Bertrand Russell and the problem of ‘deterrence’
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By Ken Coates
‘Bertrand Russell and the problem of deterrence’ is an abridged version of the first chapter of Ken Coates’ collection of essays and working papers titled The Most Dangerous Decade. Published by Spokesman in 1984, the collection is subtitled: World Militarism and the New Non-aligned Peace Movement. The book is available to buy from spokesmanbooks.org.
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The new movement for nuclear disarmament in Europe, which has swept across the continent in the first years of the present decade, offers many similarities to the earlier peace movement, remembered now by people entering middle age.
In the late 50s and early 60s, however, life was rather simpler than it is today. The differences between the peace movements of then and now are perhaps as important as their similarities. So, too, are the differences in the contexts in which they seek to act. In 1955, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein published the famous manifesto which launched the Pugwash movement, so named because the first international meeting of scientists which it called into being met at Cyrus Eaton’s estate in Pugwash, Nova Scotia.
This document … sets out the classic statement of the perils of nuclear war, which, its authors established, might quite possibly put an end to the human race. Their judgement has lost none of its validity. But the political disputes which divide the world have changed significantly since Russell and Einstein agreed their text. “The world is full of conflicts”, they wrote, “and, overshadowing all minor conflicts, the titanic struggle between communism and anti-communism”. Two-and-a-half decades on, this “titanic struggle” has radically changed its form.
Even in 1955, anti-communism had many exponents, from quasi-feudal despots, to the directors of great capitalist corporations, to social democrats or libertarian socialists. Those opposing communism in 1980 represent a no less incompatible spectrum than before, although the shades of opinion included in it are now perhaps more finely delineated. On the other side, those supporting communism have fragmented into a dizzying variety of schools … Doctrinal disagreements follow these national and regional cleavages, and also, to some degree, overlay them …
Not a whit less divided is the capitalist world. Whilst multinational companies establish a new globalism, serious divisions of economic interest separate the United States from the most potent European nations, and there are widening breaches between both of these power centres and their dynamic competitors in Japan. If conventional socialist doctrines on imperialism are true, then the real world conflict is as likely to follow intercapitalist fractures as it is to remain contained in the ideological rupture of the cold war. At the same time realistic “western” analysis can show that ideological quarrels have relatively easily become exchanges of shot and shell between “communist” states, whilst the basic East-West divide has remained frozen in an uneasy peace …
All this has made the maintenance of peace immeasurably more difficult, since the complex of shifting affinities involves risk that where one dispute between two contenders might be negotiated to a settlement, the actions of a third party may serve to reopen old divisions on a new plane, or create new conflicts immediately after the resolution of existing ones. That more than one of the potential contenders phrase their communiques in the language of Marxism, with quotations from the same scriptures, by no means ameliorates this difficulty.
The fragmentation of interests within the blocs makes the old concept of detente infinitely more difficult to pursue. Even if all the statesmen in all the powers were firmly bent on avoiding war at all costs, they would require consummate expertise and skill to do so. However, it seems rather plain that peace is not exactly the first priority for all of them, so that the avoidance of war requires other advocates, with firmer commitments, if it is to be adequately promoted.
All this would have been a warning to heed even if each of the worlds of Russell and Einstein had simply subdivided: but in fact both parts of their world have also entered other profound crises. Fission has followed crisis, and aggravated it in the process. Apparent economic stability in the West has given way to deep slump, mass unemployment, and aggravated civil disorder in many countries. The once monolithic political conformity of the East has also broken into serial problems, promoting apathy, withdrawal and even non-co-operation on a wide scale. Strident dissidence has become evident among certain minorities. In both halves of this cold peace, troubles now come, not in single spies, but in whole battalions.
However complex the evolution of affairs since they wrote their manifesto, Russell and Einstein were right to pinpoint what has remained the unresolved problem of our time, to which we may find no simple solution in any scriptures, secular or other. In a prophetic moment more than a hundred years earlier, the authors of the Communist Manifesto had spoken of the class struggle (which they clearly saw as a democratic process in the fullest sense of the words), as ending “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes”.
