DAEDALUS ON
THE
AIR

WGBH/FM

BOSTON

WRVR/FM

NEW YORK

WUHY/FM

PHILADELPHIA

WAMU/FM

WASHINGTON, D.C.

WFCR/FM

AMHERST

WAMC/FM

ALBANY

WAER/FM

SYRACUSE

IS DISARMAMENT NOW POSSIBLE?

Participants: EMILE BENOIT, Professor of International Business, Columbia University
TRISTRAM COFFIN, author and Washington journalist
HENRY A. KISSINGER, Professor of Political Science, Harvard University
FRANKLIN A. LONG, Assistant Director, Science and Technology, United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

Host: GERALD HOLTON, Professor of Physics, Harvard University, and Editor of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Moderator: BERNARD T. FELD, Professor of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Executive Producer: NINA HOLTON

Technical Producer: GEORGE T. MASCOTT, JR.

Audio Engineer: WILLIAM BUSIEK

This program was broadcast on the Educational Radio Network on Monday, April 8, 1963, and was produced jointly by WGBH-FM Boston and DAEDALUS, the quarterly journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, for the Educational Radio Network.

Copyright © 1963 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 280 Newton Street, Boston 46, Massachusetts.

WGBH/FM BOSTON AND THE EDUCATIONAL RADIO NETWORK

IS DISARMAMENT NOW POSSIBLE?

MR. HOLTON: Three years is a long time as measured by the clock that times the arms race; and three years ago Jerome Wiesner, who has since become President Kennedy's science adviser, had this to say in an issue on Arms Control and Disarmament:*

* ...To a distressing degree, American citizens, who normally insist on free and open discussion on important issues facing their country, have turned away from the problems of arms control as being of such complexity and requiring access to so much secret and military and political information as to be beyond the comprehension of the ordinary citizen. But without a widespread understanding of the options available to the nation, ... it will not be possible for the United States to find acceptable arms-limitation agreements.... If the arms race is allowed to continue its accelerating pace, our country will have less security, not more, with each passing year. As a result, there is an ever increasing likelihood of a war so disastrous that civilization, if not man himself, will be eradicated.... We have seen each of our advances matched by Soviet developments, so that, as time passed, the only discernible result has been that both our nations have produced more and more destructive weapons against which there is no defense.... One of the most ironic aspects of the situation in which the United States and the Soviet Union find themselves is that each is running an arms race with itself....

Gentlemen, today we shall ask ourselves whether this dire statement of 1960 is still true today, or whether the danger is

*Arms Control* (special issue), DAEDALUS, Fall, 1960.

-2-

[LC]

even greater; or whether, as I believe is the case, we are now at
a unique moment when methods of mutual control of disarmament are
at last becoming not only necessary, but also possible.

I propose that we first look at our current arms strat-
egy: What is the state of preparedness? What levels of arms build-
up are really needed, and for what purpose? (What is the arms race
buying us, in other words.) What is the foreseeable future going
to bring? And how does disarmament fit into gaining a sound strat-
egy? Secondly, if we determine that a controlled disarmament pro-
gram is the soundest course to protect our national security, I
shall ask, do our policy makers, by and large, see this? Do the
Soviet Union's policy makers? Do our respective citizens see this?

Third, if we find that disarmament is seen on both sides
to be in the interest of national security, why are there obstacles
to its realization? That is, what are the presumed economic and
policy effects?

And fourth, looking to the immediate future, what are
the gradual or more drastic disarmament plans that deserve discus-
sion? What are their merits, their dangers, their timetables?

To start us off, may I call on each of you briefly to
say what you see to be the main new development that may give us
hope to have more success in our search for a stable peace than we
have had so far.

Mr. Franklin Long...

MR. LONG: I would say that one new thing is the existence of the agency that I work for. It's clearly an event when a country - and our country is the first in the world to do it - decides that the problem is of sufficient depth and sufficient importance to set up a

[Lc]

-3-

separate agency to study it.

MR. HOLTON: And aren't similar efforts, to your knowledge, also being made in the U.S.S.R.?

