Age of Overkill; 2; The Delicate Balance of Terror

Ahhhhhh Our world lives precariously and dangerously balanced on the edge of disaster, and has lived that way since Hiroshima.

What is the principle by which we have found safety during that time? And is it likely to continue? In this second of a series of talks about our age of overkill and how we can expect our world to survive in it and move beyond the power principle to some sort of security, I come to the question of the balance of terror. Last time I said that when man was presented with the Faustian bargain, here is the power you of Dremt of what will you do about it, man faltered, and in that faltering lace some hope for the future. Except for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the weapons have not been used since that time, but can we find safety in this and peace? The man who brought a new and vivid phrase into our language to describe that principle of safety was Winston Churchill.

When he left Downing Street for the last time and bad fare well to his public life, the magnificent old political warrior gave a message not only to his people but to the world. In the last speech that he delivered in the House of Commons, he talked of the old world of the balance of power and he talked of the new world that was coming and of the new principle which would replace the balance of power, namely the balance of terror. And there are many who have found in this idea of terror balanced between the two power systems, they have found in this idea a principle of a new kind of peace. They say peace, it's wonderful, but is it really there? Can we really say that we have found in this balance of terror a new principle of collective world security?

Can we really say that simply because the weapons that are confronting mankind are unthinkable and because nuclear war is intolerable, can we say that therefore we have some security? Perhaps I will be permitted a personal note here. During World War II I was a correspondent in the Western European Theatre of War in England and in France and in Belgium and Holland and finally in Germany and in Germany I saw some things but I wanted to go back after the war and a few years after what I did, you know for many of us we had forgotten to remember what had happened in Germany and I thought that I would remember to remember and so I went back, I went to Munich and from Munich I went to a place called Dachau.

Dachau as you know was the incineration factory, the crematorium where 238,000 out of the six million Jews who had been killed by the Nazis were destroyed. I came there and I found a rather neat and trim memorial park with barracks all around on the edges and I thought is it possible that what happened here could actually have happened until my eye caught sight of a towering chimney and I went into the building that the chimney was attached to and first I went into the shower room where they stripped them then I went into the gas chamber where they gasped them and then I went into the furnace room where they burnt them and the furnaces were still there standing rather open with little cuts on wheels the creak as you push them in and out and all around on the walls of this furnace room Dachau there were thousands of inscriptions left there by the families

of the victims that had passed through there and as I sat there in that furnace room at Dachau I had some long thoughts I thought surely surely here was a great historic people a great nation here was a people who had developed their universities their laboratories their factories their big cities here was a people who had had not only soldiers but also thinkers and scientists novelists and dramatists and poets philosophers and sociologists and even theologians surely it was unthinkable that this people would have been capable of developing leaders who would be responsible for this sort of massacre and would be capable of letting them do it surely that was unthinkable and yet the unthinkable happened this is one of the things that we must understand that there is a difference between the intolerable and

the impossible the unthinkable is not impossible the unthinkable may happen not only in the past has it happened but it may happen in the future you know history history is often richer in its resourcefulness in its sheer ingenuity in its imaginative possibilities much richer than some of the human beings the commentators who claim to understand it or even the men of action who claim to shape it and in that difference between history and men we have one possibility of what may happen for the future history comes up with hair raising surprises and just at the point when we have accommodated ourselves to those surprises it comes up with something new that stuns us now there is a principle that we now have called deterrence and I think it's rather important for us to understand what deterrence means you

know this is a curious world that we live in it is not an era of wars of nuclear wars but of limited wars it is not an era of peace but a violence which has always stopped short at the brink of nuclear war it is an era when men fought with limited weapons while contriving weapons of total destructiveness it is an era in which men carried out underkill while they prepared for what I have called overkill and it is an era in which both sides the Russians and the Americans as well have fumbled for slogans slogans that would give them the illusion that they knew where they were going in the pitch blackness of the city of dreadful night the Russians for example have had slogans of their own they've talked

about people's democracies they've talked about coexistence they've talked of the future that lay ahead for a peaceful socialist world they've talked of the imperialisms of the West and of the mad war mongers who were willing to unleash nuclear energy and of the need for stopping them by having all the anti imperialist nations join in this now we in the West have also had our slogans we've had the slogan of containing the expansion of communist power we move beyond containment we've had the slogan of rollback of pushing back what the communists have already achieved or as we've called it a liberation of freeing the the satellite countries behind their own curtain we've even had the slogan of massive retaliation which was a threat to use our full nuclear energy in case the communist world

pushed us too hard but now our basic slogan is that of deterrence and it is this slogan of deterrence that we now rely on there are many questions about what we call deterrence but the sharpest of them is whom will the deterrence deter if deterrence is to have any meaning there must be a probability that whatever the target is for deterrence will respond to that target and I think the answer is that deterrence deterrence only those nations who follow the rules of the game that's true of the Russians it's true of the Americans it's true of the British it's true of the French the current members of the nuclear club but the question arises what happens when a nation scorns the rules of the game

