S.A.L.T. and the savour of a lasting peace
Although since the war the Soviet Union has used its own military forces to further its policies its side of the Iron Curtain, and has subsidised the military forces of many countries abroad as a comparatively cheap and painless way of advancing its pur- poses, it has always drawn back from the brink of a direct military engagement with the United States of America. For its part, the United States, as k has engaged mili- tarily with China in Korea and conducted its Indochina campaigns and also sub- sidised its allies and potential supporters throughout the world, has likewise and with as much scrupulous prudence avoided the ultimate showdown with. Russia. China since its Korean forays, despite the bellicose noises Chairman Mao and others frequently make and despite the terrible size of its Red Army, has remained re- markably pacific. Germany has been, and ought to remain for at least another genera- tion, proof against any reassertion of its aggressive urges; and Japan sinailarly, France has presumably fought its last neo- colonial battles in Indochina, Suez and Algeria; and Britain too must hopefully be considered to have had, at Suez, its last foolish fling.
The formal declaration of the inviola- bility of the Oder-Neisse frontier between East Germany and Poland through the ratification of the Warsaw agreement be- tween the Federal Republic and Poland, and the parallel arrangements between Bonn and Moscow, require only a satis- factory resolution of the problem of West Berlin; and the evidence points to a re- solution being achieved between the Occu- pying Powers which will also be acceptable to both Germanies and tolerable to both Berlins. Once the United States completes the difficult and messy and brutal task of extricating itself militarily from South-east Asia a diplomatic situation will arise in the world at large in which no super or major power will be challenging its frontiers or those of any of its rivals. Indeed, with the single exception of Israel's frontiers since the 1967 war, the frontiers of no minor countries present any international prob- lems to the super and major powers either.
The political .map of the world may be considered more firmly drawn now than it has ever been before; and It may reason- ably be concluded that the probability is that future wars will be civil rather than international and that large-scale violence will have more to do with the seizing or keeping of power within a territory than with territorial aggrandisement. With less confidence but nevertheless with ;ncreasing justification, it may also be reasonably concluded that ideological and religious conflicts, while erupting into fierce local outbreaks of violence, will be conducted internationally through other than military means. This is no new Pax Romana or Pax Britannica which has broken out, nor even a Pax Sino-Russo-Americana, but is in- stead the old nuclear stalemate become with each year that passes less of a stale- mate and more of a peace. The super- Powers and the major Powers fear to wage war upon each other, hesitate to wage it upon lesser nation-states lest it spread to greater ones, and strive actively to reduce and hope eventually to eliminate the causes of war so far as they are involved.
The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks which have begun again this week in Vien- na are a recognition of this state of affairs and a recognition also of the desire of the United States and the Soviet Union that this state of affairs should persist, and that arrangements between them should be sought to secure this end. They are a major advance forward from the base se- cured by the non-proliferation treaty. The talks began in Helsinki eighteen months ago, and it is their fourth round Which has now opened. Thus far, their seriousness of intent and of conduct has been best shown by the secrecy with which they have been surrounded. They are not a propagandist exercise, but are instead a very deliberate attempt to reach agreement and to bring order and restraint to what remains poten- tially a disastrous arms race. It is pleasing too, that Vienna should act as host: for in several respects Austria represents the most successful of the East-West compromises thus far reached and, with its Jewish social-democratic Prime Minister, Dr Bruno Kreisky, demonstrates the possibil- ity of other kinds of reconciliation also.
Disarmament has in the past proved so chimeric a project that talks to achieve a measure of it, especially when conducted in the old League of Nations buildings in Geneva, have been regarded as ludicrous, self-defeating, propagandist, disreputable and so forth, even though it could be ar- gued that without the Geneva talking- shop there might have been no non-proli- feration treaty and hence no strategic aims limitation talks. In the inter-war years a combination of international distrust, to- gether with the existence of countries de- termined upon territorial aggrandisement and others wishing to see the defeat of communism, was in fact quite sufficient to render any disarmament talks equally ludi- crous, self-defeating, propagandist and disreputable. In the immediate post-war years the same international distrust was combined with ideological rivalries and a general assumption that the frontiers as left behind by the war were fluid and would need redefinition; also the Soviet Union needed to achieve a kind of parity with the United. States before the two Super-Powers could sensibly sit down to- gether and talk turkey. Although inter- national distrust remains (and is never likely to disappear), the successful resolu- tion of the Cuban missile crisis by Ken- nedy and Khrushchev demonstrated that distrust could be surmounted: ideolo- gical rivalries are unimpaired but are now more widely seen to represent no particu- lar impediment to reaching working agree- ments, and the crusaders of militant capi- talism and world revolutionary commu- nism are sowing seeds which now fall on very stony ground (outside South Ameri- ca); the Soviet Union is not so fearful and conscious of its inferiority as it was; and above all, the territorial boundaries left behind by the war have congealed and are now not fluid at all but solid and accepted.
The conditions therefore now exist for a successful degree of negotiated disarma- ment in the strategic arms limitation talks (for to limit further rearmament is in effect to cause a measure of disarmament). Provided the talks go well—and there is every reason to suppose that both sides intend that they shall—the conditions also exist for a European security conference which will conclude peace treaties with the Germanies, and will declare inviolable the existing European frontiers, and will lead the way to normal relations being resumed between all the nation-states of Europ. Only through the firmness of the recogni- tion of existing frontiers, supported by treaties and the Russo-American detente, will Europe's chief remaining unnatural frontier disappear, the Iron Curtain that rattled down in 1947.
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