Looking Ahead
By CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS
WE need a much franker debate about nuclear policy than any we have had up to now. The danger of the nuclear debate is that it is always lagging a year or two behind events: we argue whether it was wise to have equipped ourselves with nuclear weapons in the past, and whether it is fortunate that we possess them today; but neither is exactly the point. I would not deny that the nuclear weapons have up till now acted as a deterrent and have played their part in saving us from war. Weapons of terror do deter for a time. The question for the election, though, is not, what is the policy now? but, what should be the policy for the future?
That nuclear weapons have preserved peace in the short run is no argument that they will preserve it in the long run. Strategic nuclear weapons differ from all weapons of the past; no one can be certain that, if loosed, they will not set up consequences which will destroy their user as much as their victim. No Power that possesses them is under a threat of imminent destruction such as alone might make the use of them sane. No one can pretend that the gains to anyone from a war in which they were used would be such as to make the use of them sane. Therefore no one will use them unless he is insane. A prolonged state of tension, far from being a guarantee against their use, is the one thing that might cause that in- sanity which would bring on their use. Therefore no sane person of any school of thought denies that it should be our supreme purpose to break the tension. Now we cannot hope to break it unless we turn from situations of the past or even of the ephemeral present and give our minds instead to consideration of what will be the situation of the future. Those who are well informed tell me that, if no disarmament agreement is reached, then in a few years the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile will be fully developed. And in a few more years, we are told, both sides will have sufficient Polaris submarines to disperse their missiles all over the world and to dispatch them from the bottom of the sea. When that time comes who can say what the Americans' policy will be? But we can at any rate say what it will not be. The one thing that is certain is that the Americans will no longer then be willing to keep vulnerable and costly land bases in these islands. Conservatives are sometimes free with their gibes against advocates of disarmament that they want to 'shelter behind America'. The truth is of course that—very properly and very fortu- nately—we do shelter behind America today under Conservative rule, and the question is what we should do in a few years' time when that is no longer possible for us.
There are plenty of debatable possibilities. There is something to be said for it that we should have an off-chance of escaping des- truction in a Russo-American war and no chance of doing anything effective to prevent one, and that we should therefore relapse into neutralism. There is something to be said for equipping ourselves with our own Polaris submarines and trying to make our- selves a Third Power. There is something to be said for proposing to the Americans, 'We are anxious to honour obligations as allies. But enough is enough. You already have enough nuclear power to destroy Russia. There is no point in adding a few digits to infinity so that we can destroy Russia twice over. Our most effective contribution to the alliance would be to increase our con- ventional forces so thaewe are strong enough to prevent those small incidents, out of which the major war, if it does come, will almost certainly come.'
It happens to be my opinion that the third of these lines of answer is the sanest. However that may be, any of the answers demands a reappraisal of the present policy —the policy as a result of which we dare not fight a nuclear war and cannot fight any other war—the policy which combines the disadvantages of unilateral disarmament with the heaviest military budget that we have ever had to bear—the policy which is as dead as the dodo or as the Labour Party.
Now there are of course experts—men of wisdom and good will—who are giving their minds to these problems and preparing to make the appropriate switches when the time comes; and it is natural enough if those experts sometimes complain that the public debates are so largely carried on by ill- informed and irresponsible people. But, if it be so, whose is the fault? The fault is the fault of the leading politicians, who have aecess to official information, who could have carried on a responsible debate for the purpose of informing public opinion, but who have preferred to give their minds to the invention of trick formulae and slogans for preserving a facade of unity in their parties.
The Labour Party is like a parody of a Church and the Conservative Party is like a parody of a regiment. There is obviously something in the argument that, if we cannot abolish nuclear weapons altogether, at least we minimise the risk of an accident if they are not allowed to pass into the hands of an indeterminate number of Powers; and Mr. Gaitskell has a point when he challenges Mr. Macmillan to show in what way his policy of 'independence' through the possession of the bomb has been greater than that of General de Gaulle or Dr. Adenauer. But, if the bomb has not in- creased our influence, the logical conclusion is that we should abandon it. There was a time when the general self-denying ordinance of the non-nuclear club might have been accepted. The Socialists with some care have delayed making the proposal until they are quite sure that it will not be accepted. Whatever we may think of his other activi- ties, we can hardly quarrel with Mr. Cousins for stigmatising this proposal as an absurdity.
If the Conservatives had a coherent de- fence policy to oppose to the incoherence of the Socialists, the desirability of a Con- servative victory could hardly be even a matter of debate. But have they? They have admittedly an apparent coherence because, whereas the Socialists conduct their searches for the Emperor's clothes in public, the Conservatives prefer to elect a leader who assures them with a superior smile that, whatever appearances may suggest, the Em- peror has got his clothes all right, and they all believe him. Now, though no one can pretend that the personality cult is a very democratic way of settling policy, it is at least a way of settling policy; and, on a problem on which the public must neces- sarily be imperfectly informed, it is arguable that it is the best way of settling it. But we can only feel comfortable with it if we can feel assured that the wise leaders whom we are trusting to do our thinking for us are really thinking. Since Suez it has been hardly possible to have that confidence, and although Mr. Macmillan is a very different man from Sir Anthony Eden, his recent ex- cursions over the world have not given much of an impression that he is certain even in his own mind what he is proposing to achieve.
Quite frankly I do not greatly care who wins the election, but I do care that the information machinery of the parties should be used for giving the public information rather than for keeping information from it.
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