MR. LONG: The U.S.S.R. has, I heard, set up now a small, continuing study within their academy set-up. It is not yet a separate agency.

MR. HOLTON: Yes. Right. Mr. Kissinger.

MR. KISSINGER: I do not quite agree with the implication that the arms race itself is going to produce a war. I do agree with the implication that the arms race itself doesn't add to security. The danger that I see in the arms race is that as these weapons pile up and as their destructiveness increases, the pattern of political confrontations to which one has been getting used over the last fifteen years, and which has not led to war, may continue on the assumption that it will never lead to war. If it ever does lead to war, of course, the destructive potential is so vast now that this may lead to the end of civilization.

MR. HOLTON: Mr. Benoit.

MR. BENOIT: I think that up to recently disarmament negotiations have been essentially a ritual activity to assuage the guilt involved in pursuing the arms race, if indeed not a deliberate effort to improve one's relative situation by getting concessions from the opponent which are favorable to one's own military position. I think there has been a substantial improvement recently, in that the U. S. government has for the first time adopted the principle of general and complete disarmament, which it did not do formerly,

-4-

[Lc]

and because the nature of the plan proposed is, I think, beginning to show an awareness that the traditional concepts of what constitutes disarmament are utterly unworkable, and that if we really mean disarmament we have to think much more widely than we had been thinking before.

MR. HOLTON: Mr. Coffin.

MR. COFFIN: I'm not particularly an optimist. I think that there are two reasons why we might make progress in disarmament. One is that the Russians are very badly in need of more money for the economic system rather than for arms, and therefore I think they are at this present time anxious to do some disarming. There is also, I think, a growing concern in the intellectual community - and I would include in this the intellectual community of the Washington government - for some form of disarmament.

Against this, I would say the Russians cannot at any time in the appreciable future withdraw their troops from Eastern Europe, because if they do their regimes will collapse there. And secondly, there is the tremendous pressure in this country against disarmament and the almost hysterical nature of the American public because of the treatment of each crisis by political opposition in the newspapers.

MR. HOLTON: With that I turn you over to the moderator, Mr. Feld.

MR. FELD: There is a new objective aspect to the situation, and that is the fact that now more than ever before since the end of the last war we and the Soviet Union, the two major antagonists, are rapidly reaching the stage of relative parity in our arms capa-

[L.C.]

-5-

bilities, in the destructiveness of our nuclear capabilities, which on both sides are now approaching essentially all that could possibly be required of nuclear armaments, and also in our capabilities for fighting what we might call conventional wars - old-style wars for defending our interests without the necessity of using nuclear armaments. If both these trends should continue - and I believe they will continue - we may reach a situation where it is to the advantage of both sides to curtail the arms race, to slow it down, eventually to stop it, and I believe also to turn it around and to disarm to a large extent. If this may objectively be the situation, then now is the time to start talking seriously and planning seriously for serious disarmament.

I believe it might be useful before we start to discuss what can be done in disarmament, to review the present status of armaments, particularly of nuclear armaments. Last June, Secretary McNamara enunciated American nuclear strategy in a speech at Ann Arbor. He said, "The United States has come to the conclusion that to the extent feasible, basic military strategy in a possible general nuclear war should be approached in much the same way that more conventional military operations have been regarded in the past. That is to say, principal military objectives in the event of a general nuclear war stemming from a major attack on the alliance should be the destruction of the enemy's military forces, not of its civilian population."

Now this statement of Secretary McNamara's aroused great controversy for a number of reasons. In the first place it indicated that to a large extent our Department of Defense was inclined to

[LC]

-6-

think of nuclear weapons as viable weapons for fighting wars in a nuclear age. Second, it enunciated a policy which many people felt could very easily lead to the United States using its nuclear weapons to strike first in the event of a conventional conflict.

