We are being lured today with the sweet siren songs of disarmament which promises to protect us from war. But unlike Ulysses, we are not tied to the mast. Only a resolve to follow reason and not blind hope will keep us from being dashed on the rocks of this illusion.
Many before us have been concerned about the evils of war. We are faced with an age-old problem. The Roman philosopher Seneca mentioned it in the first century. “We are mad,” he spoke, “not only individually but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolate murders, but what of war and the much vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?” Rome had some minor success in limiting war with her Pax Romana, but this was because Rome’s power was recognized as supreme. When her power disintegrated, wars again became the natural course of events.
Subsequent efforts to limit wars have been attempted by international agreement. As early as 1095 the Council of Clermont decreed the prohibition of warfare on certain days of the week. In the thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas urged papal condemnation of war. In the fourteenth century, Marsiglio of Padua suggested that the General Council of the Church assume this secular function of war control for Europe, and Henry IV of France had the Duke of Sully publish a similar plan in 1634.
William Penn, in 1693, proposed a European Parliament, and the Abbe Saint- Pierre in the next century took up the same theme in an effort to prevent war. These plans, together with Immanuel Kant’s “On Perpetual Peace,” were the forerunnners of the League of Nations and the United Nations of today.
Hope for peace is as endemic to man as the hope for immortality. None can say that either peace or immortality is unattainable. In fact, some slight progress has been made toward each objective. The human life span in some cultures has been extended. So, too, the possibility of violence to an individual (which, after all, is the ultimate evil of war) has been decreased—in some cultures.
But a great error of our times—and of all times, for that matter—is to assume that some small progress represents attainment of the final goal. Hope is such strong medicine that people tend to grasp every shred of evidence which supports their aim and discard the evidence which refutes it.
War is not inevitable. Nor is death. Who knows what we may discover tomorrow? But all the evidence points to the fact that war is just as likely to happen as ever before. For war is a highly complex product of human passions and human organizations. War is not logical, any more than a fight between husband and wife is logical. Neither party wants it, yet couples often quarrel bitterly.
War is senseless and irrational. Yet war persists. Seldom does a nation want war; often nations feel compelled to wage war. The so glibly quoted definition of war made by Carl von Clausewitz has done irreparable harm in the thinking on this problem. He said that war is an extension of politics by violent means. This leads us to consider war as a planned and rational decision made by statesmen.
The concept of war described by Leo Tolstoi in War and Peace is much more consonant with the extensive knowledge of the social-psychology which has been developed in this century. War is a social and emotional upheaval, rather than an act of statesmen. War breaks out; it isn’t planned. Its outbreak is just as unpredictable as an epidemic of measles. Thus war cannot be a logical extension of politics. Even though political leaders make the decisions for war, history most often shows that such decisions were foregone conclusions. Any leader would have been compelled to make a similar decision.
When professorial Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1916 on the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” he was fully committed to a neutral position. Pacifistic and idealistic as he was, events overtook President Wilson and he was compelled to ask for a declaration of war less than two years later.
Adolph Hitler did not start World War II, one must remember. He did start war with Poland. It was aggressive, and ruthless, but it was not World War II. The “peace in our time” appeaser of Munich, Neville Chamber- lain, was the one who felt compelled to live up to British commitments and declare war on Germany. He could not avoid this decision. Neither Hitler nor Chamberlain wanted the war that followed.
But the likelihood of war should not cause us to decrease our efforts to limit and control it, any more than the likelihood of death should abate our search for ways to prolong life. Nevertheless, we must pursue this Holy Grail of peace with our eyes open to the real dangers confronting us. The quest must not blind us to reality.
Disarmament is unquestionably one means of controlling war. Victors usually disarmed their former enemies and this definitely reduced the possibility of war recurring. Although disarmament by international agreement has had little success in checking war, this inauspicious record should not cause disarmament to be discarded from our list of possible measures. It would be utterly ridiculous, however, to place so much hope in a method that has never proved successful as to relax our efforts for bona fide armed protection.
Horrible as it is, armed might is the force which has kept great nations sovereign. Paradoxically, this has been the most reliable measure for keeping the peace. Had Britain been strong, would Hitler have risked the invasion of Poland? To let down our guard on the hope of disarmament by simple agreement would be asking for destruction. And this would apply even after effective inspection has been established. At any time a nation may repudiate its agreement, eject inspectors, and start arming. Having the initiative, that nation may build a superior war machine in just a few years as did Nazi Germany. Or a member of a covenant may openly violate its provisions, as when Japan invaded Manchuria and Italy, Ethiopia, with neither declaration of war nor notification to the Council of the League. Yes, the concept of international morality has a long*way to go-
The United States has more often than not responded to the wishful thought rather than to the hard facts of international life. After the Revolutionary War the Army was reduced to eighty men, and the War of 1812 found us in a pitiable state of military anemia -—a state which caused us cruel hardship and, except for chance events abroad, might have caused the loss of our independence. There were few men who had either the wisdom or the courage to speak as John Adams. Like Ulysses, he had chained himself to the mast of reason and truth. “The delightful imaginations,” he said, “of universal and perpetual peace have often amused, but never been credited to me.”
