Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare

Bertrand Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135223595
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Written at the height of the Cold War in 1959, Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare was published in an effort 'to prevent the catastrophe which would result from a large scale H-bomb war'. Bertrand Russell's staunch anti-war stance is made very clear in this highly controversial text, which outlines his sharp insights into the threat of nuclear conflict and what should be done to avoid it. Russell's argument, that the only way to end the threat of nuclear war is to end war itself, is as relevant today as it was on first publication.

1
IF BRINKMANSHIP
CONTINUES

In this chapter I propose to consider the probable course of events if present policies continue without actually causing a nuclear war. This subject has been investigated in an admirable report sponsored by The National Planning Association of America: 1970 Without Arms Control; Implications of Modern Weapons Technology; by NPAA Special Project Committee on Security Through Arms Control; Planning Pamphlet No. 104; May 1958, Washington, D.C. This report has the merit of being produced by men who are not concerned in any anti-nuclear campaign, but are merely engaged in producing a picture of facts and probabilities as impartial and objective as is humanly possible. Although it proceeds on the hypothesis, which I also am adopting in the present chapter, that no great war will break out during the period in question, it admits, what is indeed obvious, that while present policies continue there is at every moment a certain likelihood of war. It says, ‘not only does the danger of war remain a possibility, but the probability totalled over time increases, becoming a certainty if sufficient time elapses without succeeding in finding alternatives’. It follows that, while present policies continue, there will be constant fear of large-scale war and, as the facts become better known, this fear will increase. Increasing fear will lead to increasing armaments involving increasing expenditure and increasing rigidity of the social structure with continually diminished liberty. Only a constant propaganda of hate and terror will induce populations to accept the burdens involved. And with every year that passes, technical advances will make war, if it should come, more and more disastrous. Such a situation may, among the saner elements of the population, produce a desire for secure peace, but, in the majority, it is more likely to produce an insane horror of the ‘enemy’ and a state of nerves making an explosion seem less dreadful than continued apprehension.

The expenditure on armaments is, at the present time, incomparably higher than it has ever been before. According to the above-mentioned Report, the United States is now spending 45 billion dollars per annum on military preparation. ‘In the United States about 10 per cent of gross national product is now devoted to military purposes. It is estimated that 15 per cent of the gross national product of the Soviet Union is similarly devoted.’ If the world goes on as it is, neither better nor worse, it is estimated that, from the present time till 1970, from 1,500 to 2,000 billion dollars will have been spent on armaments, but this will certainly prove to be an underestimate, since new inventions will necessitate increasingly expensive weapons. We cannot tell what new discoveries will be made, but we can be pretty certain that there will be such discoveries. Some of them might be fairly cheap: for example, methods of bacteriological warfare. It should be possible to poison the Mississippi and the Volga, and thereby to render uninhabitable all the regions depending on water from those rivers. If a suitable method of delivery of bacteria were discovered, immense damage could be done with rather little expenditure. But most of the novelties to be expected cannot cause death so cheaply. Take, for example, control of the weather. The philosophers of Laputa reduced rebellious provinces to obedience by causing the shadow of their island to plunge the rebels into perpetual night. It should become possible, before very long, to secure that some large enemy region should have either too much or too little rain, or that its temperature should be lowered to a point where it would no longer produce useful crops. It may also become possible to melt the Polar ice and, thereby, submerge large regions which are only slightly above sea level. Such measures, however, are not yet possible, but there are others, both more terrible and even more expensive, which have lately entered the domain of feasible lunacy.

The creation of satellites has given pleasure to schoolboys and statesmen, marred only, for the West, by the fact that the first satellite was Russian. As yet, satellites are small; but it is not to be supposed that they will remain so. They do not at present carry weapons of offence, but militarists everywhere hope that they will carry such weapons before long. By means of electronic computers, they can be timed to rain death upon enemy regions, while suspending this useful activity during their passage over friendly territory. Such weapons will be enormously expensive, but on each side it will be argued: ‘if the enemy may have them, we must set about having them too.’

Nor is it only satellites that are in prospect. Any day, one side or the other may fire a projectile which will reach the moon. It is confidently expected that, before very long, it will be possible to land human beings on the moon. I have read a Russian book—and I have no doubt there are similar American books—intended for the edification of the young, which set forth carefully the conditions to be fulfilled if people are to be able to live on the moon, and even went so far as to suggest that, in time, a lunar atmosphere might be created. The tone of this book was the reverse of warlike. It was concerned to stimulate the love of adventure and the hope of scientific triumph over material obstacles. But I am afraid that it is from baser motives that Governments are willing to spend the enormous sums involved in making space-travel possible. General Putt, in evidence before the House Committee on Armed Services, explained that the United States Air Force aims at establishing a missile base on the moon, and considered that a war-head will be fired from the moon to the earth without any enormous expenditure of energy, since the moon has no atmosphere and little gravity. He declared that the moon ‘might provide a retaliation base of considerable advantage over earthbound nations’. He pointed out that an attack upon the moon by the USSR would have to be launched a day or two before an attack upon the terrestrial United States if the United States was to be unable to retaliate from the moon. Such a preliminary attack upon the moon, he considered, would warn Americans of their danger. If, on the other hand, the Russians did not demolish the United States lunar installations, it would be possible, from these installations, to destroy Russia although the terrestrial United States had been obliterated. His testimony was re-enforced by Richard E. Horner, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Research and Development, who saw in the establishment of lunar bases an opportunity of breaking through the nuclear stalemate. It is curious, and typical of militarist mentality everywhere, that both these two eminent gentlemen seemed at first loath to admit the possibility of Russia, also, installing missile stations on the moon. It is obvious that what one side can do, the other, also, can do, and the only result of such plans, if they are carried out, must be warfare in the moon. General Putt, it is true, did, in the end, acknowledge that what the United States can do in the moon, Russia can also do, but the moral which he drew was that the United States must also occupy Mars and Venus which, apparently, he considered to be beyond the reach of the Soviets. All this curious speculation received much less publicity than might have been expected, and I should not have known of it but for the fact that it was reported in I. F. Stone’s Weekly of October 20, 1958. I have seen no account of similar plans by the Soviet Government, but it must be assumed that such plans exist.

