Real Peace Read Free

today many concoct them to “explain” international relations. They are profoundly reassuringto those who otherwise would be profoundly confused by the complex dilemmas we face. But these myths are doubly dangerous: dangerous because they can distract and confound our leaders and clog decision-making channels, and also because of the chance that one of them might actually become official policy.
    The Disarmament Myth . This is the granddaddy of peace myths, a favorite of generation after generation of idealists. Founded on a logical fallacy in which human intentions are equated with the means men use to carry out their intentions, the idea of disarmament has alternately seduced and disappointed peacemakers throughout history.
    â€œDisarmists,” those alarmists who think the world’s greatest evil is the arms race, believe that it is the existence of arms that causes war rather than the political tensions which lead to their use. Because of this fundamental misconception, the disarmists’ best hope for peace is a prescription for international disaster.
    If we are to make any progress toward real peace we must accept the fact that war results from unresolved political differences, not from the existence of arms. Pursuing arms control talks without dealing with our other nation-to-nation problems at the same time would be the ultimate example of treating a symptom while letting the disease run its brutal course. It is like a doctor prescribing aspirin rather than penicillin as a cure for pneumonia.
    One of the few arms control pacts of the twentieth century was concluded in 1922 at the Washington Naval Conference. The U.S., Britain, and Japan agreed to limit their naval forces by adopting a battleship ratio of 5-5-3; Japan had also signed a treaty with eight other powers agreeing to observe the integrity of China. But Japan’s ambitions in the Far East and its resentment of the Western powers were both far greater than its commitment to the agreements it had signed. In 1931 it invaded China, and in 1941 it struck our naval forces at Pearl Harbor.
    World War II resulted not from arms buildups but from theterritorial ambitions of Japan and Germany. Germany’s and Japan’s arms buildups were a result of these ambitions, not the cause of them. The current arms race is between a similarly ambitious Soviet Union and a free world that has determined not to be caught off-guard again. The root causes of that conflict must be addressed before arms control can have any purpose.
    The one sure way to prevent a nuclear holocaust would be to eliminate all nuclear weapons. But complete nuclear disarmament is an impossible dream. The reason is simple: nuclear weapons are simple. The principles of physics that make them possible are widely understood by governments, by terrorists, even by college undergraduates. The materials for making them are within the grasp of virtually every modern nation.
    Some, out of desperation or supreme naivete, have suggested that an international authority be established to banish nuclear weapons and make sure they are never built again. Because such an authority would by necessity be privy to the inner workings of every government in the world, it would itself be the most powerful and ultimately the most dangerous institution on earth. Incredible political force would have to be brought to bear to keep nuclear weapons from being built, and that force would be so vast as to change the character of life on earth. Like the seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the disarmists are in effect asserting that we must offer ourselves and our liberties up to some superstate so that it can protect us from being devoured by each other in the nuclear state of nature.
    That the disarmists would propose some outlandish “world government” shows that most of them, to put the most charitable light on the matter, are living in a dream world in which problems between