26 FEBRUARY 1983, Page 7

Playing with nuclear fire

Murray Sayle

Tokyo

One innocent evening in December 1966, a shadowy couple — the colonel of the first engineer battalion, First Division, United States Army, and my good self were seated on upturned ammunition boxes in a clearing in 'The Iron Triangle', just north of Saigon, slapping mosquitoes and viewing The Big Picture.

`Do people out in the world', the colonel asked, 'really understand what we're doing here?'

`Frankly, colonel, no.'

`No more Munichs!' said the colonel, raising his can of Schlitz, The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous. 'Appeasement stops here!'

`Munich? in Germany?'

It took a six-pack to fill in the picture. The second world war, the colonel explain- ed, had been caused by the timidity of the guardians of the peace, Britain and France. Umbrella politicians bet rayed Czechoslovakia, while red-blooded American boys, like the colonel, watched impotently from a distance, the sword struck from their hands by pacifists and Panty-waists.

Now a new tyranny, worse than Hitler's, was abroad. The Commies, from their Moscow headquarters, had first seized China, then half of Korea, then Vietnam. If we don't stop them in Phu Bai, we'll be fighting them in Pasadena,' said the col- °be'. `If we fail here, no ally will ever trust the US again. How's your drink?'

A year or so later I was in far-off Moscow, viewing the same picture, from a slightly different angle, with Kim Philby of the KGB.

'How did you come to get into the business, Kim?' I asked one night, over pre- dinner vodkas.

`The fight against Hitler,' Kim answered, with unusual promptness. 'Munich?'

`I saw that coming,' said Kim. 'First, Ramsay Macdonald betrayed the working Class by joining the National government of 1931. No hope in the Labour Party. Then I Watched Dollfuss's troops shelling the workers' flats in Vienna. Munich confirmed that only the Soviet Union was prepared to resist fascism.'

`But Adolf has long gone to his reward.'

'It's the same fight,' said Kim. 'Imperialism is the last stage of capitalism. Who put Hitler into power? The capitalists. Look what the Americans are doing in Viet- nam: concentration camps, genocide, just like Hitler. I've fought all my life for the same cause. Have another v-vodka.'

, Americans and Russians, it seems, both believe they are fighting the good fight against the ghost of Adolf Hitler, or Gitler as the Russians quaintly call him (no 'h' in Russian). They are undoubtedly talking about the same unsavoury figure — the Russians objecting to his persecution of communists and invasion of their country, the Americans to his murder of democrats and Jews. Both, however, were eager to get the services of Hitler's rocket experts, while the Americans, according to the Russians, also had jobs for Gestapo ghouls like Klaus Barbie (curiously enough, the Americans accuse the Russians of hiring colleagues of Barbie's, like the ex-Nazi intelligence chief Otto John).

Now, I see, Mrs Thatcher has joined the spot-the-Hitler movement, preceded more eloquently by our own Peregrine Worsthorne, writing in of all places the Spectator. 'Try to recall the moral horror that engulfed all civilised peopie when the truth about the Nazi extermination camps first became known, and ask yourself whether you would have deemed a nuclear defence against that scale of evil contrary to the Christian conscience,' urges Wors- thorne, in the Notebook of 12 February . . . `If by some miracle Western television cameras were to penetrate into the Gulag, and expose horrors comparable to those of Buchenwald and Belsen, the peace move- ment would evaporate overnight.'

All of these people, Kim included, are, I am sure, sincere in abominating the Fuhrer and urging vigilance against his successors, whoever they might be. The symmetry of their arguments is, however, striking, especially as viewed from Japan, a country with some first-hand experience of nuclear war, where much the same debate, long since thought settled, is once again coming to the surface.

A revealing point of departure is the competitive rush for the German rocket ex- perts, at a time when both superpowers-to- be knew about atom bombs, the Russians were, no doubt, in the early stages of work on theirs, and the Americans were rushing to get Little Boy and Fat Man (the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) opera-

tional before Japan should have time to surrender.

Neither the US nor the USSR were at that stage necessarily planning to arm their German-designed rockets with nuclear bombs, although Hitler, by vainly rocketing Rotterdam and London, had already demonstrated that these weapons have a negligible military use, destroying a fraction of what they cost (civilian lives excluded) unless they carry conventional warheads. The point is that the combination of missile and nuclear explosive is a weapon against which there is no known, or at any rate trusted, defence — except the threat of counter-use.

