The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories
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The fears of the Russians proved to be groundless, inasmuch as the agreement closely paralleled the line that the Russians had taken at the Vienna Conference. The agreement reduced the number of rockets and bombs to be retained by America, China and Russia below the shake-up level of the smaller nations, and it did eliminate all submarines capable of launching rockets; but it left Russia, America and China each in possession of one hundred long-range rockets capable of carrying 10-megaton clean hydrogen bombs. The agreement also fixed the number of rockets and bombs which the other nations were permitted to retain. All nations were pledged not to resort to the use of atomic bombs except in retaliation for an atomic-bomb attack.
As the result of the disarmament agreement, the nations were able to reduce their arms expenditure somewhat, but they were obliged to pay a good portion of what they saved in arms cost into the Fund for Compensation.
There was nothing in the agreement to offer any assurance that general and virtually complete disarmament would be achieved in the predictable future. True enough, the agreement defined the stages through which the world could go from the initial arms level (stage one) to virtually complete disarmament (stage ten). But the date of the transition from one stage to the next was left to the determination of the Security Council, where Russia had the veto, and there was no way of telling when, if ever, progress toward disarmament might take place.
Then, out of the blue, three months after the ratification of the agreement, Russia offered to cede to Poland each year, over a twenty-five-year period, strips of territory three to ten miles wide along Poland’s eastern border, on condition that Poland cede year by year similar strips of territory on her western border to Germany. Poland declared herself willing to accept such a switch, but demanded a compensation of $25,000 for each Polish family which had to be relocated. This would have meant an outlay of $100 billion, payable over a period of twenty-five years, or about $4 billion a year.
The Fund for Compensation would have been able to take on this load without too much difficulty, but this would have required approval by the Assembly and many nations were outraged by Poland’s demand, which they regarded as extortion.
Still, in the end, the Assembly did approve; and since not even the Germans are prepared to go to war for something they can get without war, the approval of the Assembly split the People’s Party in Germany. Half of its members seceded from the party and joined the other parties in voting for a constitutional amendment which provided for French representation in the German parliament, amounting initially to 5 per cent and after three years to 10 per cent of the total votes. As could be expected, France reciprocated.
With the adoption of this amendment the danger that the People’s Party might gain a majority in the German parliament receded, and two years later the Security Council voted, with the five permanent members concurring, to reduce the arms level from stage one to stage four. Within five years the arms level was down to stage seven.
The disarmament agreement stipulated that mobile international armed forces, equipped with machine guns and light tanks of considerable fire power, be set up under United Nations auspices, but it did not say in what manner such forces would be controlled by the UN. In this respect the stipulation had been left vague on purpose, in order to secure acceptance of the agreement. During the negotiations the Russians had been pressing for the setting up of a world armed force under the central command of the United Nations, with the Secretary General being the commander in chief of the force. Since three of the previous Secretaries had had marked pro-Russian leanings, it is not surprising that America Opposed a setup of this type. Most of the other nations rejected the setup proposed by America on the ground that it ran counter to sound principles of administration.
After the settlement of the German-Polish issue, negotiations on the setting up of some international armed force were reopened, and it was then agreed to set up a number of regional international armed forces under UN auspices rather than a single world armed force under the central command of the UN Secretariat. It was agreed that each such regional armed force should be under the control of five nations, who would appoint, by majority vote, the commander in chief. The slate of the five nations was to be subject to the approval of the UN Security Council, with the concurring vote of the five permanent members. One third of the cost of maintaining the regional force was to be borne by the five nations assuming the responsibility for maintaining peace in the region, and two thirds of the cost was to come from the Fund for Compensation.
This agreement did not appear to represent any real progress, because at first all slates proposed were vetoed by either Russia, China or America. One year later, however, when Russia and China proposed a slate of five nations for the control of a regional armed force for central Africa, where the expansionist tendencies of some of the new African nations represented a constant threat to their neighbors, unexpectedly America concurred and the slate was approved by the Security Council?*
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* America, owing to the implacable hostility of the African political leaders toward her, had lost interest in Africa by 1987. This brought to an end a period of American-African relations which started in 1960, when the Kennedy Foundation allocated a modest sum to bring to the United States African students on American fellowships, and, on Vice-President Nixon’s initiative, the-State Department allocated a similar sum for the same purpose. From these modest beginnings there grew a vast fellowship program for Africans which brought over thousands of African students every year to America, where they received a college education. From among their ranks came most of Africa’s political leaders. Their subsequent hostility to America is rather puzzling, because even though they may have been exposed to a certain amount of racial discrimination while studying in America, they could not have been any worse off, in this respect, than the American-born colored citizens of the United States.
