The Nuclear Age

WALTER LIPPMANN

THE age we are living in is radically new in human experience. During the past fifteen years or so there has occurred a profound revolution in human affairs, and we are the first generation that has lived under these new conditions. There has taken place a development in the art of war, and this is causing a revolutionary change in the foreign relations of all the nations of the world. The radical development is, of course, the production of nuclear weapons.

As a scientific phenomenon, the nuclear age began with the explosion at Los Alamos in 1945; but in world relations the nuclear age really began about ten years later. During the 1940s the United States was the only nuclear power in the world. But by the middle fifties and in the years following, the Soviet Union had created an armory of nuclear weapons and had built rockets which have made it, for all practical purposes of diplomacy, a nuclear power equal to the United States. The essential fact about the appearance of two opposed great powers armed with nuclear weapons is that war, which is an ancient habit of mankind, has become mutually destructive. Nuclear war is a way of mutual suicide. The modern weapons are not merely much bigger and more dangerous than any which existed before. They have introduced into the art of warfare a wholly new kind of violence.

Always, in the past, war and the threat of war, whether aggressive or defensive, were usable instruments. They were usable instruments in the sense that nations could go to war for their national purposes. Nations could transform themselves from petty states to great powers by means of war. They could enlarge their territories, acquire profitable colonies, change the religion of a vanquished population, all by means of war. War was the instrument with which the social, political, and legal systems of large areas were changed. Thus, in the old days before the nuclear age began, war was a usable — however horrible and expensive — instrument of national purpose. The reason for that was that the old wars could be won.

In the pre-nuclear age, right down through World War II, the victorious power was an organized state which could impose its will on the vanquished. The United States did that with Germany and with Japan. The damage they had suffered, although it was great, was not irreparable, as we know from the recovery after World War II of West Germany and Japan, as well as the Soviet Union.

But from a full nuclear war, which might well mean a hundred million dead, after the devastation of the great urban centers of the Northern Hemisphere and the contamination of the earth, the water, and the air, there would be no such recovery as we have seen after the two world wars of this century.

The damage done would be mutual. There would be no victor. The United States has the nuclear power to reduce Soviet society to a smoldering ruin, leaving the wretched survivors shocked and starving and diseased. In an interchange of nuclear weapons, it is estimated coolly by experts who have studied the possibility, the Soviet Union would kill between thirty and seventy million Americans.

A war of that kind would not be followed by reconstruction; it would not be followed by a Marshall Plan and by all the constructive things that were done after World War II. A nuclear war would be followed by a savage struggle for existence, as the survivors crawled out of their shelters; and the American republic would have to be replaced by a stringent military dictatorship, trying to keep some kind of order among the desperate survivors.

To his great credit, President Eisenhower was quick to realize what nuclear war would be. After he and Prime Minister Churchill had studied some of the results of the nuclear tests, President Eisenhower made the historic declaration that there was no longer any alternative to peace.

When President Eisenhower made that statement no one of us, I think, understood its full significance and consequences. We are now beginning to understand them, and here, I venture to say, is the root of the frustration and the confusion which torment us. For while nuclear weapons have made war, the old arbiter of human affairs, an impossible action for a rational statesman to contemplate, we do not have any other reliable way of dealing with issues that used to be resolved by war.

IT IS enormously difficult to make peace. It is intolerably dangerous and useless to make war about the fundamental issues. That is where our contemporary frustration and confusion originate. We are confronted with an extraordinarily tantalizing and nerve-racking dilemma.

For as long a time as we can see into the future, we shall be living between war and peace, between a war that cannot be fought and a peace that cannot be achieved. The great issues which divide the world cannot be decided by a war that could be won, and they cannot be settled by a treaty that can be negotiated. Our world is divided as it has not been since the religious wars of the seventeenth century, and a large part of the globe is in a great upheaval, the like of which has not been known since the end of the Middle Ages. But the power which used to deal with the divisions and conflicts of the past — namely, organized war—has become an impossible instrument to use.

President Eisenhower and President Kennedy are the only two American Presidents who ever lived in a world like this one. It is a great puzzle to know how to defend the nation’s rights and how to promote its interests in the nuclear age. There are no clear guidelines of action because there are no precedents for the situation in which we find ourselves. And as statesmen grope their way from one improvisation and accommodation to another, there are masses of people who are frightened, irritated, impatient, frustrated, and in search of quick and easy solutions.

The nuclear age is only a few years old. But we have already learned one or two things about how to conduct policy in this age. It was once said of a British admiral in World War I that if he made a mistake, he could lose the British Fleet and with it the whole war in an afternoon. Mr. Khrushchev and Mr. Kennedy are in a similar position today. In a few days or so Mr. Khrushchev can lose the Soviet state and the promise of a Communist economy. He can lose all the work of the FiveYear Plans, Seven-Year Plans, and TwentyYear Plans. In that same time, Mr. Kennedy can lose the Constitution of the United States, the freeenterprise system, and the American way of life, and along with them all the frontiers, old and new. I don’t think I am exaggerating. A full nuclear war would produce by far the biggest convulsion which has ever occurred in recorded history. We cannot understand the realities of the KhrushchevKennedy encounter, which has been going on since they met at Vienna last June, unless we remind ourselves again and again of what war has become in the nuclear age.

