Walter Milns

WORKING PAPER

Revised - August 16, 1961

THE NATURE OF A DEMILITARIZED WORLD

1.) The Significance of the Question

Commenting recently on a panel discussion by a number of
those who took part in last year's Moscow "Pugwash" conference, David
Riesman noted "a very strong sense in members of the panel that a dis-
armed world would look very different from ours, and that neither
American nor Soviet participants had seriously thought about how to make
such a world tolerable and reasonably safe." That a demilitarized inter-
national system would look very different from the existing one seems
obvious; but that it might not appear to anyone as tolerable or even reasonably
safe may seem a rather startlingly new idea.

Yet it can be said that there is nothing new about it ---
that this is the rock on which all proposals for the control, reduction or
elimination of armaments have foundered, since the original proposal of
the Imperial Russian Government in 1898 which initiated the modern history
of disarmament. It has never been possible to devise a disarmament plan
which looked safe, or even tolerable, to all the nations concerned in terms

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of their military security, power and prestige. Jules Moch has given as his first "constant" of disarmament policy the principle that "any disarmament agreement, partial or general, must be approved unanimously by the states concerned. This requires that the treaty should at each stage increase the security of all the parties and not the security of some to the detriment of the security of others." No persuasive draft of such a treaty has ever been devised. No proposal in this area has ever convincingly demonstrated that all would be better off by its acceptance than by its rejection.

The introduction of the missile-borne nuclear arsenals has provided us with reasons, more powerful than ever before existed, for fearing the future if the world is not demilitarized. But so far, no one has provided reasons for accepting demilitarization. The official Soviet position calls for "general and complete disarmament" within a brief period of years; the official Western position, while hesitating over the means, accepts the same end as its ultimate goal. It seems clear that if either set of proposals were adopted and put into effect in good faith, the result would be a very drastic transformation of international relations. But what would the new system look like, how would it work, in what way would it deal with the problems of both power and security? Neither set of proposals offers much if any clue to this question; neither, patently, can as it stands dispel the fears which it immediately engenders in the other side.

Neither offers any kind of useful blue-print of the international system which would be produced by its acceptance. But if there is

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any hope whatever of progress toward general disarmament, blue-prints
of this kind have become essential. We have developed a pretty persuasive
--- and appalling --- picture of what will happen if the nuclear arms race
is continued unchecked; we have developed almost no picture at all of what
would happen if it were abandoned by common consent. In general, we
tend either to dismiss such a possibility as utterly Utopian, or to assume
that once it were realized all problems would be at an end and all could
live in safety and security thereafter. Neither position is well founded.
The missile-megaton arsenals have brought the demilitarized world much
closer than is the Island of Utopia; but in doing so have magnified rather
than diminished many of the problems it would present. There is a case
for a demilitarized world, but so far no one has made it. Yet if there is
to be any real progress down the road toward disarmament that case must
be made and made persuasively. It is a very difficult question to deal
with. But its significance to the problem of disarmament is paramount.

2. <u>Two Avenues of Approach</u>

There appear to be at least two ways of getting at the
matter. In the first place, one can simply assume that the demilitariza-
tion has taken place; that all the military peoples have agreed that
organized war is an outmoded institution and have in fact divested themselves
of their military systems, including (as the Soviet proposal of June, 1960,

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puts it) their "war ministries, general staffs and... funds for military purposes." One can then try to imagine the resultant situation. A model constructed in this way will have considerable intellectual utility. It will enable one to separate the war factor from the totality of international relations, to see the war system in the round as a cultural mode or behavioral pattern, to see how many of our current troubles are the systemic consequences of these patterns rather than inherent in the nature of man or the necessities of social organization. Such a model will, in general, be optimistic and not without value. It will emphasize the fact that in the modern international organization there are no factors which require the great social groupings to shred each other with high explosive or incinerate each other in the thermonuclear fires. It will demonstrate that the world could get along without the war system a good deal better than it is now getting along with it.

But the method has its obvious limitations. The model, however attractive, is of course completely unrealistic under present conditions. The initial assumption, that the Soviet plan or its equivalent has been accepted and put into force, implies the further assumption that military considerations have ceased to be of interest to the world's governments; that the governments have concluded that organized war is of no practical use to them, and has thereby become humanly "impossible." No people and no government has come anywhere near such a conclusion today. In his special message on defense, President Kennedy said, accurately and

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sincerely, that "the basic problems facing the world today are not suscep-
table to a military solution." His predecessor had declared that there
is no longer "any alternative to peace." But neither of these sentiments
was intended to imply that the United States would or could divest itself
of its military establishment. If war no longer offers a practical "alterna-
tive" to peace, peace seems to very few to offer a practical "alternative"
to maintaining the war system. The necessary initial assumption that the
war system has been abandoned makes the model inapplicable to present
problems. The model tends, as do other models of permanent peace
systems, to meet its difficulties by assuming them away to begin with.
However useful it may be in setting the stage, so to speak, something of
more immediate relevance is required to affect the action.