I don't mean scorns them necessarily because the people of this nation are more barbarous than the rest are more inhuman now I'm talking of something else they may scorn the rules of the game because they are convinced that they have a special pipeline to history that they are a special carrier of humanity that they are a vessel chosen by history to carry some principle more sacred than the life and death of millions of other human beings and we get something of the quality of this when we think of the leaders of the Chinese revolution when we think of those who have made it clear that they don't intend to live up to these rules that their aim is what they call the great leap forward you know they're willing

to to pay a good deal of price for this leap forward these are people in the hurry their people trying to to jump into the future and to jump at a faster pace than any people has ever jumped before and when you think of them and the way in which their leaders are managing to get at them and to fill them with a new kind of fanaticism when you think of the way in which they've instilled them then the doctrine that they are the carriers of history then again I put the question what happens when China joins the nuclear club and reminded of a passage in Romeo and Juliet where Shakespeare is talking of a poor hapless apothecary from whom the potion is purchased and you remember he says the world is not his friend or the world's law one may say this about the feeling that the Chinese leaders and people have they have a feeling that the world is not their friend or the world's

law they have a feeling of being a strange from the world and in this strangement lies a good deal of the danger in the in order to understand some of this better we have to go back to medieval times perhaps you know the medieval map makers when they were charting the parts of the world which still had not been penetrated still had not been explored all the deserts and the jungles they used to put a Latin slogan on those areas of the world and the slogan was heek sunt draconace here are dragons now it's quite possible that there are areas of the future that we too have not explored uncharted areas and the question for us is what are the dragons today are there some dragons and I suspect that there are and I'd like to indicate what these dragons may be by a quick list of

mine on the blackboard first is the is the question of blunder itself sheer blunder there's a story and I think it's true that at one point a number of American soldiers watching a radar screen thought they saw planes approaching and they were about to give the proper response when it turned out that it was not actually planes but it was geese geese on the radar screen or perhaps some mad sergeant at one of the missile bases who goes berserk it has been said that every polaris submarine the captain of every polaris carries a good deal of responsibility in the charge in the trust that he has and a blunder may happen and there is the question of the atomic jitters or what we might call a overreaction of each

side to the other you see both sides are poised watching what the other will do each of them is in a sense giving signals to the other sometimes those signals may miscarry sometimes there may be a miss estimate a misunderstanding of what those signals are and if one side misinterpret what the other is about to do and overreacts to it you can get nuclear war by the atomic jitters and then there are the brush fire wars in the past 15 years since Hiroshima there have been a number of these brush fire wars fortunately they have not developed into nuclear wars as I have indicated last time there are certain nerve and areas which thus far have prevented them from developing farther and yet it is not unthinkable that in the future they may develop and forth there are what we might call the brinkmanship

wars that is each side moving up to the brink closer and closer to explore how far the other side will move you may find at a certain point that each has moved beyond the point of no return and war will be there and then perhaps the most unthinkable deliberate nuclear wars deliberate in the sense that for one reason or another out of a sense of either over arrogance or overconfidence or of being isolated and feeling weak the leaders of one side may attempt preventive war may use what we call a preemptive first strike in order to prevent the other side from using their first strike and then finally the diffusion of nuclear weapons and in a sense this is the most important of all because what has been happening in our

time is that the scientists and technicians have been moving ahead inexorably with genuine creativeness and imaginativeness in their own terms and while the statesmen have been blundering and faltering in many ways the scientists have created cheaper ways of manufacturing nuclear weapons shortcuts to them to such an extent that there is a real prospect that let's say by 1965 every nation that has a nuclear reactor now will be able to manufacture nuclear weapons since there are about 20 nations that fall into that category there is a possibility that by 1965 there may be that many nations making nuclear weapons I say possibility that's rather exaggerated the men who ought to know about these things calculate

that there may be somewhere between 5 and 10 perhaps 12 or 15 but that's enough and what's even more important is that whereas the present members of the nuclear club are have nations and the future members may be have not nations the present members are conservative nations the future members may not be now I want to make very clear what I mean by conservative in this sense paradoxical as it may seem Russia and America are the two great conservative powers today think of the case of Russia for example think of what they've been through since the Russian Revolution the sacrifices they've incurred the ordeals of suffering and privation and of terror think of the millions of peasants who were sacrificed by Stalin's policy of rapid industrialization so that consumers goods were cut and the Russian juggernaut

