The Scientist as Rebel

by Freeman J. Dyson

  It was Lansbury’s fate to preside over the British pacifist movement at the peak of its popularity during the same years which saw Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. A few weeks before Hitler became chancellor, the undergraduates of Oxford debated the proposition “That this House will under no circumstances fight for its King and Country,” and approved it by a substantial majority. This vote received widespread publicity and may in fact, as the opponents of pacifism later claimed, have encouraged Hitler to pursue his plans of European conquest more boldly. Whether or not Hitler paid attention to the Oxford students’ vote, there is no doubt that his aggressive policies were encouraged by the existence of strong pacifist sentiments in England and France. In October 1933, Hitler felt confident enough to withdraw from the international Disarmament Conference which had been meeting before he became chancellor; this action was an official notification to the world that he intended to rearm Germany. Four days later, Lansbury spoke for the Labour Party in the House of Commons:

  We will not support an increase in armaments, but we shall also refuse to support our own or any other government in an endeavour to apply penalties or sanctions against Germany. No one will ask for these if the great nations immediately, substantially disarm and continue until universal disarmament is accomplished.

  The great nations were not about to disarm, as Lansbury well knew. His policy meant that England would simply do nothing, neither arm nor disarm. He was caught in the tragic dilemma of political pacifism. The pacifists of England and France, by announcing their unwillingness to fight, made Hitler more reckless in risking war and made the war more terrible when it came. There is no easy answer to this dilemma. A country facing an aggressive enemy must decide either to be prepared to fight effectively or to follow the path of nonviolence to the end. In either case, the decision must be wholehearted and the consequences must be accepted. The example of England in the 1930s proves only that a halfhearted commitment to pacifism is worse than none at all. Halfhearted pacifism is in practice indistinguishable from cowardice. European pacifism became finally discredited when World War II began and halfhearted pacifists could not be distinguished from cowards and collaborators. The debacle of European pacifism has at least one clear lesson to teach us: pacifists, if they are to be effective in the modern world, must be as wholehearted and as brave as Gandhi.

  In 1935 Lansbury was forced to choose between his pacifist principles and his position as leader of the Labour Party. Being an honest man, he stuck to his principles and handed over the leadership of the party to Clement Attlee, the same Attlee who became prime minister ten years later and made the decision to arm Britain with nuclear weapons. Pacifism as an effective political force in England was dead. But it was still alive in India. Young Englishmen like me, who were against the establishment and against the empire, acclaimed Gandhi as a hero. We greatly preferred the flamboyant Gandhi to the powerless Lansbury and the colorless Attlee. Our conversation was sprinkled with the rhetoric of pacifist doctrine. If only we had a leader like Gandhi, we said, we would fill the jails and bring the warmongers to their senses. We continued to talk in this style, while Hitler filled his concentration camps in Germany and silenced those who opposed his policies. Then in 1940 Hitler attacked and overran France. We were face to face, as Lansbury had been in 1933, with the classic pacifist dilemma. We still believed theoretically in the ethic of nonviolence, but we looked at what was happening in France and decided that nonviolent resistance would not be effective against Hitler. Reluctantly, we concluded that we had better fight for our King and Country after all.

  Forty years later, a book, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, was written by Philip Hallie, telling the story of a French village which chose the path of nonviolent resistance against Hitler.2 It is a remarkable story. It shows that nonviolence could be effective, even against Hitler. The village of Le Chambon sur Lignon collectively sheltered and saved the lives of many hundreds of Jews through the years when the penalty for this crime was deportation or death. The villagers were led by their Protestant pastor, André Trocmé, who had been for many years a believer in nonviolence and had prepared them mentally and spiritually for this trial of strength. When the Gestapo from time to time raided the village, Trocmé’s spies usually gave him enough warning so that the refugees could be hidden in the woods. German authorities arrested and executed various people who were known to be leaders in the village, but the resistance continued unbroken. The only way the Germans could have crushed the resistance was by deporting or killing the entire population. Nearby, in the same part of France, there was a famous regiment of SS troops, the Tartar Legion, trained and experienced in operations of extermination and mass brutality. The Tartar Legion could easily have exterminated Le Chambon. But the village survived. Even Trocmé himself, by a series of lucky accidents, survived.