A second approach may be made by asking, not how a warless
world could be expected to operate, but how it may or might be attained.
What are the essential obstacles? What is required to overcome them?
What are the ineluctable "constraints" within which demilitarization can
alone take place, those "constants," as Jules Moch put it, which define the
problem? For useful discussion, one must here somewhat narrow the
question. Many --- probably most who have thought about it at all ---
believe that a demilitarized world is ultimately inevitable. But its nature
will clearly be determined by the means through which it is established. The
really passionate argument is not over the end result but over the means to
its attainment. In 1860 probably most thoughtful Americans, North and South,

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believed that the abolition of Negro chattel slavery was
ultimately inevitable. Our greatest, and relatively most
deadly, quarrel was fought, not over the distant end, but
over the means.

If discussion of a demilitarized world is to be
fruitful one must, it is submitted, rule out notions of the
inevitability of the triumph of either Communism or anti-
Communism. One may retain one's private beliefs as to the
certainty of one or the other of these outcomes, but it is
difficult to see how there can be much useful discussion
unless all are willing to contemplate the possibility that,
arguendo, neither will occur. "Co-existence" -- of Communist,
democratic and the many intermediate forms of state -- must
be accepted, not merely as a temporary expedient leading to
an inevitable global triumph of one form or another, but as
a theoretically at least possible condition. The question
then becomes: What are the conditions or requirements which
must be fulfilled to lead to an international system which,
while demilitarized, does not necessarily produce the triumph
of any specific system, but leaves it open to men to shape
their political destiny as their needs and aspirations may
dictate?

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The second approach appears to be necessary as a corrective to the obvious limitations of the first, though the first is useful as opening possibilities which the second, alone, might not reveal. The first may be said to present the problem of *peace by assumption*; the second, the problem of *peace by evolution*. Both will be pursued in this paper.

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## 3. Peace by Assumption

Here the first difficulty is that just suggested: The assumption that "peace has broken out" raises quite different notions in Communist and in Western political thought. In Communist theory, war is exclusively the consequence of the "contradictions" within Western capitalist society or of the efforts, to which these lead, to suppress the socialist revolution, which must in any event ultimately triumph everywhere. When all states have acquired a thorough-going socialist organization, the causes of war will have disappeared. To assume that peace has broken out is therefore to assume that socialism has everywhere triumphed.

In Western thought, the causes of war are far less simple. They are to be found in the conflicts of interest and policy between armed, independent sovereignities, which may occur regardless of the internal organizations of the respective states. The outbreak of peace does not imply the elimination of conflicts of interest and policy, but rather an agreement that such conflicts should be resolved always by non-military means within a

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framework of law. The Communist concept of peace implies the generalization throughout the globe of the systems and methods which appear at present to have eliminated the possibility of organized war within that one-third of the human race which today constitutes the Communist community. The Western concept of peace similarly involves the generalization throughout the globe of the systems and methods which appear to have eliminated organized war not only within the great, integrated Western nations but within the Atlantic World as a whole.

Today, a repetition of the American Civil War seems impossible, not because we have eliminated passionate conflicts of interest and purpose from our society, but because we have confined them within a legal system (supported by the Federal "monopoly of force") which compels their resolution by non-military, and nearly always non-violent, means.

This system has been, in effect, expanded through the Atlantic world. There is no legally authorized monopoly of force, but something like its equivalent has been supplied by the combination of the Communist threat from without and the overriding American military predominance within. National issues, some of a rather grave kind, still arise within the Atlantic world, but they are adjusted normally either by applying commonly accepted standards of law and justice (the fisheries dispute between Britain and Iceland is an example) or by a basic sense of community of interest. Within the Atlantic world as a whole we have developed a going system of essentially legal or quasi-legal institutions which seem to make it almost inconceivable that there could be

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an important war between any members of the NATO alliance or their
partners, in Latin-America and elsewhere --- despite the wide variety of
social and governmental systems included, one of which, Jugoslavia,
being avowedly Communist.

To Western thought, the Communist picture of a warless
world seems fantastically at variance with all the lessons of history and
experience. How can the universal socialization of the means of production
under a series of proletarian dictatorships in itself remove the causes of
conflict between the great social groupings - causes which, from the dawn
of history, have always eventuated in great wars? But to a sincere Communist
the Western picture of the warless world must seem equally fantastic.

How, he may ask, can anyone expect an effective system of law to be developed
for a global society which still contains the capitalistic and exploitative
elements which have, he holds, invariably led to war in the past? The image
of a warless world held by each side seems utterly unrealistic to the other; and
it is clear that this circumstance enormously intensifies the difficulty of
attaining a general pacification. But so long as one is interested only in the
results of pacification (not its attainment) the issue and the arguments it
suggests may be deferred. The discrepancy between the two prophetic
pictures is drastic. But their similarities are hardly less striking.