That “common ruin” now looms over us. It is no longer a question of socialism or barbarism, but of survival or the end of our species. Although this dilemma has confronted us since the Hiroshima explosion in August 1945, we have neither adequately understood it, nor have we yet resolved it. It will be more extensively discussed below.
Yet the existence of this dilemma does not at all annul the other lesser social tensions which demand real change in the structures of our societies, East and West alike. The inhibition of such change itself intensifies the threat of war, while the threat of war is used to reinforce that inhibition.
In his attempt to focus these prospects more than [60] years ago, Bertrand Russell drew three rather evident conclusions: first, that any future large-scale war would bring disaster “not only to belligerents, but to mankind”; second, that little wars would always henceforward contain the risk of becoming great, and that the more of them there were, the more likely it would be that one or another of them might grow to encompass our general destruction; and third, that even were existing nuclear weapons all by agreement to be destroyed, the outbreak of any future major war would ensure that replacements would be used as soon as they could be manufactured.1 So far more than a hundred “little” wars have raged since 1945, and two of them, those in Korea and lndo-China, involved the use of a firepower more horrendously devastating than the totality of that available during the Second World War. To this matter, too, we shall return below. In one sense, this fact does not contradict what Russell said: war in Afghanistan, or in Iran, or in Eritrea, or in Namibia, or in the Lebanon, or who knows where next, does indeed carry the most fearful prospect of escalation, drawing in both active external sponsors and passive bystanders. In another sense, those who have preached the conventional doctrine of deterrence can be yielded (for what it is worth), their claim that ever-enlarging nuclear arsenals in both superpowers have up to now kept them apart from direct engagement one with another, and schooled them in exploring the delicate risks of proxy conflicts. The proxies will take no comfort from this.
This doctrine of deterrence has not stood still, however. Until recently, one of its most loyal British proponents has been Mr Denis Healey, who informed us in the early 1950s that the best guide to the true state of the world was Thomas Hobbes, who understood power politics. For Hobbes, fear was an indispensable component of the impulse to statehood, upon which depended the public peace and the containment of the “war of each against all”, which otherwise raged in the society of natural man. But if this doctrine had been true, Hiroshima would surely have generated sufficient fear to force us all to accept the need for a genuinely international polity. It did not. Instead, it became an obstacle to such a polity. Deterrence theory, founded in one kind of technology, and within a given geo-political balance, has reiterated various rather primitively Hobbesian prescriptions to all who would listen, while both technologies and political realities have been borne along beneath it in a heaving flux of change. Hobbes himself would have been infinitely wiser than his modern epigones. He would never have ignored corporeal being because of a web of words. Order may once have been based on fear, but today fear has reached a point at which it imminently threatens to destroy what it has left of “order”.
When Bertrand Russell sought to explain the confrontation of the nuclear superpowers, back in 1959, he offered a famous analogy:
“Since the nuclear stalemate became apparent, the Governments of East and West have adopted the policy which Mr Dulles calls ‘brinkmanship’. This is a policy adapted from a sport which, I am told, is practised by the sons of very rich Americans. This sport is called ‘Chicken!’ It is played by choosing a long straight road with a white line down the middle and starting two very fast cars towards each other from opposite ends. Each car is expected to keep the wheels of one side on the white line. As they approach each other, mutual destruction becomes more and more imminent. If one of them swerves from the white line before the other, the other, as he passes, shouts ‘Chicken!’, and the one who has swerved becomes an object of contempt. As played by youthful plutocrats, this game is considered decadent and immoral, although only the lives of the players are risked. But when the game is played by eminent statesmen, who risk not only ‘their own lives but those of many hundreds of millions of human beings, it is thought on both sides that the statesmen on the other side are reprehensible. This, of course, is absurd. Both are to blame for playing such an incredibly dangerous game. The game may be played without misfortune a few times, but sooner or later it will come to be felt that loss of face is more dreadful than nuclear annihilation. The moment will come when neither side can face the derisive cry of ‘Chicken!’ from the other side. When that moment is come, the statesmen of both sides will plunge the world into destruction.”2
I do not cite this passage out of piety. Russell’s parable is no longer adequate. As we have seen, various things have changed since 1959. Some were beginning to change, at any rate in minds like Mr Henry Kissinger’s, even before that time.