  Trocmé learned many years later how it had happened that the village survived. The fate of the village was decided in a dialogue between two German soldiers, representing the bright and the dark sides of the German soul. On the one side, Colonel Metzger, an appropriate name meaning “butcher” in German, commander of the Tartar Legion, killer of civilians, executed as a war criminal after the liberation of France. On the other side, Major Schmehling, Bavarian Catholic and decent German officer of the old school. Both Metzger and Schmehling were present at the trial of Dr. Le Forestier, a medical doctor in Le Chambon who was arrested and executed as an example to the villagers. “At his trial,” said Schmehling when he met Trocmé later, “I heard the words of Dr. Le Forestier, who was a Christian and explained to me very clearly why you were all disobeying our orders in Le Chambon. I believed that your doctor was sincere. I am a good Catholic, you understand, and I can grasp these things.… Well, Colonel Metzger was a hard one, and he kept on insisting that we move in on Le Chambon. But I kept telling him to wait. I told Metzger that this kind of resistance had nothing to do with violence, nothing to do with anything we could destroy with violence. With all my personal and military power I opposed sending his legion into Le Chambon.”

  That was how it worked. It was a wonderful illustration of the classic concept of nonviolent resistance. You, Dr. Le Forestier, die for your beliefs, apparently uselessly. But your death reaches out and touches your enemies, so that they begin to behave like human beings. Some of your enemies, like Major Schmehling, are converted into friends. And finally even the most hardened and implacable of your enemies, like the SS colonel, are persuaded to stop their killing. It happened like that, once upon a time, in Le Chambon.

  What did it take to make the concept of nonviolent resistance effective? It took a whole village of people, standing together with extraordinary courage and extraordinary discipline. Not all of them shared the religious faith of their leader, but all of them shared his moral convictions and risked their lives every day to make their village a place of refuge for the persecuted. They were united in friendship, loyalty, and respect for one another.

  Sooner or later, everybody who thinks seriously about the meaning of war in the modern age must face the question whether nonviolence is or is not a practical alternative to the path we are now following. Is nonviolence a possible basis for the foreign policy of a great country like the United States? Or is it only a private escape route available to religious minorities who are protected by a majority willing to fight for their lives? I do not know the answers to these questions. I do not think that anybody knows the answers. The example of Le Chambon shows us that we cannot in good conscience brush such questions aside. Le Chambon shows us what it would take to make the concept of nonviolent resistance into an effective basis for the foreign policy of a country. It would take a whole country of people standing together with extraordinary courage and extraordinary discipline. Can we find such a country in the world as it is today? Perhaps we can, among countries which are small and homogeneous and possess a long tradition of quiet resistance to oppression. But how about the United States? Can we conceive of the population
of the United States standing together in brotherhood and self-sacrifice like the villagers of Le Chambon? It is difficult to imagine any circumstances which would make this possible. But history teaches us that many things which were once unimaginable nevertheless came to pass. At the end of every discussion of nonviolence comes the question which Bernard Shaw put at the end of his play Saint Joan:

  O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive thy Saints? How long, O Lord, how long?

  Postscript, 2006

  Since this chapter was written in 1984, the emphasis in discussions of war and peace has shifted from national conflicts to the so-called “war against terrorism.” In my view, the policy of turning the fight against terrorism into a war is practically ineffective as well as morally wrong. The effective tools for fighting terrorism are civilian police forces and civil defense. Granted that the ends of defeating terrorism are morally justified, it does not follow that the use of war as a means is justified. The “war against terrorism” is probably creating new terrorists faster than it eliminates old ones. To be opposed to this particular war, it is not necessary to be a pacifist.

  The story of Le Chambon sur Lignon is told in an excellent documentary film, Weapons of the Spirit, produced by Pierre Sauvage in 1987, with many villagers who had been participants in the passive resistance speaking on camera. Sauvage was born in the village while his Jewish parents were hidden there.

  1. The Barbadian Diary of General Robert Haynes, 1787–1836, edited by Everil M.W. Cracknell (Medstead: Azania Press, 1934).

  2. Lest Innocent Blood be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There (Harper and Row, 1979).

  11

  THE RACE IS OVER

  A FEW YEARS ago I walked into a room where there were forty-two hydrogen bombs lying around on the floor, not even chained down, each of them ten times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. This experience was a sharp reminder of the precariousness of the human condition. It encouraged me to think hard about ways to improve the chances of survival of my grandchildren. Nuclear weapons remain, as George Kennan has said, the most serious danger to mankind and the most serious insult to God.

  The disappearance of nuclear weapons from our thinking about the future is a historic change for which we must be profoundly grateful. Fifty years ago and for many years thereafter, nuclear weapons dominated the landscape of our fears. The nuclear arms race was the central ethical problem of our age. Discussion of the ethical dilemmas of scientists centered around bombs and long-range missiles. The evil face of science was personified by the nuclear bomb designer. Now, quietly and unexpectedly, the bombs have faded from our view. But they have not ceased to exist. The danger to humanity of huge stockpiles in the hands of unreliable people is as real as ever. Yet the bombs are not mentioned in our vision of the future. How could this have happened?

