Strength Out of Weakness By CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS T HE argument about
the morality of the H-bomb a little obscures the question : what is the sense of it? It would be a disaster if the idealism of those who are against the bomb should allow those who favour it to appear unchallengeably as the realists. Dr. Jowett in Max Beerbohm's famous cartoon was shown as asking Rossetti what they were going to do with the Grail when they had found it. I feel very much the same about the bomb.
The Christian religion is a religion of peace, but I do not think that it is a religion of abso- lute and unconditional pacifism. I do not think that if one had found oneself with a gun outside a Nazi gas-chamber it would have been one's Christian duty to say to the Jews who were being shepherded inside, 'I am very sorry for you, but I am afraid that my principles will not allow me to offer violence to this SS man who is sending you to your death.' There are times when a little violence is necessary to prevent greater violence, but, however that may be, it only causes con- fusion to my mind to mix up with the general pacifist argument the particular argument about the H-bomb.
The important point is not whether war has ever been justifiable but how the H-bomb changes the nature of war. The canonists have always laid it down that one of the conditions of a just war is that it must have a reasonable chance of suc- cess. If we prefer less theological language, then we say that war is only sensible if it is fought for a purpose and ceases to be sensible if that purpose cannot be attained. It comes to much the same thing. Of course, a nation has a right of self-defence, and in the past it has made sense to say that, if the armies stand along the frontier, then they can repel the invader and our national way of life can be preserved. But in a nuclear war we may perhaps destroy our enemy, but, whether we are nominally victors or not, there is no chance that the pattern of our own national life with which we entered the war will still survive when we emerge from it. We may say that we are fighting against Com- munism, but we cannot say that we are fighting for freedom or democracy or Christianity or any other cause that is dear to us. We have a right to self-defence, but we cannot pretend that a nuclear war would be a war of self-defence, for suicide is not a method of self-defence—still less is a policy which results in such generic effects as to change the nature of unborn generations.
How, then, are we to avoid nuclear war? 'Scrap the bomb,' says the slogan. The slogan clearly has three entirely different meanings. It may mean that there should be a general inter- national agreement for disarmament, subject to proper provision about inspection. To that no one can be opposed if it can be managed. It may mean that we, Britain alone, should cease to manufacture nuclear 'weapons. I would myself be in favour of our ceasing to manufacture them, because they seem to me a total' waste of money. The Americans already have an infinite destruc- tive power and infinity plus one is no greater than infinity. The notion that British nuclear weapons would enable us to pursue a foreign policy independent of the Americans seems to be puerile and, as long as Britain makes these weapons, there is a grave danger that other Powers will insist on making them too, for pure prestige's sake until at last, as in Mr. Nevil Shute's novel, a bomb is dropped by the Albanians which has the quite unintended effect of destroying all human life. 'Yet the question whether the bomb should be manufactured in Britain is after all a very secondary question. The real question is: if all efforts for a general dis- armament should end in failure, would it then be better for the Western world—that is to say, the Americans—unilaterally to abandon these weapons?
I think that there is no doubt that horrible weapons are effective deterrents for a short time. I think it more likely that there would have been a European war over the last twelve years— more likely that there would be a war in Europe this summer were it not for the existence of these weapons of which both sides are so desperately afraid. On the other hand, I do not think that horrible weapons are an effective deterrent for very long. I cannot see the two sides standing opposed to one another and armed with these weapons for a generation or two without some accident bringing about the use of them. Should the West, if no better is possible, break the dead- lock by unilateral disarmament? To abandon the nuclear weapons at a time when the West had not yet sufficient conventional forces to prevent an invasion would indeed be to run a grave risk. But it is not a law of nature which compels the West to have smaller conventional forces than the Russians. The West has a larger population and much greater wealth than the Russians. In so far as there is any reputable excuse for the West's deficiency in conventional forces, it is that she has spent so much money on nuclear weapons that she has not had sufficient to spare for the conventional. I would like to see the West build up sufficient conventional forces to secure her against a conventional Russian invasion and then, if no general agreement has been reached, unilaterally scrap her strategic nuclear weapons.
What would happen then? Of course there would be nothing physical to stop the Russians from wiping out the Western world by nuclear bombing, and the Russian leaders, we all know, are ruthless and unscrupulous men who do not shrink from any violence that suits their purposes. But would it suit their purposes to blot out the West? Surely not. The Communists believe that their eventual world victory is inevitable. With a little patience Western Europe and America and their vast economic wealth must inevitably fall into their power. They are doubtless willing to help along the inevitable economic process by a little incidental and ruthless violence here and there, but it is surely exceedingly improbable that they would wish wantonly to destroy the economic resources of which they hope in the near future to become the inheritors.
On the other hand, unilateral nuclear dis- armament, far from making the West weaker would make it stronger. In so far as the West is able to equip itself with more ample conven- tional forces, it will be in a stronger position to negotiate with Russians who possess indeed a nuclear weapon but are afraid to use it. If it is not yet quite true today, it will soon be true that nuclear weapons will be quite useless and a waste of money to the West because their destructive
power will be so great that one attack will be sufficient to annihilate its victim. It will then for the West be morally impossible to strike the first blow and physically impossible to strike the second. The possession of the whole parapher- nalia of such equipment therefore becomes a nonsense. Thirdly, the real battle of the modern world between Communism and the West is clearly the battle for the allegiance of the uncom- mitted third of mankind. That is a battle of the mind in which weapons of any sort can play only a very minor part. In that battle the West is at present at at least one great disadvantage, which is that as a matter of history it was white men who dropped atomic bombs on Orientals. The only effective way of proving to the African and the Asiatic that we are not 'bombing' men is to divest ourselves of these weapons.
Of course, such arguments as these cannot remove the fact that, so long as these bombs exist at all, the world is a desperately dangerous place. No argument can remove that fact. It is all to probable that, if the Russians found themselves losing a war in which they were sufficiently im- plicated for defeat to be mortal for them, they would unloose the bomb sooner than go down to defeat, but there is no question of anybody attempting or being in a position to attempt a direct military overthrow of the Russian regime. It is possible that, even if they should find the battle for the mind in the uncommitted countries not going their way as they had hoped, then in spite and despair they would prefer to drop the bomb and destroy the world rather than admit defeat, just as no one can doubt that Hitler would have destroyed the world in his hour of defeat
if he had known how to do so. Of course, they may do something like that. There is no guarantee against lunacy and a lunatic may be in power or may come to power in the Kremlin—or indeed elsewhere. All that can be said on that is that the Communists can equally destroy the Western world whether the Western world possesses the bomb or whether it does not. Indeed, they are somewhat more likely to destroy it if the Western world keeps the bomb than if it scraps it. So long as it keeps the bomb, the Communists may always believe—however mistakenly—that the Western world is planning against them a blow of sudden physical destruction and that it is therefore essential for them to get their blow in first. They cannot believe that if the West has divested itself of its weapons of destruction. History may well have proved that it is a mistake for a Power to divest itself of weapons which it will dare to use, but a Power strengthens itself rather than weakens itself if it divests itself of weapons which it will not dare to use.
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