Verbal threats are not enough. To be ef- fective, the threatener has to be prepared, materially and, just as important, psychologically, to use his remaining nuclear weapons on his opponent. With five to ten minutes' warning, there is no time for referenda, moral debates or even a cabinet head-count. The nuclear powers have, in short, already made the decision to use their nuclear arsenals, under certain conditions. Hitler was thus both optimistic,. and premature, in calling his toys Vergeltungswaffen. It was only in the time of Dwight, Nikita, Harold and Charles Le Grand that the world had authentic, purpose-built 'revenge weapons' to reckon with.

peaking for Western deterrers Mrs That- Ocher spelled out some of the conditions already decided by our side, when she assured Bournemouth Young Conser- vatives (according to the Sunday Times) that 'no NATO weapons, conventional or nuclear, would ever be used except in response to attack'. This may sound like a pledge of `no first use', but it is not. The Prime Minister is careful not to say 'in response to nuclear attack', no doubt because current NATO doctrine calls for (comparatively) small battlefield nuclear weapons to be used to stem the first thrust of a Soviet armoured attack while, as far as we know, the Russians have similar plans for their side of the engagement. It is precisely because the next step up the lad- der, for the West, is now total mutual an- nihilation that President Reagan and the rest want to introduce medium-range Per- shing 2 and Cruise missiles into Europe.

Incompatible ideologies and mutally unacceptable systems of power projection and penology no doubt sharpen the animosity between the super-powers and their clients. Even the insular French, for instance, have now given up their ideas about defence tous azimuths and targeted everything they've got on Moscow and en- virons, so that no one in Brighton or Boulogne is losing sleep about the nuclear arms outre-manche.

Just the same, there is no need to hate or espouse communism, imperialism or bourgeois democracy to see that a technical development in the art of war, of unknown but clearly nasty import — the appearance of a form of attack to which there is no known defence but counter- attack — alone is enough to throw generals, politicians and the rest of us into alarm and despondency, especially as they are deployed by two super-powers whose size, like Hertz and Avis, guarantees rivalry and friction.

Why, then, drag Hitler into it? Mrs That- cher and her debating partner, the for- midable P. Worsthorne, were both address- ing themselves to the arguments of the unilateralist movement:

1) Nuclear weapons are so horrible, and dangerous to humanity that it is morally wrong, under all circumstances to use them. As deterrence implies a prior decision to use, possession is therefore also morally wrong.

2) Come what may, those without nuclear weapons, especially the inhabitants of non-super-powers, are less likely to be targets than those with, in the apocalyptic nuclear exchange which may take place never, or any minute, depending on the thinker's level of anxiety.

Neither of these propositions is, in my view, self-evidently absurd. The first is a moral judgment worthy, like the pacifism of which it is a special case, of at the least respect, while the second as a shrewd guess is at least as plausible as rival attempts to forecast the unforecastable.

Wheeling on the ghost of Hitler may not disarm these arguments, but that, clearly, is the idea. Those who are troubled in their consciences about using nuclear weapons as a reprisal, which may inciden- tally end the human race, and anyway clear- ly violates the prescription that vengeance is mine saith the Lord, will feel much easier when they know that it is Evil Incarnate that is targeted, even before Evil has shown its hand by launching the first strike. And, fallible human beings that we are, it wouldn't matter too much if we got our signals wrong, as long as Evil Incarnate was getting its deserts on the other end. Everyone agrees that Hitler was the ultimate bad guy, and indeed he made this very claim himself. So, if the Russians are just as bad, or batting, at any rate, on the same team, then the moral objection to pressing the counter-button (and the but- ton?) is eased.

The Hitler analogy would seem, at first glance, to offer comfort and guidance to the shrewd-guessers as well. Hitler was already operating Buchenwald and Belsen, and planned, if he could, to expand his system to Birmingham and Boston, Mass (and in fact did, to most of Byelorussia). A `nuclear defence against that scale of evil' would, in the Worsthorne exegesis, have both been acceptable to the Christian cons- cience (or, we might amplify, to decent peo- ple of all persuasions) and sound sense as well.