  In the summer of 1995 I took part in a technical study of the future of the United States’ nuclear stockpile. The study was done by a group of academic scientists together with a group of professional bomb designers from the weapons laboratories. The purpose of the study was to answer a question: Would it be technically feasible to maintain forever a stockpile of reliable nuclear weapons of existing designs without further nuclear tests? The study did not address the underlying political questions, whether reliable nuclear weapons would always be needed and whether further nuclear tests would always be undesirable. Each of us had private opinions about the political questions, but politics was not the business of our study. We assumed as the ground rule for the study that the weapons in the permanent stockpile must be repaired and remanufactured without change in design as their components deteriorate and decay. We assumed that the new components would differ from the old ones when replacements were made, because the factories making the old components would no longer exist. We looked in detail at each type of weapon and checked that its functioning was sufficiently robust so that minor changes in the components would not cause it to fail. We concluded our study with a unanimous report, saying that a permanently reliable nuclear stockpile without nuclear testing is feasible. Unanimity was essential.

  Unanimity was made possible by the objectivity and the personal integrity of the four weapons designers who worked side by side with us for seven weeks, John Richter and John Kammerdiener from Los Alamos, Seymour Sack from Livermore, and Robert Peurifoy from Sandia. They are impressive people, master craftsmen of a demanding technology. They have spent the best part of their lives planning and carrying out bomb tests. They remember every test, whether it succeeded or failed. They know why each test was done, and what was learned from its success or failure. Their presence was essential to our work, and their names on the report gave credibility to our conclusions. They are survivors of a vanishing culture. They lived through the heroic age of weapon-building. They will not and cannot be replaced. By working on this study, they unselfishly helped our country to move safely into a world in which people with the special qualities and talents of these four men will no longer be needed.

  The conclusion of our study was a historical landmark, commemorating the fact that the nuclear arms race is finally over. The nuclear arms race raged with full fury for only twenty years, the 1940s and 1950s. Then it petered out slowly for the next thirty years, in three stages. The science race petered out in the 1960s, after the development of highly efficient hydrogen bombs. Nuclear weapons then ceased to be a scientific challenge. The military race petered out in the 1970s, after the development of reliable and invulnerable missiles and submarines. Nuclear weapons then ceased to give a military advantage to their owners in real-world conflicts. The political race petered out in the 1980s, after it became clear to all concerned that huge nuclear weapons industries were environmentally and economically disastrous. The size of the nuclear stockpile then ceased to be a political status symbol. Arms control treaties were concluded at each stage, to ratify with legal solemnity the gradual petering out of the race. The atmospheric test ban of 1963 ratified the end of the science race, the ABM and SALT treaties of the 1970s ratified the end of the military race, and the START treaties of the 1980s ratified the end of the political race.

  How may we extrapolate from this history into the world of the 1990s and beyond? The security and the military strength of the United States now depend primarily on nonnuclear forces. Nuclear weapons are on balance a liability rather than an asset. The security of the United States will be enhanced if all deployments of nuclear weapons, including our own, are gradually reduced to zero. For the next fifty years we should attempt to drive the nuclear arms race in reverse gear, to persuade our allies and our enemies that nuclear weapons are more trouble than they are worth. The most effective moves in this direction are unilateral withdrawals of weapons. The move that signaled the historic shift of the arms race into reverse gear was the unilateral withdrawal of land-based and sea-based tactical nuclear weapons by President George Bush in 1991. Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev responded quickly with similarly extensive withdrawals of Soviet weapons. The testing moratorium of 1992 was another effective move in the same direction.

  To drive the nuclear arms race further in reverse gear, we need to pursue three long-range objectives: worldwide withdrawal and destruction of weapons, complete cessation of nuclear testing, and an open world in which nuclear activities of all countries are to some extent transparent. In pursuing these objectives, unilateral moves are usually more persuasive than treaties. Unilateral moves tend to create trust, whereas negotiation of treaties often tends to create suspicion.

  Our nuclear stockpile study fitted well into the context of the reverse-gear arms race. The purpose of the study was to achieve a technical stabilization of our stockpile, to clarify what needs to be done to maintain a limited variety of weapons indefinitely without testing. Stabilization is the essential prerequisite for allowing the weapons to disappear gracefully. Once a stable regime of stockpile maintenance has been establish
ed, the weapons will attract less attention both nationally and internationally. They will acquire the qualities that a stable nuclear deterrent force should have: awesomeness, remoteness, silence. Gradually, as the decades of the twenty-first century roll by, these weapons will become less and less relevant to the problems of international order in a hungry and turbulent world. The time may come when nuclear weapons are perceived as useless relics of a vanished era, like the horses of an aristocratic cavalry regiment, maintained only for ceremonial purposes. When nuclear weapons are generally regarded as absurd and irrelevant, the time may have come when it will be possible to get rid of them altogether.