“The Clattering Train”

The Nation’s Safety and Arms Control.
by Arthur T. Hadley.
Viking. 160 pp. $3.00.

Arms Control, Disarmament and National Security.
by Donald G. Brennan,
with the sponsorship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. George Braziller. 475 pp. $6.00.

In his history of the Second World War, Sir Winston Churchill tells us how, in a moment of despondency over what appeared to him to be the inevitable drift to war in 1935, he was further depressed by the recollection of some long forgotten lines from Punch:

Who is in charge of the clattering train?
The axles creak and the couplings strain;
And the pace is hot and the points are near,
And Sleep has deadened the driver’s ear;
And the signals flash through the night in
vain,
For Death is in charge of the clattering
train.

To many thoughtful persons in these days when reserves are being called back to the colors and the cry to resume nuclear testing in the atmosphere is raised, these lines must seem uncomfortably appropriate. It may be true, as Wayland and Elizabeth Young have written recently in these pages, (“Disarmament vs. Arms Control,” August), that “it is now generally accepted among the informed that the arms race is too dangerous for a sane power to continue pursuing without any check or inhibition whatever”; but there has never been much evidence that any progress was being made toward devising such checks, and of late most of the signs have pointed in the other direction.

On the other hand, even discouraged observers may derive some crumbs of comfort from the sight of the remarkable number of books dealing with the arms race that have been rolling from the presses in recent years. In no previous period of national emergency has the general reader been offered so much informed and sophisticated analysis of the problems involved in formulating military and foreign policy: and whatever the course of events in the years that lie ahead, no one who owns a library card will be able to claim with much plausibility that he had no opportunity to discover what was going on in the world around him. How much good all this publishing activity will do no one would dare guess; but it cannot do harm.

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To this ballooning literature two important works have now been added: Arthur Hadley’s book on arms control, which had its origins in a summer study on the subject led by Victor F. Weisskopf and Jerome B. Wiesner of MIT; and the revised and expanded edition of the Fall 1960 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The second of these is probably the most satisfactory, and certainly the most comprehensive, volume that has yet appeared on the military problems that face the nation today, and within its covers are articles by two dozen of the country’s leading students of military affairs and nuclear technology. Here, among other things, one will find a calm and objective exposition of the dangers of all-out war occurring within the next decade (Herman Kahn); discussions of the various proposals that have been made to avert that catastrophe (including an eloquent but rather lonely plea for unilateral disarmament by Erich Fromm); analyses of the kind of strategies best designed to promote arms stabilization (Henry Kissinger and Thomas Schelling); examinations of the past record of disarmament negotiation and of the special difficulties of negotiating with the Soviet Union (William Frye and Bernhard Bechhoefer); reflections on the possible influence of the smaller powers and of Red China in promoting or retarding international agreement (Paul Doty and Doak Barnett); and technical studies of the problems of nuclear test bans, inspection, and adjudication (Edward Teller, Bernard Feld, Ithiel de Sola Pool, Lewis Bohn, Louis Sohn, Arthur Larson, and others).

Despite the impressiveness of this volume, however, it is likely that Arthur Hadley’s book will find a wider audience. Mr. Hadley has the ability (which is not shared by all the contributors to the Daedalus volume) to write about technical matters in straightforward, vigorous, non-technical language, and he is not inhibited by any feeling that he should be objective. The editors of the Daedalus volume have thought it advisable to include different points of view, and its contributors have been charitable toward ideas that they do not themselves hold. Mr. Hadley speaks for himself and has no hesitation about attacking proposals he feels are dangerous or that he believes serve only to muddy discussion of national policy in this time of crisis.

Thus, he not only rejects unilateral disarmament as a policy for the United States (it would, he argues, make it more, rather than less, likely that Americans would die in war, since a defenseless America would invite a Soviet-Chinese rivalry for its riches that would probably be fought out in this hemisphere), but he turns his face against any policy that has as its end-objective either total disarmament or a monopoly of nuclear arms by the UN or some other international agency. It is his view that a world that was temporarily deprived of major weapons would—given the situation in places like the Congo and Kashmir—be even less stable than the one in which we live today, and that in such a world the United States would be exposed to the menaces of “fly-by-night Castros” and to the ever-present threat of rearmament by its major antagonists, since, even if all weapons were destroyed, “knowledge of how to make them would remain.” As for the idea of a super-police force, Mr. Hadley is uncompromising in his opposition. “To remove the power and responsibility of protecting the Free World and keeping the strategic peace from those nations whose political traditions and recent international actions show a developing respect for justice, and to place this power instead in a new and traditionless force, created by negotiation and bureaucratic fiat, would seem an action of incredible risk.”

