other issues a decrease in defense spending and military troop withdrawal from Lebanon and Central America. But governor has returned to academic life teaching Foreign Policy at Duke University. More

of his remarks can be heard on the next edition of spectrum. George McGovern's appearance at Smith College was sponsored by the smith student lecture Committee. I'm carriage of the spectrum.