IMPLIED DETERRENT
cOINCIDING, as it happened to do, with the startling news of Rochdale, the Defence White Paper has re- ceived less attention than it deserved. The Conserva- tives have had more distracting business—explaining away Mr. Parkinson's tiny total—to attend to; and the Labour Party, with its cataclysmic differences of opinion on defence policy, was probably glad enough of the respite Rochdale afforded, giving it time to think out a way to attack the Government's defence policy without causing internal fission between the new Left—as represented by that preserved ginger-group 'Victory for Socialism'; the old Left, represented by Mr. Anenrin Bevan; and the old Right, in the person of Mr. George Brown. As a result the many serious questions which the White Paper begs are left a-begging.
* * * The first and most serious of them arises out of the state- ment in the White Paper that if Russia were to launch a major attack on the West, even with conventional forces only, the West would have to hit back with strategic nuclear weapons. Now, Mr. Duncan Sandys can fairly argue that this has been an implied deterrent for years. The Russians have long known that if they invade Europe, the conventional forces arrayed against them can hope to hold them up only a matter of hours. The implied deterrent, therefore, is the H-bomb underground. But it is one thing to have an implied deterrent, quite another to come out openly with the White Paper threat—and for many reasons. To begin with, the threat is empty : everybody, including Mr. Sandys, knows that H-bombs will not be launched from this country if a conventional war begins. But Mr. Khrushchev may not realise this. For all his political acumen, he is a man of exceedingly limited intelligence; he may conceivably believe—and is likely to, if we say it often enough—that we really intend to hit back with strategic nuclear weapons if; say, war breaks out anywhere along the Curtain. And this, surely, is dangerous; for there is always a risk that war may break out, unheralded and unwanted. If it should, Khrushchev might not appraise the true situation here; he might feel that it would be wise to obliterate us before we have decided whether or not to carry out the White - Paper's policy. A small risk, perhaps—but an unnecessary one. There are some things better left unsaid, and this was one of them.
4 second question which arises out of the White 'Paper concerns the conventional forces which are to be retained. The decision has been taken to lure recruits into committing themselves for longer periods of service by offering them pay
increases.: a decision obnoxious in principle and unwise in practice. Recruiting will probably be temporarily stimulated, because there are few pleasanter things than getting more pay than the next man for the same work; and young men in the Forces do not always look ahead to the time when they may feel the desire to get out, in order to settle down, or to marry, or to take up some different job. But the fact that they are • being asked to contract themselves in this way is itself a reflection of the unpopularity of Forces life : if people liked it they would not have to be bribed into staying. This appears to have been a political decision, reached on the assumption (probably fallacious) that there is strong feeling against national service. It is a deciSion that the Government will live to regret—if it liyes.
Finally, there is the economic problem. Are the economies genuine—or will there be, in the Defence Estimates, a supple- mentary estimate trying to get out? It is impossible to tell, because with the best of intentions neither the Government nor anybody else can be certain how our commitments may alter in 1958. All that can safely be said is that the odour of the supplementary clings to the pronouncements of Ministers, these times, like scent to a courtesan's writing paper.
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This is not to accuse them of deliberate dishonesty. It is simply an expression of a feeling of distrust—the feeling which Christopher Hollis graphically describes in an article in this issue. Everything this present Government does breeds' suspicion. The press is sometimes accused of hazarding demo- cracy by bringing Parliament, Ministers and politicians into disrepute; but—as Rochdale ought to have shown—nothing that journalists are doing can so effectively bring Parliament, Ministers and politicians into disrepute as what they are doing themselves. For example, it is clear from the White Paper that the row which led to Mr. Thorneycroft's resigna- • tion could easily have been settled, at the cost of more drastic defence pruning—that Ministers who insisted that the cuts would have to be made in social services were wrong. Mr. Sandys might not have stood for it; but reading this regrettable White Paper it seems incredible that any government would not have been prepared to•trade him for Mr. Thorneycroft with equanimity : with satisfaction, even. It is a sorry docu- ment, and in some ways a thoroughly reprehensible one—yet another reflection of the desperate shifts to which this Govern- ment is being put to keep up its appearances : to save its ravaged face.
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