rolled right over those millions of peasants or think of what Russia endured in World War II when it lost between 20 and 30 million of its manpower and perhaps one third of its economic plant and since that time the Russians have rebuilt and moved on they've developed big concentrations of industry that are vulnerable to destruction by missile power they've developed huge cities they for the first time they have a feeling of relaxing from Stalin's police state at least relaxing a little and for the first time they have the sense of being able to get some more consumers goods than they have had in the past history of the communist regime they're sitting on top of a pyramid of power and of potential for the future they don't want that pyramid destroyed in that sense they're conservative people a conservative

nation with relatively responsible leaders and what is true of Russia is obviously true of the United States we have within our grasp all the materials through automation through our vast technological changes through our wonderful human resources and manpower we have within our grasp and the chance of an era of plenty as well as an era of freedom we don't want that destroyed now that's not true of course of other countries and what perhaps what we may be able to envisage is how the Chinese to take back to them as an instance how they are likely to react to this question of nuclear war during 1960 there were a series of manifestos coming from the Chinese a series of attacks upon Russian leaders you know sometimes even

in a relatively harmless public document you may find a good deal of dynamite pact and this is true of the Chinese theoretical newspaper the Red Flag which has been publishing a number of rather thinly veiled attacks not so much on the west but upon Khrushchev himself they say that Khrushchev is too tender minded they say he's too soft toward the west they go back to the Leninist doctrine that war between the capitalist world and the communist world is inevitable and they say if it's inevitable then let it come they admit of course that a good deal of the world will be destroyed but they say that on the ruins of what is left we can build a more beautiful civilization in responding to this kind of a danger we need at one strength and firmness on the other hand

we must not be too rigid we need flexibility and in order to understand this danger I think it might be worthwhile for us to take another historical excursion and to go back this time to the 18th century you know the the 18th century was the era in which there were a number of liberal and revolutionary thinkers particularly in France and Great Britain and the doctrine that they develop was the doctrine that man is perfectable and that that the human potential as you look toward the future has infinite possibility nothing is excluded from what mankind can accomplish by using its collective will and by using its reason and intelligence now you take one step from there the 18th century thinkers didn't take it but it's been taken since if nothing is

nothing is impossible in terms of a goal then perhaps nothing is excluded in terms of means that step was taken by the communists in Russia and it was taken by the Nazis in Germany and it has been taken by the the Chinese communists nothing is excluded in terms of goal what this means is that it is possible if you think of yourself as the carrier of history to use any means at all in achieving a goal which for you is sacred now the leaders of the Western coming to understand this and in coming to understand this they are developing new attitudes toward weapons which have thus far been regarded as unthinkable I talked the other day of Herman Kahn's book on Thermonuclear War and I want to refer to it again because what Kahn is saying in effect is this he is saying up to now we have thought of these weapons as so intolerable that we have been afraid

to face them Kahn for example puts three questions now he says there's a short range question how can we reach 1961 he's writing this in 1960 the first question is how can we reach 1961 there's an intermediate question how can the world reach 1965 and then there's a long range question how can the world reach 1975 and in order to reach these target dates he suggests that the democracies will have to understand that war is something to be faced he goes so far as to say that there are certain tragic but distinguishable post war states tragic in the sense that all of them involve immense destruction but distinguishable in the sense that if the destruction is more it will require more time to rebuild if it is less it will require less time to rebuild and he takes

the tough-minded attitude that if the West prepares with a willingness to take whatever the consequences are then the Russians and the Chinese will be less inclined to the adventure the adventure of of using these weapons now on the other hand there is a very different attitude which one may find best expressed in a movement in Great Britain the movement of the marchers this movement took its shape in Britain because the British people feel that they're a kind of a of a sinkable missile base and they have recoiled from the sheer destruction of life that this will involve and so men and women and children have been marching they've been marching in order to say that the most sacred thing about life is life itself one of their seminal thinkers is Lord Bertrand Russell and Russell has even envisaged the

possibility that if you follow this attitude of unilateral disarmament which the marchers express the possibility that there may be a world in which communism will have taken over now that possibility is for us unthinkable and I prefer myself an earlier Lord Russell who talked not about unilateral disarmament but about the free man's worship who saw that man is an infinite decimal item in a whole planetary galactic system of all kinds of constellations and yet even though he's an infinite decimal item Bertrand Russell understood that there is a precious spark about him and that precious spark is the spark of freedom it is that spark of freedom which seems to me to be even more important than life itself man is going through a long and dark tunnel

and I don't know how long it's going to be before it can get to the end of that tunnel the tunnel is going to involve all kinds of ordeals when we do get to the end however into the light we will be able to move beyond the power principle next week on the age of overkill Brandeis University professor Max Lerner will discuss imperialism old and new this program was produced for the National Educational Television and Radio Center

by the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council WGBH TV Boston this is NET National Educational Television