Page:Minority of One February 1961.pdf/4

A Case for Unilateral Disarmament

By W. H. Ferry

The author is a vice-president of the Fund for the Republic and a staff member of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California. His views are in no way related to those positions.

We believe that America's willingness to disarm is the missing link in multilateral disarmament. Mr. Ferry's advocacy and arguments, however, introduce a needed constructive antidote to our official conception of international relations.

Mr. Ferry's "case" will be continued in the March 1961 issue of TMO. -Ed.

Let us imagine that Mr. Khrushchev has recalled Machiavelli and asked his advice on how to achieve his main aims.^[1] And let us assume that chief among these aims is eventual domination of the globe. 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. If you use them, whatever the situation or pretext, three things will follow. First, you will render some of the choicest industrial and building sites on earth useless and uninhabited. Second, you will be fearfully bombed yourself, which cannot be expected to endear you to your subjects. Third, those people now labeled neutral and uncommitted will never trust or follow your lead. But I need not speak further on this line; 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."

Machiavelli continues: "You have provided simple Communist answers to immense problems of social organization for people to want to share in the plenty of industrial society. Your diplomacy has been wily and far-sighted. Your encouragement of scientific development has won you respect, if not friendship, in many parts of the world. You have a considerable accomplishment in the field of peaceful economic competition. And despite heavy arms burdens you have so far man- aged to keep your own subjects relatively happy; though I must confess that they appear to be far easier to satisfy than I would be.

"What I wish to propose, Prince, is that you lay down your arms. Not today or to- morrow, but after preparation of the kind I shall now outline. First and most difficult you must bring China into your plan. Second, you must make more menacing noises at the West, more menacing even than you made at Paris and in New York. The object here is to get the West to commit itself even more expensively to arms build-ups, and to enter into more and more "defense" pacts and economic aid agreements with other countries. 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. Fourth, you will prepare your nation for peacetime production and life. You will make plans for shifting missile and arms factories into civilian goods. 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. 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. These arrangements can, moreover, be made publicly, for the West can be trusted not to believe its eyes. In fact, these days it is a curious penchant of both East and West to call things by their opposites. A writer named Orwell called this language of opposites Newspeak; I wish I had said that. So evidence of peace preparations on your part, it may be confidently predicted, will be regarded in Washington as preparation for war."

Machiavelli smiles out of the window of the Kremlin and continues: "Before I come to the final points I wish to say that I realize that the steps I have been describing are not simple to take. You will have domestic tribulations, especially with your older and more warlike and less imaginative colleagues. But in such bureaucratic infighting you have no peer between Tashkent and Leningrad. My advice here would therefore be supererogation.

"We come now to the sixth 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. You will announce that as of the date of your address, Russia is disarming down to the arms needed for domestic police. The army is being disbanded. Military detachments are being recalled and demobilized. The assent of China, and its cooperation in this action, has been obtained. The borders of the USSR will henceforth be open to all. Anyone who cares to do so may inspect any part of Russia without let or hindrance.

"Russia is taking this unprecedented action because it is genuinely a peace-loving power. 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. Against its have wishes the Soviet was forced into the arms called race by the West. Now, at the height of its power, demonstrably able to excel in this frightful competition, Russia chooses to act for humanity. For it is now clear that to continue to prepare for war is sooner or later to bring war on. There can be no winners, only losers, in modern war. The Soviet is moreover confident that in a world at peace its aims will be achieved because of the superiority of its doctrines.

"The atomic materials of the Soviet will be delivered to the United Nations, except for those amounts needed for peaceful atomic power plants in Russia and other countries. Russia offers to take a leading part in the formation by the UN of a multi- nation Peace Force. Interplanetary rocket research by the USSR and the other scientific developments of the utmost significance to mankind will likewise be de-nationalized and turned over to the United Nations."

Machiavelli pauses for a long moment and resumes: "And then, Prince, you say what you intend to do with the capital set free by unilateral disarmament. You are, I believe, spending something around 30 billion dollars a year for war? This, the UN learns, will be committed in the future and as follows: 15 billions to the upbuilding of the Soviet economy, and that of its neighbors and old friends. The next 10 billion is to be spent, beginning at once, to meet the needs of the so-called neutral and underdeveloped countries. Some of this amount will be channeled through the United Nations, to the extent that the organization can handle such tasks and to the degree there that other UN members are willing-and able-to share in the effort. The Soviet offers to underwrite, out of its savings on arms, the cost of administering this vastly expanded UN machine. The last 5 billion is to be set aside-and, Prince, if I do say so myself, I think this is rather a pretty suggestion-this final 5 billion will be set aside for the use of the United States and its allies-to be thought of as a Reverse Marshall Plan. This is not only a poetic but a necessary provision, since the West clearly has no plans whatever for coping with peace."

Machiavelli stands and looks down at Khrushchev. "Prince, you end this most memorable of speeches with a statement of

1. ↑ I am indebted to a colleague, Hallock Hoffman, for many of the ideas in the following reincarnation.