The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories
Page 4
Shortly after America undertook to provide France, Germany, Italy and Japan with their own bombs, Russia decided to provide China with the bombs that China felt she needed for her security. The Central African Federation, which was initially formed to constitute a non-nuclear block, was not provided with bombs and rockets until about ten years later.
Soon after China became an atomic power, there was a marked change in the American attitude on the issue of the islands of Quemoy and Matsu. Up to that time, for reasons of expediency, the American press had egged on the Chinese Nationalists to hold on to these islands. Thereafter, however, it was said with increasing frequency that it would be morally wrong for America to encourage the Nationalists to persist in the occupation of these offshore islands.
But just about the time when American policy toward China became more conciliatory, the Chinese attitude began to harden. When the Chinese population ceased to increase rapidly, the standard of living began to rise in China, and, with increasing prosperity, there was an increase in China’s expansionist tendencies. This is quite understandable, even though it is the exact opposite of what people had generally predicted. Invariably people who believe that they are in pose session of the truth wish to spread the gospel, and for a while the Chinese believed that they were in possession of the truth.
But, just as the zest of British imperialism persisted only as long as the English thought that by extending their system to other nations they could bring them the blessings of “civilization,” thus also the expansionist tendencies of China persisted only until the Chinese found that they were unable to bring about a betterment of the lot of the Indians by imposing on India the blessings of the Communist system.
It is curious that India, of all nations, should play this role of bringing disenchantment to imperialism. It is even more curious that she should play this role twice within the century and under such very different circumstances. No one has done more to disenchant British imperialism than did Gandhi, and he did it because he was the incarnation of the highest virtues of the Indians. However, the disenchantment that India brought to China was not due to any virtues, but, rather, to the absence of virtues.
When India became Communist, China went all out to make Communism in India a success, but after ten years of Communist rule in India it began to dawn on the Chinese that the success of their own regime in China may have been to a large extent due to the civic virtues of the Chinese, which the Indians were totally lacking. The recognition of this greatly increased China’s national pride, but at the same time it decreased her zeal to extend her political system to other nations.
After Chiang Kai-shek’s untimely death, the “Formosa for Formosans” movement began to gather strength rather rapidly. Formosa had been separated from China for two generations, and Formosa liked neither the Chinese on the mainland nor those who had come to Formosa from the mainland. There were rumors that the American government secretly encouraged the “Formosa for Formosans” movement. There is no evidence, however, that any government funds were in fact involved, even though funds for cultural activities may have come from private sources in the United States, such as the Rockefeller Cousins’ Fund.
After a while the situation became rather uncomfortable for the remnants of the Chinese Nationalists on Formosa, and most of them wanted to leave that island. China had a severe shortage of clerical workers and offered asylum to all those born on the mainland; a law enacted by the United States Congress made it possible for those of them who wanted to come to America to do so, provided they did not intend to take up residence in California.
Most people expected that China would thereafter occupy Formosa, but China appeared to have somehow lost interest in Formosa. The Americans, the English, the Germans and the Russians have always been regarded as barbarians by the Chinese, and the Japanese have been looked upon as semi-civilized. Formosa had been under Japanese rule for two generations, and apparently the Chinese came to regard the native Formosans as no more civilized than the Japanese.
When it became manifest that China was not interested in Formosa any longer, the stage was set for a political settlement in the Far East and the freezing of the map of Southeast Asia.
At the same time, however, a political settlement in Europe appeared to be as far off as ever. In Germany, united since 1980, the Social Democrats, being the largest party in the parliament, were in office. But there were four parties holding seats in the German parliament, and the position of the Government was precarious. All Germans were united in their determination to recover from Poland the territories which Germany had lost to her at the end of. the Second World War, but there was violent disagreement among the political parties as to the method of accomplishing this. The Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats wanted to force Poland to return these territories to Germany through negotiations conducted under such economic pressure as Germany was now capable of exerting. The People’s Party,however (which had been rapidly increasing in strength and had come to control 45 per cent of the votes in the parliament) , advocated the use of force if necessary.
Poland had made it abundantly clear that she would in no circumstances attempt to fight a war on the Polish-German border, and that if German troops were to invade her territory she would exact a high price from Germany by demolishing two German cities, of an unspecified size, for every ten miles’ depth of penetration of Polish territory by German troops. Following Russia’s classic example, she proclaimed that she would not retaliate if Germany demolished no more than one Polish city of equal size for every city demolished by Poland.
