by I. F. Stone
. . .
March 14, 1953
AMID THE BURST OF BAD MANNERS and foolish speculation, there was remarkably little jubilation. A sudden chill descended on the capital. If Stalin was the aggressive monster painted in official propaganda, his death should have cheered Washington. Actually the unspoken premise of American policy has been that Stalin was so anxious for peace he would do nothing unless Soviet soil itself were violated. With his death, the baiting of the Russian bear—the favorite sport of American politics—suddenly seemed dangerous. Even Martin Dies rose in the House to say that while Stalin was “utterly cruel and ruthless, he was more cautious and conservative than the younger Bolsheviks.” Few would have dared a week earlier to dwell on the conservative and cautious temperament of the Soviet ruler, much less imply that this was favorable to world stability and peace. Now this theme leaked from every State Department briefing. There was apprehension that after Stalin there might come someone worse and more difficult to deal with.
The cold war claque was critical of Nehru for calling Stalin a man of peace, but Washington’s own instinctive reactions said the same thing. The stress put by the White House on the fact that its condolences were merely “official” was small-minded and unworthy of a great power. After all, it is fortunate for America that when Stalin’s regime met the ultimate test of war, it did not collapse like the Czar’s. The war against the Axis would have lasted a lot longer and cost a great many more American lives if there had been a second Tannenberg instead of a Stalingrad. Stalin was one of the giant figures of our time, and will rank with Ivan, Peter, Catherine and Lenin among the builders of that huge edifice which is Russia. Magnanimous salute was called for on such an occasion. Syngman Rhee, ruler of a satellite state precariously engaged in fighting for its life against forces supplied by Russia, demonstrated a sense of fitness in his own condolences which Washington seemed afraid to show.
It is difficult to pursue dignified and rational policy when official propaganda has built up so distorted a picture of Russia. Many Americans fed constantly on the notion that the Soviet Union is a vast slave labor camp must have wondered why the masses did not rise now that the oppressor had vanished. The Bolshevik Revolution is still regarded here as a kind of diabolic accident. The necessities imposed on rulers by the character of the countries they rule is ignored. To understand it would be to put the problem of peaceful relations with Russia in quite a different perspective and to dissipate febrile delusions about “liberation.” The wisest of the anti-Communist Russian émigrés of our generation, Berdyaev, in his The Origins of Russian Communism has touched on the way bolshevism succeeded because it was so deeply rooted in Russia’s character and past. Bolshevism “made use,” Berdyaev wrote, “of the Russian traditions of government by imposition. . . . It made use of the characteristics of the Russian spirit . . . its search after social justice and the Kingdom of God upon earth . . . and also of its manifestations of coarseness and cruelty. It made use of Russian messianism. . . . It fitted in with the absence among the Russian people of the Roman view of property. . . . It fitted in with Russian collectivism which had its roots in religion.”
Every great leader is the reflection of the people he leads and Stalin in this sense was Russia. He was also the leader of something new in world history, a party: a party in a new sense, like nothing the world has known since the Society of Jesus, a party ruling a one-party state. It is this difference which makes nonsense of prediction by analogy based on the principle of legitimacy in monarchy or the later history of the Roman empire. Struggle among the party leaders occurred after the death of Lenin and may occur after the death of Stalin, but the party itself provides a cement strong enough to hold the state together despite such struggles. To regard this as a group of conspirators may prove a fatal error. This is a movement, with a philosophy comparable to the great religions in its capacity to evoke devotion, and based on certain economic realities which give it a constructive function. It has proved itself capable of industrializing Russia and opening new vistas to its masses, and this is its appeal to similar areas in Asia. This is a challenge which can only be met by peaceful competition, for only in peace can the West preserve what it has to offer, and that is the tradition of individual liberty and free thought.
It is time in the wake of Stalin’s death to recognize two basic facts about the world we live in. One fact is Russia. The other is the Communist movement. The surest way to wreck what remains of capitalism and intellectual freedom in the non-Communist world today is blindly to go on refusing to recognize these facts and refusing to adjust ourselves to coexistence on the same planet with them. Eisenhower in leaving the door discreetly ajar to possible negotiations with Stalin’s successor was wise, and the lesser powers should seize on the sobering moment to urge Washington and Moscow to get together.
First Call for a Test Ban
In 1954, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru proposed a ban on the testing of nuclear weapons as a way of slowing the global arms race. The idea gained little traction in the atmosphere of suspicion and hostility then dominating the Cold War powers. Not until 1963, in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, did the U.S. and U.S.S.R. agree to a limited test ban treaty, which prohibited nuclear weapon test explosions and any other nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, in outer space, or underwater (but did not prohibit underground nuclear explosions). Somewhat ironically, India is today one of a handful of nations actively resisting the ban’s current form, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1999, and insisting on their own right to develop and test atomic weapons.
. . .
November 1, 1954
THE PICTURE IN OUR MINDS of the atom bomb is of something that we have stockpiled in a kind of dark closet, which can be taken out and used if we so choose. But enough is known to indicate that this is misleading, that the atom bomb is not just another new weapon which can be held in reserve like poison gas or germs; it is a revolution in warfare.