The poor dears among us who say that they have had enough of all this talking and negotiating and now let us drop the bomb have no idea of what they are talking about. They do not know what has happened in the past twenty years, They belong to the past, and they have not been able to realize what a nuclear war would be.

Only a moral idiot with a suicidal mania would press the button for a nuclear war. Yet we have learned that, while a nuclear war would be lunacy, it is nevertheless an ever-present possibility. Why? Because, however lunatic it might be to commit suicide, a nation can be provoked and exasperated to the point of lunacy where its nervous system cannot endure inaction, where only violence can relieve its feelings. This is one of the lacts of life in the middle of the twentieth century. The nerves of a nation can stand only so much provocation and humiliation, and beyond the tolerable limits, it will plunge into lunacy. This is as much a real fact as is the megaton bomb, and it is a fact which must be given great weight in the calculation of national policy. It is the central fact in the whole diplomatic problem of dealing with the cold war. There is a line of intolerable provocation beyond which reactions become uncontrollable. It is the business of the governments to find out where that line is and to stay well back of it.

Those who do not understand the nature ol war in the nuclear age, those who think that war today is what it was against Mexico or Spain or in the two world wars, regard the careful attempts of statesmen not to carry the provocation past the tolerable limit as weakness and softness and appeasement. It is not any of these things. It is not softness. It is sanity.

But it leaves us with a task: because we cannot make war, because we cannot achieve peace, we must find some other way of meeting the great issues which confront us. For life will go on, and if the answers of the past do not work, other answers must exist and must be found.

The answer lies, I believe, in the nature of the struggle between our Western society and the Communist society.

It is often said that the struggle which divides the world is for the minds and the souls of men. That is true. As long as there exists a balance of power and of terror, neither side can impose its doctrine and its ideology upon the other. The struggle for the minds of men, moreover, is not, I believe, going to be decided by propaganda. We are not going to convert our adversaries, and they are not going to convert us.

The struggle, furthermore, is not going to be ended in any foreseeable time. At bottom it is a competition between two societies, and it resembles more than any other thing in our historical experience the long centuries of conflict between Christendom and Islam. The modern competition between the two societies turns on their respective capacities to become powerful and rich, to become the leaders in science and technology, to see that their people are properly educated and able to operate such a society, to keep their people healthy, and to give them the happiness of knowing that they are able and free to work for their best hopes.

The historic rivalry of the two societies and of the two civilizations which they contain is not going to be decided by what happens on the periphery and in the outposts. It is going to be decided by what goes on in the heart of each of the two societies. The heart of Western civilization lies on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, and our future depends on what goes on in the Atlantic community. Will this community advance? Can the nations which compose it work together? Can it become a great and secure center of power and of wealth, of light and of leading? To work for these ends is to be engaged truly in the great conflict of our age and to be doing the real work that we are challenged to do. I speak with some hope and confidence. For I believe that in the months to come we shall engage ourselves in the long and complicated, but splendidly constructive, task of bringing together in one liberal and progressive economic community all the trading nations which do not belong to the Communist society.

I dare to believe that this powerful Western economic community will be able to live safely and without fear in the same world as the Soviet Union and that the rising power and influence of the Western society will exert a beneficent magnetic attraction upon eastern Europe. This will happen if we approach it in the right way. Jean Monnet, who is the original founder of this movement, has put it the right way. “We cannot build our future,”he has said, “if we are obsessed with fear of Russia. Let us build our own strength and health, not against anyone, but for ourselves, so that we will become so strong that no one will dare attack us, and so progressive and prosperous that we set a model for all other peoples — indeed, for the Russians themselves.”

At the same time, the wealth and confidence of the new community will enable the Western society to assist and draw to it the societies of the Southern Hemisphere, where social and economic change is proceeding rapidly.

You will have seen that I do not agree with those who think that in order to defend ourselves and to survive we must put a stop to the progressive movement which has gone on throughout this century. This movement began in the Administration of Theodore Roosevelt. Its purpose was to reform and advance our own social order, and at the same time to recognize that we must live in the world beyond our frontiers. We shall lose all our power to cope with our problems if we allow ourselves to become a stagnant, neurotic, frightened, and suspicious people. Let us not punish ourselves by denying ourselves the hope, by depriving ourselves of the oldest American dream, that we are making a better society on this earth than has ever been made before.

Is all this conservative? Is all this liberal? Is it all progressive? It is, I say, all of these. There is no irreconcilable contradiction among these noble adjectives. Do not Republicans believe in democracy, and do not Democrats believe in a republic? Such labels may describe political parties in England; they do not describe political attitudes in the United States.

Every truly civilized and enlightened man is conservative and liberal and progressive. A civilized man is conservative in that his deepest loyalty is to the Western heritage of ideas which originated on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Because of that loyalty he is the indefatigable defender of our own constitutional doctrine, which is that all power, all government, all officials, all parties, and ail majorities are under the law — and that none of them is sovereign and omnipotent.

The civilized man is a liberal because the writing and the administration of the laws should be done with enlightenment and compassion, with tolerance and charity, and with affection.

And the civilized man is progressive because the times change and the social order evolves and new things are invented and changes occur. This conservative who is a liberal is a progressive because he must work and live, he must govern and debate in the world, as it is in his own time and as it is going to become.