The People’s Party advocated that Germany should resort to force and should be willing to pay whatever price might be set by the Poles. They argued that Germans, being industrious, as well as prosperous, would be in a better position to rebuild their cities than would the Poles. They contended that the return of the former German territories was not a matter which could be discussed in terms of loss or acquisition of property, because the return of these territories was essential to the Spiritual integrity of the German nation.
THE ATOMIC STALEMATE THREATENS
TO BLOW ITSELF UP, 1980 TO 1985
This rather ominous political development in Europe was paralleled by an equally ominous military development the world over. As the Russian rockets increased in numbers and became capable of carrying larger bombs, the situation of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Japan became precarious. Up to 1980, these nations had based their security on rockets which were constantly moved around within their territory. However, rockets are guided by delicate instruments, which are ruined if the rockets get badly shaken up. All these countries were small, and had Russia exploded about one fourth of her rockets in a sudden attack, say, over France and Germany, the French and German rockets would have been :so badly shaken up that neither of these two countries would have been capable of striking a counter blow. In these circumstances, all the atomic nations, with the exception of America, Russia and China, felt compelled to shift their defense from land-based rockets to rockets based on submarines.
This solved the problem of surprise attack with which these nations were faced, but it created a new problem for the world. If a city were destroyed by a rocket launched from a submarine, it might be possible to trace the orbit of the rocket back to the point at sea from which the rocket had been launched; but with the submarine submerged, it would not be possible to identify the nation responsible for the attack. The possibility of such an anonymous attack was particularly serious in View of the political frustration not only of Germany but also of Japan.
As a result of the high tariffs which America had promulgated to balance her military budget, Japan found herself in economic difficulties, which brought the Japanese militarists into office. The power of China blocked the possibility of a Japanese adventure in Southeast Asia, but Japan, having built a powerful navy, could have moved into the Philippines if America had lost her ability to protect those islands. Th
us Japan, though bottled up for the time being, was potentially expansive.
Fears were growing, both in America and in Russia, that one day a bomb might be launched from a German or a Japanese submarine and destroy, say, an American city. Since the identity of the attacker would remain concealed, America might counterattack Russia, with the result that Russia would counterattack America. To what extent such fears were justified it is difficult to say, but it is certain that if Russia and America had mutually destroyed each other this would have left both Germany and Japan in a much better position to pursue their aspirations.*
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* The reader may recall that, during the Second World War, a few days after Germany went to war against Russia there was an attack from the air against the Hungarian city of Kassa. The Hungarians examined the bomb fragments and found that the bombs were of Russian manufacture. We know today that the bombs were dropped by the German Air Force to create the impression that Russia was the attacker and to induce Hungary to declare war on Russia. This ruse was in fact successful.
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Apprehensions reached such a level that wealthy Americans went to live in Arizona and New Mexico, where they built luxurious homes equipped with air-conditioned shelters capable of storing a year’s food supply, and with attics complete with machine guns mounted in the windows. Many Americans transferred funds to Switzerland, and this movement of funds reached such proportions that Swiss banks ceased to pay interest on deposits and levied a 2 per cent annual “carrying charge.”
This flight of capital forced America to raise the price of gold. Ostensibly America did this in order to render economic help to South Africa, where, as the result of a revolution, an all-black government took over, which America was quick to recognize. In fact, however, the chief beneficiary of the rise in the gold price was Russia. Up to then Russia had refrained from exporting gold at the prevailing low prices, and she had begun of late to line the walls of her public toilets with sheets of gold, in token fulfillment of a prophecy once made by Lenin.
In the 1984 elections, civilian defense was a major political issue. The voters were split between those who favored a $1o-billion-a-year program of building bomb shelters and those who Opposed this but advocated a Federal law that would make it compulsory for all cities above 100,000 population to hold evacuation drills once a year. Once a year, on the appointed day, all the people of such cities would leave the city for a week to be sheltered and fed during that period in the surrounding countryside, at a distance of at least twenty miles from the center of the city. The new Democratic Administration which took office on January 20, 198 5, was split on this issue, and so was Congress, with a minority of the Democrats and most of the Republicans Opposed to compulsory evacuation drills. But after two Cabinet members, two Senators and one Congressman, who were most effectively opposing the institution of such evacuation drills, resigned their offices in order to become members of the Advisory Board of the American Research Foundation, Congress passed a law providing for once-a-year evacuation drills, which became the law of the land.