But is this analogy really enlightening? `Nuclear defence' is, as we have seen, a polite way of describing a perceived readiness to engage in nuclear counter- attack, even against conventional attack. Had the second world war been delayed a decade or so, the Anglo-Americans might well have beaten Hitler to an operational nuclear weapon, in which case he might have been ordered to close down his exter- mination camps, and given some Hiroshima-type encouragement if he delayed. This is not nuclear defence, it is nuclear domination, the very thing all sides are furiously building deterrents against.

If, on the other hand, Hitler had arrived at the atomic bomb first, with rockets to match, he could have extended his system to the whole world. This danger was, we might recall, precisely why the Anglo- Americans started to develop the atom bomb in the first place. Or, given that he was well begun, and only desisted because he thought the German bomb would not be available for his war, he might well have got there about the same time as the Anglo- Americans did. He could then have murdered as many people as he pleased, at Belsen, Buchenwald or anywhere else within the extended frontiers' of !the', Reich — confident, as Mrs Thatcher put it, that `the so-called balance of terror keeps the peace'.

Thus, in Hitler's day the alternatives were: 1) build the first nuclear weapons and seek to dominate the world by threatening, and being believed ready, to use them; 2) if someone else, no matter who, has pre- empted option 1, building your own, and standing ready to use them in reprisal; 3) keeping a low profile, neutrality or something like it, and hoping to stay out of the impact zone.

Options 2 and 3 are the only ones still open, and would be exactly the same if Hitler had never painted a house, persecuted a Jew or, indeed, ever been born. The problem, it would seem, lies in the nature of nuclear weapons themselves, given the tendency of states, older by far than Marx, Magna Carta or even gunpowder, to protect and promote their interests by recourse to arms. Hitler's crimes, while an extreme case, do not alter the underlying problem.

With their experience in nuclear matters, the Japanese have long believed that they 'You may be a Conservative, but you're a wet.' have a unique contribution to make to resolving this dilemma, which faces us all. There is not much point, of course, in urging Japanese to prepare to fight Hitler and his national successors. The present prime minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, served four years in the imperial Japanese navy, the seagoing arm of Hitler's unreliable ally. Japanese in general have only the vaguest idea of what a Jew might be, and view with amusement the claims of Germans or in- deed any other foreigners to be the master race.

On the other hand, German qualities of diligence and discipline are admired here, and the late novelist Yukio Mishima created only a mild stir with his play, My Friend Hittora, which he described as a tribute 'to the dangerous hero Hitler from the dangerous thinker Mishima'. (Both, in fact, ended their lives in suicide.) The Japanese have, however, suffered much in person at the hands of Russians (and vice versa) and no recourse to, analogy has been necessary to persuade some 75 per cent of Japanese in the most recent poll to express a greater or less degree of hostility to the Soviet Union.

Few Japanese, for instance, have ever forgiven the Russians for attacking them, in their view without provocation, in the dying days of the second world war, and seizing four small islands to the north of Japan which the Japanese still want back. Nor have they forgotten that, of a quarter of a million Japanese prisoners taken by the Russians in the same war, some 100,000 never came home.

No peace treaty has been signed between Japan and the Soviets, and in theory the war still continues in this part of the world. Nevertheless, since the day Nagasaki was levelled in August 1945, no nuclear weapon has been publicly introduced into Japan, and Japanese have at least theoretically enjoyed all these years exactly what the unilateral disarmers in Britain and the rest of Europe are trying to achieve now. Japanese motives have, in fact, been exactly the same as the unilateralists', the argument that the possession of nuclear weapons is both morally wrong and dangerous, as making the possessor more likely to suffer nuclear attack. Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt, in fact, got into trouble with Japanese public opinion in 1953 for refusing to say that use of nuclear weapons was in all circumstances immoral, and no person in power or influential in a nuclear state (except the present Pope, if he counts) has visited Hiroshima or Nagasaki since.

In 1967 the then Prime Minister, Eisaku Sato, won the Nobel Peace Prize for formally enunciating the three principles that Japan would never possess, manufacture or permit the introduction of nuclear weapons on to her islands. These principles, with Japan's American-written constitution, which forbids Japan either to make war or to possess the means of doing so, have given Japanese the feeling that they enjoyed a special position in the world, a comparative safety based on the general

acknowledgment that Japan was now a 'peace nation'.