In 1842, a Congressman announced, “We have no prospect of war.” Four years later we were fighting Mexico. An effort was made to abolish the Navy just before the Civil War. In the Congress of 1896, Livingston of Georgia said, “I do not take much stock in the danger of an early war with Spain,” and influential “Uncle Joe” Cannon proclaimed, “I want to say that I do not believe we will have war this coming year—no, no war this year, nor next year, nor the year after.” But war came in two years. About that time reputable studies were published and broadly discussed which proved war “impossible from military, economic and political points of view.”
“The very development that has taken place in the mechanism of war,” wrote I. S. Bloch, a prominent Polish banker, “has rendered war an impractical operation. The dimensions of modern armaments and the organization of society have rendered its prosecution an economic impossibility, and, finally, if any attempt were made to demonstrate the inaccuracy of my assertions by putting the matter to test on a great scale, we should find the inevitable result in a catastrophe which would destroy all existing political organizations.”
This was written before the Spanish- American War. How it sounds like the numerous erudite statements of 1955! Today we talk of atomic stalemate as if it were a new idea.
Czar Nicholas II bought the impossible- war philosophy, but his dynasty lost its crown in less than two decades as the result of internal and external war.
A wave of pacifistic optimism generated the first Hague Conference of 1899 and the second in 1907. From these meetings some rules of war emerged. Most have been broken when expediency demanded it, but at least a moral code began to evolve for international negotiations. Ethical standards were being established as a first step.
These halting but, at least, concrete efforts at international enlightenment inspired such unwarranted hope that the short-sighted believed the goal had been won. David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University, made the classic statement of mal-prediction only a few months before the outbreak of World War I. “It is apparently not possible,” he said, “for another real war among the nations of Europe to take place.” The year before this he had published a book, War and Waste, which argued the impossibility of war. It sold like hotcakes, for people wanted desperately to believe it.
Following World War I, efforts to limit war were again revived with the League and the Permanent Court of International Justice. Still more real progress, however limited, was made in codifying acts of war and placing upon them judgments of right and wrong. But the Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed by fifteen countries in 1928, was an idealistic agreement of complete unreality. Statesmen and the public had deluded themselves that simple agreement to outlaw war would suffice. The Pact created such a surge of confidence as to engulf sound thinking. People danced around the pot of peace at the end of the rainbow. In the United States, a member of Congress even proposed a constitutional amendment to make it illegal to “prepare for, declare, engage in or carry on war.”
Unfortunately the Disarmament Conference at Geneva in 1932 had about the same success as one held a century earlier. Nations could find no means at either conference of mutually limiting arms which, they thought, would not leave them at a disadvantage. Even though war was legally done away with by the Kellogg Pact, the 1932 Conference dragged on for two years, ending without progress when Germany walked out.
Nevertheless, disarmament in the future may not be impossible. No one can say that past failures assure future failures. In fact, success is often built upon a whole series of failures. International negotiations in the United Nations mechanism have become regular and constant rather than sporadic and haphazard as formerly. Mutual understanding and confidence is steadily increasing and moral values are spreading. But to put so much faith in a diplomatic or political science break-through as to discard tested methods of preparedness is to succumb to fanciful thinking of the most dangerous sort.
Clearly, disarmament cannot even begin without a certainty that each signator of a disarmament pact will, in fact, disarm as agreed. This will necessitate, first of all, thorough and effective mutual inspection. To attempt disarmament without an adequate international inspection system would be tantamount to perpetrating a hoax upon the people of the world. For good faith between international rivals is a rare thing indeed. Japan’s violation of the Washington and London naval limitation treaties is a case in point. So is Germany’s renunciation of Locarno and her invasion of the Rhineland.
Our government has taken the honest and realistic stand that an ironclad mutual inspection system must precede any disarmament. Let us not shake its resolve with pleas to heed the siren calls of disarmament by bland agreement without inspection. These are the songs repeatedly sung by the USSR.
None will question the fact that war is horrible, and with nuclear weapons its range of horror is extended and deepened. Yet horror has never deterred people from feeling compelled to go to war when their more basic interests are threatened. Atomic developments and super-sonic air speeds have not changed the character of human personality or of nations.
The effort to control human passions must go on, but we must realize that the struggle is never-ending. Progress is real, but minute and maddeningly slow. In the meantime let us also accept life as it is and keep up our guard. Let us disarm when the time comes with careful and deliberate caution. Let us never again be deluded by the will-o’-the- wisp of naive hope at the risk of our blood and freedom.