Some changes were rather evident to ordinary people, more or less instantly. Others were not. Within the game of “chicken” itself, we had the Cuba crisis of 1962. We shall discuss this later, but for our present purposes it is enough to note that Mr Krushchev swerved. This persuaded certain shallow advocates of the game that deterrence actually worked. But rather more significantly, it also persuaded the more faithful Hobbesians among Mr Krushchev’s colleagues that considerably greater effort should be lavished on the perfection of a swerve-proof war machine. Consequently, the nuclear armament balance shifted, if not in the dramatic manner announced by Washington alarmists, at any rate in the direction of something closer to effective parity.
In addition to this, proliferation of nuclear weaponry continued. This is discussed below, and all that we need to say about it here is that it has complicated the rules of the game rather considerably. The French allowed if they did not actually encourage public speculation about the thought that their deterrent was more than unidirectional, if their putative defenders ever showed undue reluctance to perform, in time of need, the allotted role. The arrival of the Chinese as a potential nuclear force produced a new prospect of a three-way “chicken” game, with both main camps holding out at least a possibility that, in appropriate circumstances, they might “play the China card”. But here the metaphor is mixing itself. Staying within the rules Russell advanced, we would have to express it like this: the Chinese “deterrent” could, at least in theory, be set to intervene against either of the other participants in the joust, unpredictably, from any one of a bewildering number of side-entries to the main collision course.
As if this were not problem enough, the war-technology has itself evolved, so that:
a. military costs have escalated to the point where nuclear powers are quite apparently increasingly impotent if they are barred from using what has now become by far their most expensive weaponry; and
b. nuclear weapons technique aspires to (although it may very well fail to meet) infinitely greater precision in attack. This brings nearer the possibility of pre-emptive war, which is a perfectly possible abrupt reversal of standard deterrence presumptions.
To these facts we must add another, of powerful moment:
c. the stability of the world political economy, which seemed effectively unchallengeable in 1959, has been fatally undermined by the collapse of the Keynesian world order, deep slump in the advanced capitalist countries, and growing social tension within the nations of the Soviet sphere of influence, who have not for the most part been able to evolve those democratic and consensual forms of administration which could resolve their political tensions in an orderly and rational manner.
In the interaction of these developments, we have seen the consolidation, amongst other delinquencies, of the doctrine of “limited” nuclear war. We can only reduce this veritable mutation in strategy to Russell’s exemplary folk-tale if we imagine that each participant car in the game enfolds smaller subordinate vehicles, which can be launched down the white line at even greater speed than the velocity of approach of the main challengers. These lesser combatants can, it is apparently believed, be set loose on one another in order that their anticipated crashes may permit time for the principals to decide whether it might _be wise themselves to swerve or not. Any desire of the small fry to change course is already taken care of, because they are already steered by remote control. Of course, the assumption is that those involved in the “lesser” combat will necessarily be destroyed. Maybe their destruction can save their mother vehicles from perishing, although careful analysts think it very much more likely not.
Stated in this way, the game has become even more whimsical than it was in Russell’s original model. But stiffened up with precise and actual designations, it loses all traces of whimsy. The lesser vehicles in the developing game of “limited” war are all of Europe’s nations. Whether or not their sacrifice makes free enterprise safer in New York, or allows Mr Brezhnev’s successors time to build full communism (and we may well be agnostic on both scores) what is securely certain is that after it Europe will be entirely and poisonously dead, and that the civilisations of Leonardo and Galileo, Bacon and Hobbes, Spinoza and Descartes and, yes, Karl Marx, will have evaporated without trace.