Since that time Secretary McNamara seems to have rethought his position to a certain extent, and more recently, on January 30 of this year, in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, he made a number of statements concerning our nuclear forces and their possible uses. I would like to quote from these. He started out by saying, "The major mission of the strategic retaliatory force is to deter war by their capability to destroy the enemy's war-making potential, including not only his nuclear striking forces and military installations, but also his urban society if necessary." But then he went on to point to some of the difficulties in this strategy. "A very large increase in the number of fully hard Soviet ICBM's and nuclear-powered ballistic missile launching submarines would considerably detract from our ability to destroy completely the Soviet strategic nuclear forces. It would become increasingly difficult, regardless of the form of the attack, to destroy a sufficiently large proportion of the Soviet's strategic nuclear forces to preclude major damage to the United States, regardless of how large or what kind of strategic forces we build. Even if we were to double and triple our forces we would not be able to destroy quickly all or almost all of the hardened ICBM sites." This would indicate a very serious new look at the situation and particularly at our nuclear capabilities. "In particular," he said, "in planning our second strike force we have provided throughout the period under consideration a capability to

[LC]

-7-

destroy virtually all of the soft and semi-hard military targets
in the Soviet Union, and a large number of their fully hardened
missile sites, with an additional capability in the form of a pro-
tected force to be employed or held in reserve for use against ur-
ban and industrial areas. We have not found it feasible at this
time to provide a capability for insuring the destruction of any
very large portion of the fully hard ICBM sites if the Soviets
build them in quantities or of missile launching submarines." In
other words, we cannot hope in the future to be able by our own
nuclear forces to prevent unacceptable retaliation. Now where
does that leave us?

MR. LONG: Isn't that the classic position of stable deterrence?

MR. FELD: Well, I would venture it depends on the numbers. Don't you think that a deterrent which involves the numbers about which we are talking may not be very stable?

MR. LONG: No, I simply meant that the essence of McNamara's argument seemed to be that either side will have retaliatory potential almost independent of what the other side does. And I take it that's a requisite for unstable deterrence.

MR. KISSINGER: Well, I think he was more ambivalent than this. Last year McNamara said that we could destroy the entire Soviet target system with our nuclear force, implying that there would be practically no retaliation. To this the Europeans replied, if you can do that why do we have to build up any conventional forces? Now he is saying there will be great grave damage, but he still has enough of the previous theory to think that you can fight a war

-8-

confined to military objectives. I don't think he's reconciled
this problem.

MR. FELD: Mr. Coffin.

MR. COFFIN: It strikes me that Mr. McNamara's statement on strategies - in fact, the statements of all people in the administration not only this but the previous one - is highly immoral and crude. Everyone knows, I think, that when you fight a war you try to destroy the other person. But why do we have to go around and advertise to the world that we are trying to destroy millions of people? Apparently we have no sense of guilt over our Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombs. I think the French, for example, would not talk about destroying half of Russia. And I think this is part of the objection to the United States increasing over the world. It seems to me that the whole problem is mainly how do you avoid war?

MR. LONG: I think that part of the difficulty in the crudeness you mention results from really having only one significant thing to do in case war comes. This is a period in which the military are clearly trying to build a greater degree of flexibility than they have had, and they aren't quite sure what the appropriate components and weighting are.

MR. FELD: Well, Mr. Long, certainly one aspect is flexibility. You also mentioned before that McNamara's statement seemed to you to be a classical expression of the position of deterrence. Nevertheless, there must be some consideration of relative strength of both sides if deterrence is to work, some kind of relative standard of parity. Now this at the moment seems to be lacking.

-9-

I wonder if you would comment on that.

MR. LONG: How do you mean it's lacking?...

MR. FELD: I mean that the United States seems to be aiming for and to some extent achieving a rather large superiority in strategic nuclear forces.

MR. LONG: One must assess superiority in two different ways. One is simply to count numbers. But numbers counting here is probably much too simple; clearly one has to ask what the sizes of the warheads are. But equally one must ask: What is the character of the country concerned?

We have taken essentially 1963 published data as developed by the English Institute for Strategic Studies, and therefore unclassified, and applied what we thought were quite reasonable assessments to percent fatality that could result to the United States and to the U.S.S.R. under first-strike situations - first strike by them, first strike by us. The curious thing is that it does, in this sense, turn out to be a parity - a parity of destruction, if you want. That is, either side apparently now has the capability of destroying large fractions of the other side's people and at the same time, of course, material. So the numbers don't really translate into predominance of ability to destroy.

