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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

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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.

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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

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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,

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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-