Before we consider the project for limited nuclear war in a little more detail, it is necessary to unravel the conventional doctrine of deterrence somewhat further . Advocates of this schema will often repudiate the fable of the chicken game. “It is a malicious travesty”, they will tell us. The vogue question which is then very commonly posed by such people is this: “you complain about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: but would these events have taken place, if Japan then had the benefit of a possible nuclear response?” Let us worry this problem a little. First, some obvious points. Did the Japanese in this speculative argument possess an equivalence of weaponry or not? If they were nuclear-armed, but with a smaller number of war-heads, or inadequate delivery systems, it is possible that their retaliatory capacity could be evaluated and discounted, in which case the American attack would presumably have gone ahead. If, on the other hand, the American Government perceived that it might not avoid parity of destruction or worse, it would in all likelihood have drawn back. It might even have hesitated for fear of less than equal devastation. “Aha!” say the deterrent philosophers: “you have conceded our case”. Well, hardly. We must first pursue it for a few steps, but not before pointing out that it has already become completely hypothetical, and already travesties many other known facts about the real Japanese war prospects in August 1945, quite apart from the then existing, real disposition of nuclear weapons. (There are some strong grounds for the assumption that the Japanese would actually have been brought to a very quick surrender if the nuclear bombardment had never taken place, or indeed, even had it not been possible). But for the sake of argument, we are temporarily conceding this special case of the deterrent argument.
Let us then see what happens when we apply it further. In 1967, the Indian Government exploded a “peaceful” nuclear device. Subsequently Pakistan set in train the necessary work of preparation for an answering technology. Since partition, India and Pakistan have more than once been at war. There remain serious territorial claims at issue between them. The secession of Bangladesh inflicted serious humiliation on the Pakistan Government. What possible argument can be advanced against a Pakistan deterrent? We shall instantly be told that the present military rulers of that country are unsavoury to a remarkable degree, that they butchered their last constitutionally elected Prime Minister, and that they maintain a repressive and decidedly unpleasant administration. It is difficult, if not unfortunately impossible, to disagree with these complaints, all of which are founded in reason and justice. But as co-opted theorists of deterrence, we must dismiss them. Our adopted argument is, that if India and Pakistan are to be held apart from their next war, the deterrent is necessary to both sides. Their respective moral shortcomings, if any, or indeed, if all that have ever been alleged, have nothing to do with the case.
Late in April 1981, Mr F.W. De Klerk, the mineral and energy affairs minister of South Africa, publicly admitted that his country was producing a quantity of 45 per cent enriched uranium, which announcement signified that South Africa had the capacity to manufacture its own nuclear armament. This news was scarcely electrifying, since a nuclear device had already apparently been detonated in the South Atlantic during the previous year, arid it had therefore been assumed, almost universally, that the South African bomb already existed. What should the black African “front-line States” then do? Deterrence positively requires that Angola, Zimbabwe and Mozambique should instantly start work on procuring their opposing bombs. After all, South African troops have regularly been in action outside their own frontiers, and the very vulnerability of the Apartheid State makes it perfectly possible that serious military ·contests could break out over the whole contiguous zone. To prevent such war, the Angolan or Zimbabwean bomb represents a prudent and uncontentious investment.
We can say the same thing about the States of the Middle East. To them we might add those of Central America. Would Cuba have been invaded during the Bay of Pigs episode, if she had deployed nuclear weapons? To cap it all, what about Japan? Her experience, surely, would seem to be the most convincing argument for developing an extensive arsenal of thermo-nuclear war-heads. Strangely, these arguments are not heard in Japan. President Mugabe has not voiced them either. Japan’s people have not escaped the customary scissions which are part of advanced industrial society, but if one thing binds them together, it is a virtually unanimous revulsion against nuclear weapons. African States repeatedly insist that they seek protection, not by deterrence, but by the creation of a nuclear-free zone. Clearly they have not yet learnt the lessons which are so monotonously preached in the Establishment newspapers of the allegedly advanced nations.
If we were to admit that all nation States had an intrinsic right to defend their institutions and interests by all the means available to any, then nuclear proliferation would not merely be unavoidable, but unimpeachable within the deterrent model. And it is this incontrovertible fact which reduces it to absurdity; and argues that Russell was in fact right to pose the question as he did. Very soon the chicken game will not only have a cluster of three nuclear States at one end of the white line, and a single super-State at the other, with the Chinese already able to intervene from a random number of side routes: but it will shortly have from 12 to 20 other possible contenders liable to dash, quite possibly unannounced, across the previously single axis of collision.