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The decision of the Soviet Union to concur in the reduction of the arms level from stage one to stage four followed, within a month, the establishment of the regional armed force for central Africa. The subsequent reduction of the arms level from stage four to stage seven followed the establishment of regional armed forces in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia and in Central America.
When the possibility of setting up regional police force sunder the control of various “groups” of nations was first discussed, many people opposed it on the ground that each such region would be likely to become the sphere of influence of one or the other of the great powers. It was recognized that an agreement among the great powers on the “groups” in control of the various regional police forces would represent a political settlement, and it was acknowledged that in one form or another a political settlement must be reached, but the conscience of the world recoiled from a political settlement based on an agreement on spheres of influence. It turned out, however, that the regions under the control of the various groups of nations were spheres of non-influence, rather than spheres of influence. For instance, Central America was under the control of Uruguay, Canada, Austria and Australia, and this did not place Central America in the sphere of influence of the United States, but it did exclude Central America from the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. Similarly, the Middle East was excluded from the sphere of influence of the United States without falling into the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union.
The drastic reduction of the arms level to stage seven resulted for many countries in a considerable saving in arms cost. This did not amount to very much in the case of Russia, since she had based her defense almost exclusively on long-range rockets, but it was very substantial in the case of America. It had always been taken for granted that when disarmament made a substantial reduction in arms cost possible there would be a great increas
e in aid to underdeveloped countries. What happened was the Opposite. Americans felt that, after a long period of stagnation, the time had Come to increase the standard of living. There was a substantial reduction in taxes, and wages went up. The annual income of the average American family jumped by about $2,000. In the first five years following ratification of the disarmament agreement, Congress failed to appropriate any funds for foreign aid. A modest Point Four program was retained, but it did not amount to very much, because, high-school education having steadily deteriorated in America, she was in no position to send a substantial number of engineers and physicians abroad.
Russia had retained the six-day work week, but had increased the annual paid vacation to three months and was in the process of trying to extend the vacation period to four months. Russia continued to lend funds to underdeveloped nations even after. the conclusion of the disarmament agreement, but she charged 5 per cent on such loans. Russia also continued to make available to underdeveloped nations the services of her engineers and physicians, and this was being done on a large scale, but after the conclusion of the disarmament agreement she began to charge for these services, whatever the market would bear.
While the events of the decades that followed general disarmament are of great historical interest, they do not come within the scope of this dissertation. My task here is to appraise the contribution that the dolphins made toward the establishment of lasting peace, and the dolphins faded out of the picture soon after general disarmament had been attained.
A week after the arms level was reduced to stage seven, a virus epidemic broke out among the dolphins at the Vienna Institute and one dolphin after another died. Two weeks after the death of the last dolphin, a fire broke out in the library of the Institute, which destroyed most of the books and, with a very few exceptions, all of the records. Thereafter, the Russians and the Americans who composed the staff of the Institute decided to abandon Vienna and to return to their homelands.
The decision to disband the laboratories of the Vienna Institute was regarded as a major blow to science and was greatly deplored all over the world. The Russian and American scientists who returned home were able to continue their work in the Crimea and in California respectively, where new research institutes were set up to accommodate them. In the years that followed these institutes turned out work which was in no way inferior to the work of the Vienna Institute but neither the Russian nor the American scientists attempted again to communicate with dolphins. No other international research project was set up to emulate the work of the Vienna Institute with dolphins, even though suggestions to set up such a project on a broader international basis were made by the British, French, Italian and Chinese governments. The German government established a very large research operation in Munich on a purely national basis, with the aim of continuing the work of the Vienna Institute with dolphins. The Munich Institute was staffed entirely with German biologists, and inasmuch as the funds were provided by the German government alone, it was deemed proper that the results of the work should benefit Germany only. The director of the Munich Institute announced at the outset that the results of experiments initiated by the staff themselves would be published, but that experiments undertaken on the advice of the dolphins and information relating to the dolphins themselves would come under the Official Secrets Act.
From the very first year of its existence, the Munich Institute published papers on a great variety of scientific subjects, many of them rather voluminous. All of them were published under the name of the scientists who performed the experiments, and no credit was given to any dolphin. While all of this work was respectable and some of it quite informative, none of it was extraordinary.