Each prediction forsees an international society composed
of about a hundred legally sovereign states, ranging from the very great to
the very small. In both prophecies, each of these states would be provided

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with lightly-armed police forces, capable of establishing the domestic
"monopoly of force," of keeping domestic order, of controlling its
frontiers and ports against smuggling, unauthorized immigration and
border forays. None, initially, would be capable of levying serious war upon
a neighbor's territory; none could export war far over national boundaries
by the use of air, sea or missile power. And in both predictions there would
be some kind of international police force competent to insure that no nation
expanded its domestic police into a military threat against the territory of
any other. This force would have to be under genuinely international control;
it could not be controlled by a single state or any exclusive group of states.
The two predictions do not differ until they reach the final clause. In the
one, this multi-national global society would be held together by common
principles of socio-economic organization; in the other, it would be held
together by commonly accepted principles of law.

This critical distinction should perhaps be clarified. Obviously
no global organization could function without law. The successful socialist
dictatorships, or peoples' democracies, require a great deal of law, and
have highly developed legal systems. It might be said that there is as much
law in the Communist prediction as in the Western. The difference is that
in the Communist prediction the laws will enforce patterns of social and
economic behavior which will eliminate any causes for international difference
or dispute. In the Western prediction, the social and economic behavior may

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differ widely and may be expected to give rise to national differences and
dispute, but the law will insist that these disputes be resolved by non-
military and so far as possible non-violent means. While this difference
is, as has been suggested, of first importance in the problem of achieving the
demilitarized world, it is much less significant to the problem of how such
a world, once achieved, would operate. In fact, whether one takes the
Communist prediction, the Western prediction or a kind of combination ---
in which there would be enough socio-economic law to avert the wars of the
past and enough political law (of non-military settlement) to avert the wars
of the future, in a world containing socialist dictatorships, democracies and
the intermediate forms --- the resultant global system will seem to have
very considerable strengths.

Under any one of the three, the military threat will ini-
tially be eliminated. This will eliminate what has been overwhelmingly the
pre-occupation of diplomacy and international statecraft since the beginning
of the modern era. Nine-tenths or more of international relations have
revolved around problems of securing strategic alliances and strategic positions,
of insuring military security against the military threats of others, of gaining
defensible frontiers. One cannot look at any study of the relations of
the European great powers from the last half of the 19th Century without
realizing that these were essentially struggles for military defense or security,
and the military prestige that was thought to support it, much more than

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struggles for economic gain or aggressive political goals. If the military threat to the established world order were removed (as under the present hypothesis it will have been) the whole international system becomes much more manageable.

In a world demilitarized by common consent the strategic factor would be absent. It is no longer of consequence as between the states of the American Union; it is no longer of any real consequence as between the nations of the Western Hemisphere. They are all independent sovereignies, without a specific international police force controlling them and with no more than the existing international organs -- such as the UN, the World Court or the Organization of American States -- to declare a rule of law in their relations. They appear substantially to have accepted the territorial boundaries shaped by history; they do not engage in intra-American arms races; their military establishments do not plan wars of offense or defense, and are in fact little more than national police forces of the kind contemplated in both predictions for the demilitarized world. Although aggressive invasions have taken place over both the United States - Canadian frontier and the United States - Mexican frontier, the former has remained demilitarized since 1817 and the latter has never been fortified. Few other Western Hemisphere frontiers are formally defended.

This situation has developed gradually, for complex reasons which might not operate to create a similar situation in the world as a whole. But if a global situation of the kind could be established, the Western

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Hemisphere experience speaks rather strongly for its probable stability. The military stability of the Hemisphere may not endure, and the action of the Communist countries in re-arming the Castro revolution in Cuba with heavy weapons cannot fall to raise doubts. But even with Cuba brought to a high level of military power relative to the other Latin countries, it is not clear that this will necessarily upset the equilibrium. This is because the balance is not a military balance at all. It does not rest upon any nice adjustment of the various countries' provision for their military security, but upon a general, if tacit, agreement that military means are no longer important, useful or even applicable to the maintenance of the security of the several national communities. The Western Hemisphere system is one in which military considerations are no longer in fact dominant in national planning and inter-American policy relations.

The United States has in the past fought several wars within the Hemisphere and has frequently intervened with armed force upon the territory of its neighbors. For a long time this has ceased to seem a practical method of exerting its influence, and alternatives have been explored from the days of "dollar diplomacy" down through those of the "good neighbor policy" to those of the Organization of American States. When the Cuban problem reached critical proportions the United States was careful not to threaten intervention with its armed forces, partly, perhaps because of its international commitments, but much more obviously because it was impossible that any national purpose could thereby be achieved. It resorted

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to its experiment in "indirect" intervention through the Cuban refugees; the experiment was a disastrous flasco, but has still opened no possibility of successful overt military action or created any real pressure to resort to it.