The majority of the Contributors to the Daedalus volume are not as forthright as this, but they seem to share Mr. Hadley’s preference for more tentative approaches to the question of arms limitation. In the controversy between H. Stuart Hughes and Irving Kristol which appeared in COMMENTARY last July, they would be found for the most part on Mr. Kristol’s side. Mr. Hadley himself calls for heightened effort to achieve a system of stable deterrence, which would allow the major world antagonists to possess enough nuclear and other weapons to make their defeat in an all-out war unlikely, if not impossible; which would be subject to the kind of inspection that would reduce to a minimum the ability or temptation to exceed the force levels agreed upon; and which would therefore limit the risk of all-out war. He admits that before this objective is reached many difficult technical problems will have to be solved, some of which we cannot at the present time even define; but in his own mind he is clear at least about two steps that will have to be taken toward that ultimate goal.

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The first of these would be a modification of our present strategical position so as to concentrate upon secure second-strike weapons, like the Polaris submarine and the Minuteman missile, rather than upon vulnerable first-strike weapons, like the B-70 bomber. This step, which would amount to a tacit renunciation of the first use of nuclear weapons, could not help but have a reassuring effect upon those who fear an American pre-emptive strike, while the reduction of the vulnerability of our weapons would make it less tempting to our antagonists to try such a strike themselves. The second necessary step would be a rapid build-up of our non-nuclear forces so that we could answer local aggressions in a manner that would not invite all-out war by the disproportionate nature of the weapons employed.

These two steps in themselves would help create an atmosphere in which negotiation for arms control could be more fruitful than it has been in the past. Until negotiations began to pay off, however, every care would have to be taken to avoid such de-stabilizing factors as accidental nuclear explosions, complications caused by wider dissemination of nuclear weapons or the intrusion of weapons into space, and fears induced by ill-prepared or precipitate programs of civil defense. Understandings with the Soviet government on these matters (the establishment of joint inspection teams to act in time of accidental nuclear incidents, for instance, or a joint ban on armed space vehicles) are, in Mr. Hadley’s opinion, of urgent importance. If reached, they can facilitate the more comprehensive agreements the world requires.

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On all these points, Mr. Hadley finds support among the contributors to the Daedalus volume. Indeed, Henry Kissinger (in an important modification of his earlier strategical views) is even more insistent that the first step toward reasonable stability in the arms race is an increase in our conventional forces, and Hubert Humphrey is even more emphatic about the necessity of a Soviet-American space agreement than Mr. Hadley himself. All told, therefore, the striking thing about these two volumes is their agreement, and the evidence they give of what Alistair Buchan, in a perceptive comment at the end of the Daedalus volume, calls “the growing consensus of opinion in the United States that limited arms control offers a more fruitful prospect than do schemes of comprehensive disarmament.”

Whether this opinion is correct will doubtless depend upon two factors that receive more satisfactory treatment in the Daedalus volume than in Mr. Hadley’s: namely, the ability of the United States and the Soviet Union to reach viable agreements of any importance, and the possibility of devising a system of arms control that will not be rendered meaningless by Red China.

In what Thomas Schelling calls the “area of military collaboration with potential enemies to reduce the likelihood of war or to reduce its scope and violence,” our explorations have already revealed common interests between ourselves and the Soviet Union. “We both,” Mr. Schelling writes, “have . . . a common interest in reducing the advantage of striking first . . . because [it] increases the likelihood of war. . . . We both have a common interest in avoiding the kind of false alarm, panic, misunderstanding, or loss of control that may lead to an unpremeditated war. . . . We have a common interest in not getting drawn or provoked or panicked into war by the actions of a third party. . . . And we may have an interest in saving some money by not doing on both sides the things that, if we both do them, tend to cancel out.” Because of these common interests, we have been able to reach tacit understandings that have helped avoid some friction—in testing our rockets, for instance, we don’t fire them toward each other’s shores—but explicit negotiated agreements have so far escaped our attempts to reconcile the two positions.

The record of Soviet-American arms negotiations shows mistakes and rigidity and opportunism on both sides. If, as Bernhard Bechhoefer has written, the United States has made the mistake of employing negotiators who have not always mastered the technical aspects of the issues at stake, the Soviet Union has certainly been at fault in using negotiation not for the purpose of reaching agreements but for propaganda effect. Unless these and other obstacles to productive interchange are removed, it is difficult to see how the kind of mutual confidence that will make for effective arms control can possibly grow. In our own country public opinion will not indefinitely tolerate negotiations that never have positive results. Even the patient Wall Street Journal had taken to complaining about the administration’s “Micawberism” in the test ban negotiations.

Finally, there remains the problem of Red China. It has become fashionable to say that the Soviet Union really wants an agreement on arms control with the United States because this will enable it to refuse to help Red China’s atomic development, which it fears. But we have no hard evidence that this is Moscow’s real attitude; and nothing in these volumes gives us any reason to suppose that the Soviet government would be willing to apply pressure to Peiping in order to make it conform to any Soviet-American agreement. In his essay on the subject in the Daedalus volume, Doak Barnett has written that “the record of recent years indicates that the Russians do not dictate to the Chinese Communists; they negotiate with them”; and he adds that the Soviet government would probably not wish to jeopardize the solidarity of its alliance with China by acting as we would like them to act. Even if we reach agreement on arms control with Moscow, therefore, there remains the problem of making the kind of concessions that will win Chinese conformity, and this may prove to be more perplexing than the other unsolved questions that worry us today.

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