Yet the Japanese are showing clear signs of giving up their privileged position, just at the time when many people in Europe are trying to adopt a Japan-like non-nuclear stance. Why? Part of the explanation is the arrival of a talkative, hawkish Japanese Prime Minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone. (In reporting in an article here dated 29 January that Nakasone had once advocated that Japan should go nuclear, I was wrong, by the way. He did, however, oppose Japanese ratification of the nuclear non- proliferation treaty, which led many Japanese, and me, to misinterpret his views on this matter.)

There is, however, no doubt that Nakasone has been describing Japan as an `unsinkable aircraft carrier' whose 'destiny is bound to that of the United States' (a description which actually fits Britain bet- ter, come to think of it) and that Japan's strategy in an 'emergency' will be to block the straits through and near Japan which are the Soviet navy's only egress to the Pacific. To this already alarming list of threats (seen from a Soviet viewpoint) Nakasone has now said that the straits will be blocked even if the Soviet Union has not attacked Japan, but if there is 'tension' in the region.

Blockade is an act of war, and a first con- sequence of Japan's unaccustomed bluster has seemingly been to doom for ever, or a very long time, the prospect of a peaceful recovery of the lost Japanese islands. Stalin demanded these islands, with other pour- boires, as his price for entering the second World war against Japan, saying that they controlled the sea approaches to Vladi- vostok (which they do), and President Roosevelt's emissary, Averill Harriman, anxious to save the lives of American boys', agreed with him. The loud-mouthed Nakasone would now appear to have con- firmed Uncle Joe's prescience.

Nakasone is, however, only saying, or rather, shouting, about changes apparent from many signs and portents visible before he took office. Modest as they are, the Japanese self-defence forces were busily laying and recovering dummy mines, and practising tri-service supply runs to Tsushima Island, right in the middle of one of the critical straits, in the administration of Zenko Suzuki, the previous prime minister, a self-proclaimed exponent of Japanese 'harmony' or pleasing everyone at once (it was near Tsushima Island that the Tsar's fleet, trying to pass the strait, was destroyed in 1905).

In Suzuki's time, too, plans were made for basing 48 F16 fighters of the US air force on Honshu, the Japanese main island, USS permitting a visit of the nuclear carrier L'SS Enterprise to Sasebo, the port from Which the old imperial navy used to control the strait when the Sea of Japan was 'the Emperor's bathtub'. The new carrier USS Carl Vinson and the recycled battleship USS New Jersey, armed with immense Tomahawk missiles, are also headed this

way, reportedly `to remind the Russians they have a Pacific coast'.

And, just in case the Soviets failed to get the message, a Japanese defence agency spokesman last weekend underlined the ob- vious and explained that the role of the Fl 6s will be `to attack bases in the Soviet Union'. Why are the Japanese playing with nuclear fire, after so many years of discre- tion?

Partly, no doubt, as an alternative to concessions on the issue of their huge trade surpluses, but more because of the logic of their geographical and political position. They have, after all, spent the decades since Hiroshima and Nagasaki under an American 'nuclear umbrella', a euphemism for American promises to revenge hypo- thetical nuclear attacks on Japan with the same on Soviet cities, to be followed presumably by the incineration of Pittsburg and Pasadena. Japanese were said to suffer a 'nuclear allergy', another euphemism, not for some notional greater Japanese fear of nuclear weapons (Europeans fear them just as much, exactly because of what happened in Japan) but for the fact that Japanese thought they had found a safer way.

Now, many Japanese, and not just the noisy Nakasone, are not so sure. The US is now making preparations to defeat the Soviet Union in either nuclear or conven- tional war, should deterrence fail (and with whatever forces outlive the failure) and per- suading or arm-twisting its allies to do the same. The days when Japan could be credibly defended by a handful of low- profile soldiers, an American promise and bluff are long past. Even in a conventional war in the Pacific between the super- powers, neither is likely to respect Japan's `peace' preferences.

The choice, for Japan, is therefore get- ting more and more like Europe's: either try to go it alone, a daunting prospect, try to moderate the super-powers' hostility, pro- bably impossible, because the conflict is im- plicit in the nature of the weapons them- selves, or join the side of their choice in the next stage of the arms race, in the uncertain hope that ever more weapons, nuclear and conventional, will maintain the 'balance of terror'. If Japan, with its industrial might, takes, with many misgivings, the third choice, the stakes go correspondingly higher, the risk of mishap greater.

No analogies are needed to make the situation alarming, complex, getting more so. Let us, as a modest start, leave the ir- relevant Hitler, Gitler and Hittora out of it.