There is now a whole growing family of atomic and hydrogen weapons adapted for use in various situations by various branches of the armed services. And if atomic weapons are being adapted to the strategic and tactical needs of the various services, then these services in turn must be adapted to the use of atomic weapons.
If one prepares to wage atomic war, one must recast one’s army, navy and air force radically. This means that we are confronted with a decision of policy quite different from taking a bomb out of a stock pile. Once the basic decision is taken to make the next war atomic, many other decisions follow which make the first difficult, and perhaps in practice impossible, to reverse. For the war begins with armies, navies and air forces trained to attack with, and defend themselves against, fission and fusion weapons. The die that may mean the destruction of civilization is not only cast but loaded in advance.
It is against this background that attention should be called to a talk given in London a week ago by Field Marshal Lord Montgomery. With Generals Gruenther and Norstad, Montgomery is one of the triumvirate which commands the NATO forces. He spoke on “A Look Through a Window at World War III.” And what he said, according to the London Times, was that “at Supreme Allied HQ they were basing all their operational planning on using atomic and thermonuclear weapons in their defense, and this called for a certain reorganization of their forces and in their strategy.”
It is sometimes assumed that we will not use nuclear weapons unless the enemy does. But Montgomery made clear in London, as he did in a speech a few weeks earlier at Ankara, that we would use nuclear weapons for defense against attack, whether that attack was atomic or not. The decision has been made, the armed forces shaped, for atomic war.
In the light of these military realities, the renewed debate at the UN over atomic disarmament between the United States and the U.S.S.R. takes on a new significance. This debate is again plunged into another lengthy and arid veto-and-inspection controversy. This controversy—pitched in these terms—is insoluble. For ther
e is no way to convince either side that any system of inspection and control may not be evaded or abused by the other.
The whole controversy in some ways is nonsense. Atomic weapons cannot be made in washtubs, nor launched without the most extensive measures of mobilization, dispersion, and defense in preparation for the retaliatory blow from the other side. As Montgomery said, the purpose of having active forces “in being” in peacetime “would make it impossible for the east to launch an attack successfully without a preparatory build-up of their forces, which we would know about.” No iron curtain could hide the preparatory measures required to launch an atomic world war.
Nevertheless there is no way to convince the American public that the Russians might not make and catapult bombs in secret from some hideaway in Siberia, nor convince the Russians that the Americans might not utilize inspection to spy out the prime bombing targets of the U.S.S.R. In this atmosphere to debate veto-and-inspection, as Lodge and Vishinsky now are doing, is worse than hopeless. The world public is lulled into a false sense of complacency by the debate, while the real decisions have already been taken, the military vested interests on both sides built up, a juggernaut created which can move in one way only, the way of the A-, the H- and soon the C-bomb.
It is this which makes the Krishna Menon proposal of last week so crucial. There was a kind of cosmic comedy in the way the United States and the U.S.S.R. hastily joined hands in shelving and thus shutting off General Assembly debate on the Indian proposal for a “truce” in the testing of new atomic and hydrogen weapons. This proposal, which was first made by Nehru last April and endorsed by Indonesia and Burma, alone offers a simple and enforceable way to put a stop to the atomic arms race, to ease tension and thereby to create an atmosphere in which further agreement may become possible. A “truce on tests” is self-enforceable because the new weapons are so powerful that if exploded their radioactivity is detectible anywhere on earth.
India spoke for mankind when its representative challenged the criminal rubbish on our side about using the atomic bomb “only in defense against aggression.” Both sides in every war always claim to be aggressed. Menon uttered what may prove to be the prophetic epitaph of our civilization when he said use of H-bombs would prove “suicide for the nations who used them, genocide for those against whom they were used, and infanticide for posterity.” If there is still a peace movement left in America, this must be its platform. As a first step away from mutual destruction, no more tests.
National Suicide as a Form of Defense
A sharp protest against the “ultimate delusion of the atomic era”—the idea that the suicidal launching of a nuclear war could somehow serve the cause of national defense. Thomas E. Murray was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission who proposed, in a speech on November 17, 1955, that the U.S. detonate a hydrogen bomb as a staged demonstration before representatives of the nations of the world in order to underscore the dangers of nuclear weaponry. The proposal was quickly denounced by the other members of the commission and soon forgotten.
. . .
November 28, 1955
THE REAL REASON WASHINGTON rejects Atomic Energy Commissioner Thomas E. Murray’s proposal for a world H-bomb demonstration is not for fear of what it might do to Them but for fear of what it might do to Us. The basic decisions of atomic warfare have been made from the beginning without consulting public opinion. At first from necessity and later from considerations of military security and finally from fear and habit, atomic decisions have been and are being made in secret, without popular consultation.
Democratic processes have been one of the first victims of nuclear fission. The decision to try and make the bomb and the decision to drop it on Japan were, of course, made privately. So was the decision to go ahead and make the H-bomb; had it not been for a slip by former Senator Ed Johnson of Colorado the public would never have known of it. Finally the decision to use “tactical” atomic weapons, and to refashion the armed services for atomic warfare, has also been made by the inner circles of the government without debate in Congress or elsewhere. The current Sagebrush military maneuvers in Louisiana show how far that transformation has gone.