For those who still believe that this dreadful evolution will be prevented by the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, we must offer three warning notes. First, the treaty’s Review Conference of August 1980, held in Geneva, failed to agree any “certificate of good health” for its operation, because the nuclear powers had flouted all their solemn promises to scale down their own nuclear stocks. Critics of the treaty said from the beginning that its weakness derived from the fact that under it the nuclear weapons-holding States were assuming the right to police the rest. This could only acquire moral validity if they began themselves to behave according to the same rules which they sought to impose on others. At Geneva, the Review Conference demonstrated that no such behaviour had materialised. Secondly, visible evidence of the collapse of the treaty’s framework has come from the military relationship between the USA and Pakistan since the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR. Vast conventional weapons shipments to Pakistan have already taken place, and vaster ones are contemplated, in spite of the previous US policy which had withheld arms supplies of all kinds from any State suspected of breaching the non-proliferation treaty. If breaches are now condoned by superpowers wherever their own perceived interests at stake, then the treaty is not merely dead, but rotting away. Thirdly, as an augury, we have the Israeli bombardment of Iraq, which shows what we must expect now that proliferation is effectively uncontrolled. It was, coincidentally, Mr Ismat Kitani of Iraq who presided over the Geneva Review Conference, and who warned that “the failure of the talks would damage world peace”.
Deterrence, in short, was in the beginning, a bi-polar game, and it cannot be played in a multi-polar world. It is therefore collapsing, but the danger is that this collapse will result in universal destruction if alternative approaches are not speedily accepted. This danger arises because deterrence is a doctrine, a hitherto partially shared mythology, a mental scarecrow which may well lose all credibility before the material war potential which gave rise to it has even begun to be dismantled.
There was always, of course, a much simpler rebuttal of the doctrine. It is, was, and has always been, utterly immoral. Unfortunately, this argument, which is unanswerable, is not usually given even the slightest consideration in the world’s war rooms, although there is a fair deal of evidence that the people who staff these sometimes find it difficult to avoid traumatic neuroses about the effects of all their devilish labours.
However, the “lateral” proliferation of nuclear weapons to ever larger numbers of States, is by no means the most drastic process by which such weapons are multiplied. Lateral proliferation will provide more and more problems for the peace of the world, but the “vertical” proliferation of superpower arsenals is fearsome on an infinitely more dreadful scale. And it is the evolution of nuclear war-fighting doctrine and the preparation for limited nuclear war which provides unquestionably the most serious threat we face in the 1980s, disturbed though rational men and women are bound to be by the prospects of the spawning of autonomously controlled atomic war-heads from one troubled region to the next. The ‘’limited’’ nuclear exchange in Europe is likely to take place before one can be prepared on the Indian subcontinent, or yet in Africa. It is also scheduled to deploy as large a proportion of the firepower of the two great arsenals as may be needed.
How did we arrive at this mutation in strategic policy, which has begun to generate weapons designed to fight war rather than to “deter” it?
At the time when Bertrand Russell was campaigning for nuclear disarmament in Britain, there was an imbalance in the nuclear explosive stockpiles, although thermo-nuclear weapons already amply guaranteed the destruction of both superpowers, if they were to venture into war. According to Herbert York, the United States then had between 20 and 40 million kilotons of explosives, “or the energy equivalent of some 10,000 World War II’s”.
“We had reached” wrote York, “a level of supersaturation that some writer characterised by the word ‘overkill’, an understatement in my opinion. Moreover, we possessed two different but reinforcing types of overkill. First, by 1960 we had many more bombs than they had urban targets, and second, with a very few exceptions such as Greater Moscow and Greater New York, the area of destruction and intense lethality that a single bomb could produce was very much larger than the area of the targets. Since all, or practically all, strategic weapons were by then thermo-nuclear, it is safe to assume that those Soviet or Chinese cities which were equivalent in size and importance to Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, by that time, targets for weapons from 100 to 1,000 times as big as the bombs used in history’s only two real demonstrations of what actually happens when large numbers of human beings and their works are hit by nuclear weapons.”3
However, overkill has its limitations: bombs in the megaton class, York tells us, do not become proportionately more lethal as they get bigger. The size of the bombs “outruns the size of the target”. This inevitably wastes much explosive power on “sparsely populated areas”. Nonetheless, if the murderous effect of fallout is considered even in the early ‘60s both superpowers could easily render the entirety of each other’s territories intensely radioactive, and still have many unexpended bombs to spare.
