Defences and Deterrents
The Arms Debate. By Robert A. Levine. (Har- vard and O.U.P., 52s.) BOOKS on nuclear strategy have a great reputa- tion for arousing people's anger. It is not just that morality goes by the board—few English strategists today even bother to consider the moral aspects—but rather that few writers, ex- cept those committed to extreme positions, appear to have any conception of the urgency of the situation. Nuclear strategy, it must be admitted, is an extremely fascinating intellectual exercise, but it should be pointed out to those who indulge in it that they are not just dealing with the abstraction of a chess problem, but that they have a very real responsibility for the educa- tion of both government and public opinion.
In America this responsibility has been shouldered by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scien- tists; the most significant essays contributed to that magazine between 1945 and 1962 have now been collected together in The Atomic Age. As a shock tactic the cover of the Bulletin always de- picts a clock-face with the hands at one minute to twelve. According to the international tem- perature the hands may move back. (In the current issue, after the test ban, the minute-hand has gone back as far as eleven minutes to twelve.) But whatever the exact time it is, scarcely an article in this collection does not im- plicitly admit the lateness of the hour.
It is not clear to me that this sense of urgency --which the atomic scientists have felt since the very first days when they tried to put pressure on President Truman—has been successfully transmitted to the Institute for Strategic Studies, as exemplified in their latest rather ponderous book on stability in Europe. 'It is likely,' write Messrs. Buchan and Windsor, 'that the years ahead will be preoccupied with arguments and negotiations within the alliance systems on either side of the wall—rather than between the two systems.' In other words, more time and energy will be spent by the Warsaw Pact and by NATO in organising their own internal problems than in examining the causes of the differences be- tween them. And in practical terms we waste time discussing multilateral deterrents when we should be devoting our intellectual efforts to securing disengagement or arms control.
Arms and Stability in Europe is one of those rather sad little composite books which should never have been written, deriving from one of those rather sad little international seminars which should never have been held. It is sufficiently turgid in style for one to doubt whether it will even be read. Its chief fault is that it is out of date. Those responsible for the discussion programme which resulted in this book were not to know that Mr. Gaitskell and' President Kennedy would be dead before the general public got round to reading it, or that the Americans would re-assess the Soviet con- ventional threat, or that Skybolt would be superseded by Polaris, or that the Brussels nego- tiations would break down; but they might have made more allowance for error or chance.
This book is' very much a manifestation of that curious Gadarene attitude which the British Establishment had towards the Common Market in the course of 1962. Absurd eulogistic claims are made here for Western Europe—'emerging as one of the world's great centres of power and energy.' One of the 'informal assumptions' of the discussion group was that Britain would join the EEC. Consequently much of the argument takes place within the framework erected on this false assumption. Apart from this, the book also reflects a fault from which much academic strategic study suffers, namely, the lack of con- crete suggestions for action. It is, in fact, one of those tiresome books which go through all the constructive proposals that have ever been put forward to solve the problem of European security and then quietly dismiss them as being unsuitable. No alternative is offered to the status quo. And its outcome is not subjected to'rigid analysis, but merely to wishful thinking: 'It is not unreasonable to assume, therefore, that if the prudential characteristics of this stalemate [in Europe] can be reinforced in the decade ahead, a more normal political relationship be- tween the two halves of Europe may gradually begin to develop.' No reasons are given for this astonishing use of the optative. Bemused by their own discussion, the authors cannot agree on a policy, and consequently are wholly unable to suggest how one might be adopted.
A case could be made out for saying that since 1957 the defence policy of the British Govern- ment has not been altered one whit by outside argument. The purely mechanical failure of Blue Streak and Skybolt are the only significant turn- ing points to be noted in the last six years. This inability of academic strategists to interact either with government circles or with radical thinking on defence has led to a certain sterility of thought. Mr. Levine's book gives some of. the reasons for this.
The Arms Debate is not a good book—its con- tent could be summarised without loss within the confines of a small pamphlet. But it does set out to show the various levels at which strategic argument can be profitable. The author divides the spectrum of thought on arms policy into five divisions, ranging from those who make drastic anti-war recommendations like Bertrand Russell to those like Senator Goldwater. who make drastic anti-Communist recommendations. Somewhere between the two are those Ns ith 'mar- ginalist' recommendations who actually sustain the debate out of which government policy is formed. The most middle-of-the-road of all, a group with whom the author sympathises, are the 'middle marginalists' whose recommendations 'are those which appear not to aim primarily at either preventing war or preventing Communist advance, but rather try to do both at the same time.' (For them, perhaps, the possibility of being both red and dead.)
This analytical approach to nuclear war is all very well, provided that the intellectual elite who manipulate the arguments are capable of trans- lating them to a popular level. As yet, neither the American strategists nor the pundits at the Institute for Strategic Studies have tried to pro- vide material with which to educate public opinion—a formidable if erratic factor in the working-out of nuclear strategy. J. Robert Oppenheimer, in an essay on American foreign policy reprinted in The Atomic Age, points the moral: 'The political vitality of our country largely derives from two sources: one is the interplay of opinion and debate in the diverse and complex legislative and executive agencies which contribute to the making of policy. The other is a public opinion which is based on con- fidence that it knows the truth. Today public opinion r2nnot exist in this field.'
RICH G011
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