The atomic thunderbolt is no longer a final weapon to be held in reserve for use only under the gravest circumstances on presidential decision, but the weapon around which all our military planning and training now revolve. Though atomic warfare means national suicide and humanity’s final holocaust, the decision to engage in it has been made. We have been consulted as little about it as if we lived under a dictatorship.
Only once has there been a great national debate on atomic policy and that came when the aroused atomic scientists descended on Washington like a flock of Paul Reveres to raise the alarums against military control of atomic energy. That great debate, right after the war, was made possible because (1) Congress had to be consulted if an atomic energy act were to be passed, and (2) the atomic scientists had not yet been frightened away from political activity by the loyalty-security mania. In this case political activity meant an attempt to fulfill the highest moral responsibilities in the society to which they had made so fatal a gift. But that was before the onset of the cold war, and since that time the government has succeeded by one means or another in shutting off real debate.
Every attempt by the Russians from the Stockholm peace petition to the latest Molotov proposals for a world pledge against atomic warfare has been hooted down. Discussion of foreign policy has been made to seem somehow unpatriotic; talk of peace, suspect. Mr. Acheson’s call for “total diplomacy” in January, 1950, merely put this into a vivid and sinister phrase; it sought at home the same kind of “disciplined” attitude toward foreign policy on which dictatorships pride themselves. Oppenheimer’s ordeal, of which the atomic scientists knew long before the public, provided the scientific elite with a chilling object lesson. The decisions were to be made by our “betters”—though these self-appointed “betters” included some of those generals with prognathous jaws and Neanderthal minds who adorn the covers of our news weeklies and wield the power of world, life and death through our ever-ready Strategic Air Command. The reality has been the subordination of the best scientific minds to military control through the rich carrot of military research grants and the heavy stick of possible loyalty proceedings. In a period when no general ever makes a speech any more without giving God a plug, and self-righteous moralizings ooze from every political pore, real morality has been completely abandoned in our imbecile fascination with these new destructive toys. The atom is our totem; the bomb our Moloch; faith in overwhelming force is being made into our real national religion.
The Pentagon and State Department have feared public debate lest it interfere with the task of recasting our armed forces, our moral standards and our minds. There is evidence that this remolding process is far from complete and irreversible. The latest Gallup poll shows that peace far outranks every other problem in the public mind (42 percent answered peace—the farm problem, which was next, drew only 8 percent). To hold an H-bomb demonstration in the Pacific, as Mr. Murray proposes, with the world press and all other governments represented, would be not merely to frighten Them but to awaken Us out of our lethargy.
Thanks to Mr. Murray, we are now authoritatively warned that the atmospheric and soil contamination from large thermonuclear explosions is a far graver menace than had hitherto been supposed; apparently there is a limit to the safe amount of thermonuclear explosion even without war. A new substance, radioactive strontium, not hitherto present in the air or earth, has been created and released. Its contamination continues long after the blasts. As it passes from the soil into food and the human body, it can create bone tumors and fatal effects. Commissioner Murray says that estimates of how much radioactive strontium can safely be absorbed “have changed almost wildly” in the past year. A year ago it was said that we had little to fear because the amount would have to increase by one million times; now the estimate has been reduced to ten thousand time
s. Mr. Murray thinks this figure will be lowered. His four fellow commissioners, in rejecting his proposal for an H-bomb demonstration, significantly fail to deny these figures. Their official statement merely says that until further study has been made “it is impossible to be definite about the genetic effects.” This is quite different from the statements of a year ago that fear of radioactive fall-out was exaggerated. Why should these matters be cloaked in secrecy, the decisions on them made without popular discussion?
The lack of real debate has allowed a thick deposit of dubious ideological fallout to contaminate the public mind. A whole series of doubtful propositions have been rubbed in by official statement and their echoes in a well-coordinated press. There is first of all the notion that but for the bomb the Russians would have overrun Western Europe after the war. This is highly doubtful in view of the terrible wounds they still had to heal from the last war, the enormous headaches occupation of Western Europe would have added to their problems, the civil war it would have provoked and the world war it would have unleashed.
America has twice been plunged into world war unprepared, and twice won despite that initial handicap. The Russians are not fools; they do not underestimate the huge industrial capacity and human resources of the American people. It is, I believe, the most dreadful nonsense to say that they would have overrun Western Europe if we had not had the bomb. The same is true, in my opinion, of the equally prevalent notion that there would be world war today but for fear of our bombs. The Russians and the Chinese have enough to do at home; and even without the bomb, war with America would ruin them for a generation. Then there is the newer notion that we must not give up nuclear warfare because only the bomb counterbalances the “hordes” at the disposal of Russia and China. But this completely overlooks the fact that these “hordes” now have the A-bomb and the H-bomb, too. So we no longer have an advantage. Would it not be better for both sides to see if some means cannot be found to ban nuclear warfare for humanity’s good?