The military doctrine which accompanied the perfection of this technology was one of the “massive retaliation”, in words of Secretary Dulles, or later, “Mutual Assured Destruction” as Defence Secretary McNamara styled it. Although its advocates always insisted that this was a deterrent doctrine designed to prevent war, it did nonetheless, bear an undeniable relationship to Russell’s game of “chicken”, whenever conflict between the two powers entered the stage of open confrontation. But during McNamara’s own period, the seeds of the new doctrine of “flexible response” were already maturing. The assumption out of which this notion was to codify itself was that different levels of nuclear escalation could be defined, permitting an American President a power to move through a spectrum of lesser types of nuclear strike before all-out mutual destruction became unavoidable. In 1964, Mr McNamara specifically mentioned the need for “flexible capability” in nuclear forces. In 1969, Defence Secretary Clark Clifford called for weapons which could be “used effectively in a limited and controlled retaliation as well as for ‘Assured Destruction’.”4
To be fair, this transition was accompanied by much lobbying from European statesmen. Henry Kissinger records some of it in his memoirs; and seeks to place much of the responsibility at the door of his European allies:
“A similar problem existed with respect to tactical nuclear weapons. One might have thought that if our strategic forces tended toward parity with the USSR and if at the same time we were inferior in conventional military strength, greater emphasis would be placed on tactical nuclear forces. This indeed was NATO’s proclaimed strategy of ‘flexible response’. But there was little enthusiasm for this concept within our government. Civilian officials in the State Department and the Pentagon, especially systems analysis experts, were eager to create a clear ‘firebreak’ between conventional and nuclear weapons and to delay the decision to resort to any nuclear weapons as long as possible. They were reluctant, therefore, to rely on tactical nuclear weapons, which they thought would tend to erode all distinctions between nuclear and conventional strategy.
A passage from a study on NATO’s military options reflected this state of mind. This particular study was unable to find any use for nuclear weapons in NATO even though our stockpile there numbered in the thousands: The primary role of our nuclear forces in Europe, the study argued, is to raise the Soviet estimate of the expected costs of aggression and add great uncertainty to their calculations. Nuclear forces do not necessarily have a decisive impact on the likelihood or form of aggression, the study concluded. This was an astonishing statement from a country that had preserved the peace in Europe for over twenty years by relying on its nuclear preponderance. Nor was it clear how forces thought not to have a decisive impact could affect the calculations of a potential aggressor. It was a counsel of defeat to abjure both strategic and tactical nuclear forces, for no NA TO country – including ours – was prepared to undertake the massive buildup in conventional forces that was the sole alternative.
To confuse matters further, while American civilian analysts deprecated the use of nuclear weapons as ineffective and involving a dangerous risk of escalation, our allies pressed a course contradicting the prevailing theory in Washington. They urged both a guaranteed early resort to tactical nuclear weapons and immunity of their territories from their use. Inevitably, discussions that had been going on since 1968 in the NATO Nuclear Planning Group began to produce serious differences of opinion.
This group had been set up by Secretary McNamara as a device by which our allies could participate in nuclear decisions without acquiring nuclear weapons themselves. Denis Healey, then British Minister of Defence, had explained his government’s view when Nixon visited London in February 1969. In Healey’s judgment NATO’s conventional forces would be able to resist for only a matter of days; hence early use of nuclear weapons was essential. Healey stressed the crucial importance of making the Soviets understand that the West would prefer to escalate to a strategic exchange rather than surrender. On the other hand, NA TO should seek to reduce devastation to a minimum. The Nuclear Planning Group was working on solving this riddle; its ‘solution’ was the use of a very small number of tactical weapons as a warning that matters were getting out of hand.