In a recent paper T. C. Schelling argues, no doubt correctly, that total disarmament cannot render war "impossible." Weaponry of some kind will always be available (he rightly reminds us that war with even primitive weapons can be very horrible, as the Thirty Years War demonstrated) and escalation always possible. He grants that "a disarmed world may be one in which motives, fears, temptations, traditions and political relationships are such that military and strategic relationships play less of a role than today." But he then goes on to consider the disarmed world in strategic terms, basically upon the assumption that these "motives, fears, temptations" remain unaltered. It is not surprising that his results are in general negative. The hope of those interested in a demilitarized world is not that it will render war "impossible", but that it will render it useless --- or at best, demonstrate an inutility which it has already achieved.

Schelling observes that it can be held that "total disarmament can be achieved only in a world in which military force has ceased to be much relied on." The statement is hardly open to question. But this would be the situation in a demilitarized world. The incentives --- or assumed incentives --- which today make it seemingly so impossible to devise any acceptable system of general disarmament would be reversed. In a demilitarized world, for

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any nation to resort again to the war system, to re-start the processes of
competitive armaments and war, would be pointless. Little or nothing
could be gained thereby; a great deal could be lost. Alternative means would
be available for deciding such power issues as remained; while the appil-
cation of organized military force would be largely useless in furthering
any real interest of the government contemplating it. The costs, on the
other hand, would be severe. Not only would a return to the war system
by one mean a return by everyone else; the domestic economic cost of re-
starting a great war industry would be heavy while the international political
costs might be destructive.

This last statement is not based on any undue confidence in
the police power of "world opinion." It is based rather on a consideration
of the practical political strategy (in which "world opinion" might be one
factor) which the potential violator would have to devise. One reason, at
least, why the United States did not resort to atomic war on China at the
time of the Chinese intervention in Korea was the obvious fact that the
slaughter of millions of Chinese civilians would have accomplished no
American purpose, but would have destroyed American influence throughout
the world.

One may take another example. Among Americans interested
in disarmament problems one often hears the argument that as disarmament
approaches totality the inspection system must be made correspondingly
rigid and complete. The thought here is that in a disarmament agreement

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reducing American and Soviet nuclear stockpiles to a certain fixed mega-
tonnage, a violation of five or ten per cent by either side would not make
much difference; but if the agreement were for the total abolition of all
nuclear weapons, then even a few megatons clandestinely held out by one
side would give it an overwhelming advantage over the other. When interest
served, the violator would merely have to deploy the threat of his clandestine
arsenal, and the world would be at his command. It follows that as disarmament
approaches its low limit, inspection must become correspondingly thorough
and rigorous. Laxities or slippages which would be allowable at a compara-
tively high level of armaments are wholly unacceptable as one nears total
divestiture of weapons.

As long as one persists in regarding the problem of the
demilitarized world as a military problem, the argument seems unanswerable.
But it neglects the consequences that would be produced by the demilitarizing
process itself. If, in a world demilitarized by common consent, one party
did hold out a clandestine nuclear arsenal --- even if he managed (which
would not be easy or probable) to conceal a command and delivery system
adequate to back up any threats which he wished to make with it --- would
the instrument be of any practical use to him? Would his nuclear threats
not be as empty, and as disastrous to his own interests, as was the threat
of United States atomic weapons against China in the Korean and Indo-
Chinese episodes? If the intended victim simply refused to pay any attention
to it (as did the Chinese during that era) could he actually launch his weapons?

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If he did, could he accomplish anything except his own destruction thereby?
The truth would seem to be that as the world approaches total demilitarization, the practical political risks of violation become greater; the advantages of violation become less. A climate has been created in which military considerations are in fact of diminishing importance --- as they are in the Western Hemisphere today --- and inspection systems, while no doubt still necessary, could decline to little more than a precautionary formality -- rather like inspection and accounting systems in the modern corporate and financial world. These will not inevitably reveal embezzlement, which of course continues to recur, but they are sufficient to maintain the general level of confidence which renders those embezzlements which do occur of minor significance.

The last formal, organized international war within the Western Hemisphere was the Chaco War of the '30's. There has been no lack of violence within the Hemisphere since then, but increasingly it has taken the form of revolution, guerrilla war or mob riots. Where the sovereign states have meddled in each other's affairs, they have been increasingly tending to do so through "indirect aggressions," through support of one or another faction within the "target" state, through propaganda, gun-running and subversion. The United States, which intervened in Cuba in 1898 with a full-dress military invasion, has been unable to see how a repetition of that process could possibly resolve any of the problems by which we are confronted in Cuba today. Sixty years ago the American military