The evacuation drill for New York City was set for December 12, 198;, and it caused considerable resentment against the Democratic Administration in Washington because of the heavy losses in Christmas shopping suffered by the retail trade. The evacuation date was set by the mayor of the city, who was a Republican and who was not slated for re-election. It so happened that this was an exceptionally cold December, and among the eight million evacuees there were over 100,000 suffering from frostbite who required treatment upon their return to the city. Most of the other major cities set the date for their evacuation drills for the spring and early summer, but, even so, the evacuation of these cities was regarded by the inhabitants as a major nuisance.
THE DISARMAMENT AGREEMENT OF 1988
By the fall of 1986 there was strong sentiment in America for general and total disarmament, and in 1987 the dolphins called an informal conference at the Vienna Institute to discuss the possibility of such disarmament.
In order to be able to appraise the contribution made by this conference to the achievement of disarmament, it is necessary to recall the political thinking that prevailed on the subject at that time. This thinking is reflected in articles which appeared over a period of years in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, by American, Russian and Chinese authors.
Most of the American authors favored general and total disarmament. They took it more or less for granted that a world disarmed down to machine guns would be a world at peace, but they were less certain about the feasibility of such disarmament. Some Americans held the View that there would be almost no way “to make reasonably certain that bombs and rockets which Russia might want to hide could be detected.
Most of the Russian authors, while favoring, in principle,general and complete disarmament, took the position “that such disarmament must follow rather than precede the establishment of an international armed force capable of protecting the smaller nations. The Russians pointed out that an improvised army equipped with machine guns could spring up, so to Speak, overnight. If a small nation were invaded by such an improvised army of its neighbor, Russia, having given up her bombs and rockets, would be unable to protect that nation.
American authors did not favor the establishment of an international armed force, presumably because they assumed that such an armed force would be set up under the United Nations, where America might be outvoted.
More and more often America was forced to use her veto in the Security Council. The Russians frequently accused America of misusing the veto, but no Russian has ever been able to define the difference between the use of the veto and the misuse of it. Also, Russia succeeded with increasing frequency in depriving America of her right to the veto, by managing to shift the controversy-through the “Uniting for Peace” resolution-to the General Assembly, where she was sometimes able to muster a two-thirds majority.
Some American authors suggested that, in place of setting up an international armed force, the nations of the world should enter into a covenant and pledge themselves to apply stringent economic sanctions against an “aggressor.” The Russians doubted, however, that nations who entered into such a covenant would live up to their commitments if this entailed paying a high price in terms of their own economic welfare. The Russians reminded the Americans that when Italy attacked Abyssinia it proved to be impossible to embargo the supply of oil to Italy, because American oil interests were opposed to America’s participation in such an embargo, and, further, that when Japan attacked China the United States continued to supply oil and scrap iron to Japan until she herself was ready to enter the Second World War.
Concerned with Europe more than with any other continent, the Russians stressed that while Germany was economically integrated with Western Europe, politically she was not; they stressed that Western Europe was incapable of politically restraining Germany from taking armed action against Poland and was not in a position to apply economic sanctions against Germany without suffering staggering economic losses.
The Special disarmament number of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of May 1986 contained a number of remarkably lucid articles by American, Chinese and Russian authors. No one who reads these articles can doubt that the Americans were willing to go much further toward total disarmament than were the Russians.
The Russians were willing to consider controlled arms limitations, the idea being that, in return for total elimination of all submarines capable of launching rockets, America, Russia and China would cut down the number of their long-range rockets and bombs below the shake-up level* of the small atomic countries. Apparently this was as far as they were willing to go in the absence of a reliable UN military force.
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* If a sufficiently large number of sufficiently large bombs were detonated at a suitable height above countries like France, Italy or Germany, the explosions would shake up the rockets on the ground to the point where their guidance system would be affected and the rockets would become unusable.
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The Americans wanted to go much further. They stressed that the problem that the bomb posed to the world could be solved only by eliminating the possibility of war between the Great Powers, and that the kind of controlled-arms limitations which the Russians favored would not accomplish this. They drew a sharp distinction between controlled-arms limitations of the kind which the Russians had in mind and virtually total disarmament which would eliminate the possibility of war between the Great Powers.*
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* The first disarmament conference of the League of Nations convened in 1926. It happened that Albert Einstein passed through Geneva during this conference, and when the reporters discovered his presence they asked him how he was impressed by the progress the conference was making. “What would you think,” Einstein asked, “about a meeting of a town council which is convened because an increasing number of people are knifed to death each night in drunken brawls, and which proceeds to discuss just how long and how sharp shall be the knife that the inhabitants of the city may be permitted to carry?” After a somewhat shocked silence, one of the reporters asked Einstein, “Do you mean to convey that the disarmament conference is bound to fail?” And Einstein said, “Yes, I do.”