What Britain, supported by West Germany, was urging came to be called the ‘demonstrative use’ of nuclear weapons. This meant setting off a nuclear weapon in some remote location, which did not involve many casualties – in the air over the Mediterranean, for example – as a signal of more drastic use if the warning failed. I never had much use for this concept. I believed that the Soviet Union would not attack Western Europe without anticipating a nuclear response. A reaction that was designed to be of no military relevance would show more hesitation than determination; it would thus be more likely to spur the attack than deter it. If nuclear weapons were to be used, we needed a concept by which they could stop an attack on the ground. A hesitant or ineffective response ran the risk of leaving us with no choices other than surrender or holocaust.
But what was an ‘effective’ response? Given the political impossibility of raising adequate conventional forces, the Europeans saw nuclear weapons as the most effective deterrent. But they feared the use of them on their territories; what seemed ‘limited’ to us could be catastrophic for them. The real goal of our allies - underlining the dilemma of tactical nuclear weapons - has been to commit the United States to the early use of strategic nuclear weapons, which meant a US-Soviet nuclear war fought over their heads. This was precisely what was unacceptable to American planners. Our strategy - then and now - must envisage the ultimate use of strategic nuclear weapons if Europe can be defended in no other way. But it must also seek to develop other options, both to increase the credibility of the deterrent and to permit a flexible application of our power should deterrence fail.”5
It was in March 1974 that the new Defence Secretary, James Schlesinger, announced a comprehensive justification for limited nuclear war. Since then, although United States spokesmen, including President Carter himself, have havered backwards and forwards on this question, “flexible targetting” has apparently gone remorselessly ahead, and the concomitant doctrines of limited war have become military orthodoxy. It is this fact which rendered the revelation, in August 1980, of the contents of Presidential Directive 59 so unsurprising to the specialists. It is also this fact which had previously provoked British military leaders and scientific planners, like Lord Mountbatten and Lord Zuckerman, to unrestrained protest.6
Of course, military doctrine is an arcane science, and while specialists debated these issues they were accorded a respectful if distant, albeit widespread, apathy. But, as the practical conclusions of their debates became plain, public moods began to change. First, the project for an enhanced radiation (or “neutron”) bomb brought home to a wide audience the apparent truth that warfighting, as opposed to “deterrent” weapons were far advanced in preparation. Then, the Soviet installation of SS-20 missiles, which could strike European or Chinese targets, but not American ones, aroused concern not only among Governments. And finally, the NATO decision to “modernise” theatre nuclear forces in Western Europe, by installing Pershing II missiles and land-based cruise missiles throughout Europe, brought forth a storm of objections, and the beginning of a new approach to European disarmament.
Neither the Soviet, nor the American “modernisations” were uniquely responsible for this profound movement of opinion. Europeans had begun to perceive their intended role as victims: limited war in Europe meant that schedules were being evolved which made them prime targets. If any of them, on either side, were over-run, they could anticipate a double jeopardy: nuclear bombardment from the “enemy” while they were themselves a nuclear threat, followed by nuclear bombardment by their “allies” if anyone was left to hit. In this growing realisation, Europe began to generate a continental Resistance, from Scandinavia to Sicily, from Poland to Portugal. This epic movement is still in its infancy, but already it demands attention.
Already there have been two major gatherings of its supporters, at the Brussels Convention for Nuclear Disarmament held in July 1982, and at a second, larger, meeting which was held in Berlin from 9 May-15 1983. In 1984, a third Convention has been scheduled for Perugia, in July. There can be little doubt that Russell’s ghost will draw encouragement from this widening response to the dangers against which he warned so cogently, and with such prescience.
Footnotes
Parts of this text appear in Heresies (Spokesman, 1982). Other parts were included in the Introduction to Alva Myrdal: The Dynamics of European Nuclear Disarmament, (Spokesman, 1981).
1. Bertrand Russell: Commonsense and Nuclear Warfare, London, Allen and Unwin, 1959, p.29.
2. Ibid., p.39.
3. Herbert York: Race to Oblivion -A Participant’s View of the Arms Race, New York, Simon and Schuster, p,42.
4. See Jerry Elmer: Presidential Directive 59 - America’s Counterforce Strategy, Philadelphia, American Friends Service Committee, 1981.
5. The White House Years, Weidenfeld and Nicholson & Michael Joseph, pp.218-9.
6. Apocalypse Now? Spokesman, 1980.