In the Munich Institute’s fifth year of operation, one of the members of the staff was sued for divorce by his wife. During the ensuing court wrangle, which was exceedingly bitter, the wife testified that, in addition to his salary from the Institute, her husband derived about an equal amount of income as a consultant to industrial corporations. She said, on the witness stand, that in the Institute’s third year there had been some talk that its director might resign, that the Institute might be dissolved and that the staff might be transferred to various research institutions in Frankfurt, Göttingen, Cologne or Leipzig, all of which were much less pleasant places to live than Munich. At that time there were rumors that the staff had found it impossible to learn the language of the dolphins, that they came to doubt that the dolphins had a language that could be learned, and that all of the experiments carried out by the staff represented the efforts of the staff themselves.
These proceedings in court attracted considerable attention in Munich, where it had been noted previously that the staff of the Institute appeared to live above their means. The U.S. Senate Committee on Internal Security also got into the act, and it subpoenaed several of the former staff members of the Vienna Institute who had returned to America. A minor stir was created when all of these men refused to testify, but since they were not suspected of being Communists there was no attempt to cite them for contempt. Some columnists chided the scientists and sided with the Congressional committee, but most of the others stressed that refusing to testify could in no way be construed as an admission of guilt.
There were, of course, those who questioned whether the Vienna Institute bad in fact been able to communicate with dolphins and whether the dolphins were in any way responsible for the conspicuous achievements of the Vienna Institute. America being a free country, any one can think and say, of course, what he pleases. It is difficult to see, however, how the Vienna Institute could have accomplished as much as it did if it hadn’t been able to draw on considerably more than the knowledge and wisdom of the Russian and American scientists who composed its staff.
[1960]
My Trial as a War Criminal
I was about to lock the door of my hotel room and go to bed when there was a knock on the door and there stood a Russian officer and a young Russian civilian. I had expected something of this sort ever since the President signed the terms of unconditional surrender and the Russians landed a token occupation force in New York. The officer handed me something that looked like a warrant and said that I was under arrest as a war criminal on the basis of my activities during the Second World War in connection with the atomic bomb. There was a car waiting outside and they told me that they were going to take me to the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Apparently, they were rounding up all the scientists who had ever worked in the field of atomic energy.
Once we were in the car the young man introduced himself and told me that he was a physicist as well as a member of the Moscow Chapter of the Communist Party. I had never heard his name before and I was never able to remember it thereafter. He was obviously very eager to talk. He told me that he and the other Russian scientists were all exceedingly sorry that the strain of the virus which had been used had killed such a disproportionately large number of children. It was very fortunate, he said, that the first attack was limited to New Jersey and that the early cessation of hostilities made attacks of larger scope unnecessary. According to plan-so he said-stocks of this virus were merely held in reserve for an emergency. Another virus differing by five further mutational steps had been in the stage of pilot plant production, and it was this improved virus which was meant to be used in case of war. It would not affect children at all and would kill predominantly men between twenty and forty. Owing to the premature outbreak of the war, however, the Russian government found itself forced to use the stocks which it had on hand.
He said that all the scientists arrested would be given a chance to go to Russia, in which case they need not stand trial as war criminals; but that if I should elect to stand for trial he personally hoped that I would be exonerated and that afterward I would be willing to collaborate with the Russians here in the United States.
He said that the Russians were very anxious to get the support of people other than the American Communists fo
r a stable political regime in the United States which would collaborate with them. Since they now had the support of the Communists anyway, he explained, they would rather bestow their favors on those whose co-operation was not yet assured. “We shall, of course, lean on the Communists for the next few months,” he said, “but, in the long run, dissatisfied elements who are used to conspiracy would not be relied on by us. It is difficult to work with fellows who have no sense of humor,” he added as an afterthought.
He told me that no scientist would be forced to go to Russia and that no one who was innocent need go there for fear of having to stand trial as a war criminal,‘because, he said, Russia would do everything in her power to make the trials fair and impartial. “The outcome of a bona fide trial,” he added somewhat illogically, “is, of course, always something of a tossup.” He told me that he expected that Russia would, within a fortnight, change her position on the question of world government; that she would come out in favor of it, in principle, and that she would press for immediate strengthening of the United Nations. The tribunal which was being assembled to try war criminals would not be Russian-dominated, he said, but would, rather, be composed of representatives of all nations which were not at war with Russia.
I was surprised to hear him say that he expected Great Britain to delegate the Lord Chief Justice to sit on the tribunal, and, frankly, I did not believe him then, though of course this was technically not impossible, since the coalition Cabinet had declared Britain’s neutrality twenty-four hours before the outbreak of the war. His prediction was confirmed, however, the following morning when the newspapers reported the Speech of the British Prime Minister, who had said that Great Britain, having participated in the Nuremberg trials, could not now refuse her participation without being guilty of displaying a double standard of morality. The information which I received from this young man proved to be most valuable to me, because it gave me time to make up my mind as to what line I would want to follow.