MR. HOLTON: This does not depend on just being the first one to do it but is the net result at the end of several interchanges - is that right?

MR. LONG: Well, we only used two interchanges, a first strike and a second

[Lc]

-10-

strike. But I might explain that the essential compensation
from the Russian standpoint is the fact that their country is
considerably less urban than ours, so that fewer targets are
available to us if we choose to go this immoral path of popula-
tion destruction.

MR. FELD: Mr. Kissinger.

MR. KISSINGER: Very often wars have occurred even when there was an effective balance, because one side or the other, or both, thought that they could gain a decisive advantage, which then turned out to be illusory.

One other point. I'm not sure that the stability or insta-
bility of the deterrent equation is entirely related to numbers.
Numbers is one index, but the mere fact that we have very large
numbers of missiles is one indication of an unstable situation.
It may not even be decisive, because at lower numbers you might
still have the situation where one or the other believes that it
could carry through a disarming blow. Then you wouldn't have
stable deterrence.

MR. FELD: Of course, the stability of the deterrence is not the only factor. Another factor, I suppose, is what happens if the thing breaks down. And there, there is quite a difference in numbers. I wonder if we could have some comment concerning the question of whether relative stability of more or less the same type requires the numbers which we seem to be heading for or might be achieved by considerably lower numbers.

[LC]

-11-

MR. COFFIN: Let me ask one question first. Isn't it a lot of hocus-pocus to talk about the humanity of not attacking cities? After all, if you attack urban areas you have a wide area of destruction. I cannot believe, for example, in this country - and I'm sure it's true in Russia - if you have a strike upon the United States... we'll suppose there's a missile base in Maine some place, and the man there at that missile station hears that the United States has been struck. He's not going to hit the Dnieper Dam, he's going to strike at Moscow if he knows where the target is. I think that we're kidding ourselves with the idea that we can hold a war to so-called strategic targets and not destroy people.

MR. KISSINGER: In all of those problems one has a difficult decision to make. You do not want to make war so relatively attractive that, even though you minimize civilian casualties or think you are minimizing them, you make it a more possible calculation. I think one of the big disputes between us and the Europeans is that we are talking about tolerable strategies and that's the last thing they want, because they think it might tempt attack.

MR. FELD: Well, the reason that I keep coming back to this question of numbers is that we will want to talk about how we can start on the path to disarmament, and starting on the path to disarmament implies in the early stages a willingness to reduce levels from where we are now to something which people might consider more tolerable but still stable. So it seems to me important to have some feeling for what the numbers imply. Mr. Benoit.

MR. BENOIT: I thoroughly disagree with Mr. Feld. I don't think the level of

[L.C.]

-12-

armaments that one has or the extent of the arms race or anything like that has anything whatever to do with disarmament. Disarmament is a radical change in direction; it involves a basic system change and, it's a fundamentally different way of relating nations to one another, under a rule of law and without the right to judge one's own case. No progress is going to be made toward their solution by reducing the level of armaments a little bit. Even if they are greatly reduced, if the potentiality for increasing them again is still present, you have gone no way toward disarmament in my view of what that really is.

MR. LONG: May I enter at least a mild demurrer? It seems to me that, in fact, one is simply better off if sometime in the future one has half the total kill-potential that we do now - or two thirds, or three quarters. It cannot be worse and there are many situations in which it could be better. Similarly, if one stops the continuation of the arms race, stops the production of armaments - one has gained a set of national benefits, international benefits, which are far from trivial.

MR. BENOIT: I'm sorry, I just don't agree. I think that if, with a lower level of armaments, war is more probable, one is not better off but worse off. The problem of starting on up from a given level of armaments and hostilities - of escalating - is still there.

MR. KISSINGER: Could you define the distinctions between the way we have been speaking of disarmament here and what you have in mind?

MR. BENOIT: Yes. Some of you are talking of disarmament as what I define as bilateral disarmament; that is to say, a reduction of forces