We have been here before

The campaign to disarm America continues. From the "Nuclear Winter" scare propaganda to the unbridled attacks on the idea of substituting a protective defense for deterrence by retaliation, ever more scientific flaws appear in the arguments of the ESPS (Ex-Scientists for Preemptive Surrender). Spewing scientific jargon, they seek to palm off self-serving speculation as genuine science, which is the crux of what this publication opposes.

But it is not the crux of the problem. Exposing the technical flaws in the ESPS scenarios might be mistaken for pooh-poohing the horrors of war. It shouldn't: It is Ehrlich and Sagan who know war only from kiddies' cartoons; if they knew its horrors from experience, they might try to prevent them rather than invite war by weakness. The more important aspect, however, is this: Even if the ESPS' concoctions were true (and they do have more than a little truth in the mix), it would make no difference to the basic fallacy: that war is rooted in the existence of weapons, and that it can be avoided by disarmament.

This illusion, which has always cruelly afflicted mankind, shows how wishful thinking can override sane logic: it is obvious that the man who is better armed and resolved to defend himself will deter the aggressor; it is equally obvious that the ill-equipped, irresolute pussy-footer is begging to become his victim.

But what wishful thinking cannot override is the historical record. "There was the 1937 International Peace Campaign in Brussels run by French Communist Party leader Marcel Cachin," reports Paul Johnson(1), "which invented a Peace Day, a Peace Fair, a Peace Penny and a Peace Oath... Experts accepted the views of Guilio Douhet in The Command of the Air (1921) that fighter aircraft could do little to prevent mass bombing... The brilliant H.G. Wells film, Things to Come (1936) presented a terrifying scene of total devastation. The same year, Bertrand Russell [British mathematician, founder of the Ban-the-Bomb Campaign, in which he was active to his death in 1970, P.B.] argued in Which Way to Peace? that fifty gas-bombers, using lewisite, could poison all London... In this highly emotional atmosphere, with an ostensible concern of humanity forming a thin crust over a morass of funk, the real issue of how to organize collective security in Europe was never properly debated."

The history of the 1930s is the history of the 1980s: for every Soviet offer of razoruzheniye (disarmament) we find one of Abrustung by Adolf Hitler; for every Doctor for Social Responsibility visiting Moscow with his "America stinks" message, there was a Western intellectual saying over the Deutschlandsender that the repressive Western powers were denying Nazi-Germany's legitimate aspirations.

I cannot, however, find any Nazi or appeaser of the 1930s to match the New York Times' Anthony Lewi's gross indecency in attributing Soviet persecution of Andrei Sakharov to "Ronald Reagan's anti-Soviet rhetoric."(2) The nearest I can find is the case of Geoffry Dawson, editor of the influential London Times, who would doctor, and mostly kin, the dispatches of his Berlin correspondent. "I simply cannot understand why [the Nazis] should apparently be so annoyed with The Times at this moment," he wrote to a friend on 23 May 1937. "I spend my nights in taking out anything which I think will hurt their susceptibilities, and in dropping in little things which are intended to soothe them."(3)

Nor is there much new about Markey and the other congressional Chamberlains when they belittle the stream of Soviet weapons flowing from Nicaragua to El Salvador. The legalistic quibbling by these Knights of Affirmative Action who yawn as the Miskito Indians are being exterminated, have been answered some time ago:

"When one is deprived of ones liberty, one is right in blaming not so much the man who puts the fetters on as the one who had the power to prevent him, but did not use it... Why are we still considering whether aggression has taken place instead of how we can resist it?"

No: the Corinthian emissaries to Sparta in 432 B.C.(4)

[1] Modern Times, Harper & Row, 1983;

[2] "The Sakharov Case: Anthony Lewis Finds the Culprit," Contentions (Comm. f. Free World, 211 E.51 St., New York, NY 10022), July-Aug., 1984;

[3] M. Gilbert, Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, Houghton-Miflin, 1981;

[4] Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (Engl. Transi.) Penguin, 1954.