In reading of the plans of militarists, I try very hard to divest myself for the time being of the emotions of horror and disgust. But when I read of plans to defile the heavens by the petty squabbles of the animated lumps that disgrace a certain planet, I cannot but feel that the men who make these plans are guilty of a kind of impiety. It is easy to imagine a Congressional election, or a Soviet party dispute, turning on the question whether Americans on the moon have exterminated the Russians there or vice versa. Such plans degrade the heavenly bodies and the majestic course of nature to the petty stature of furious men quarrelling over trifles. But I fear it cannot be doubted that, unless our disputes are brought within reasonable proportions, the populations of the most powerful nations and their followers will be willing to reduce themselves to starvation level in the search for means of injuring each other.

Our planet cannot persist on its present courses. There may be war, as a result of which all or nearly all will perish. If there is not war, there may be assaults on heavenly bodies, and it may well happen that means will be found to cause them to disintegrate. The moon may split and crumble and melt. Poisonous fragments may fall on Moscow and Washington or on more innocent regions. Hate and destructiveness, having become cosmic, will spread madness beyond its present terrestrial confines. I hope, though with much doubt, that some gleams of sanity may yet shine in the minds of statesmen. But the spread of power without wisdom is utterly terrifying, and I cannot much blame those whom it reduces to despair.

But despair is not wise. Men are capable, not only of fear and hate, but also of hope and benevolence. If the populations of the world can be brought to see and to realize in imagination the hell to which hate and fear must condemn them on the one hand, and, on the other, the comparative heaven which hope and benevolence can create by means of new skills, the choice should not be difficult, and our self-tormented species should allow itself a life of joy such as the past has never known.

2
IF NUCLEAR WAR COMES

There are a great many people who, having realized that a nuclear war would be a disaster, have convinced themselves that it will not occur. I profoundly hope that they are right, but if they are, it will only be because the Great Powers adopt new policies. While present policies continue on both sides, there is much more possibility of a nuclear war than is thought by the general public. The reason for the danger is that leading statesmen on both sides believe, or profess to believe, that their side might secure a victory in the old-fashioned sense. Mr Dulles warned a Committee of Congress that the American way of life is in greater jeopardy from the Cold War than it would be from a hot one. An open war—so he is reported as saying—America could win, but ‘I do not know if we will win this Cold War or not’. I quote The Times of June 27, 1958. Mr Krushchev, on the other hand, in a letter to me, said:

However much our opponents may slander us, the Socialist countries will not disappear because of that, and Communism, the most progressive and humanist teaching, will not cease to exist.

How many attempts there have been to destroy Communism by force of arms!…

I think that if imperialism unleashes a new world war, it will perish in it. The peoples will not want to put up with a system which cannot exist without wars, without the annihilation of millions of people, to enrich a handful of monopolists.

I have no doubt that both Mr Dulles and Mr Krushchev have many followers who devoutly believe that a nuclear war would end in establishing the sort of world that they think good. In this chapter, I wish to give reasons for thinking this belief on either side completely mistaken. It is a dangerous belief both because it makes war more likely and because it is an obstacle to rational conciliation.

There are various possibilities as to how a nuclear war might begin. It might begin with a surprise attack from either side, but it might, also, grow out of an originally non-nuclear war. The United States Government has stated with great emphasis that it will never initiate a nuclear war, but this statement is subject to a qualification. Both Britain and the United States have said that, if Russia makes a non-nuclear attack upon any NATO country, the West will retaliate with nuclear weapons. It would seem to follow that Russia would have no motive for initially abstaining from nuclear weapons and that any war between East and West would almost necessarily be nuclear from the first.

It is obvious that the side which strikes first will gain great advantages from having the initiative. But, on the Western side, and presumably also on that of Russia, great pains have been taken to insure that a surprise attack shall not be decisive and shall not make retaliation impossible. I think we must, therefore, assume that the full potentialities of nuclear devastation will be developed against East and West equally.

How complete the devastation would be is a matter of controversy. Some optimists, who are afraid that their side may shirk the battle, maintain that not more than 30 per cent of mankind would perish, and such a loss they would regard with equanimity. But I think the pronouncements of those who have had the skill and the opportunity to make reasonable estimates lead to a very much more pessimistic conclusion. It must, however, be emphasized that there can be no certainty in this matter until after the event.

Let us begin by a statement by General Gavin, who was, at the time that he made the statement, Chief of Army Research and Development in the United States. He was giving testimony before the Symington Senate Committee. He was asked:

If we got into a nuclear war and our strategic air force made an assault in force against Russia with nuclear weapons so that the weapons exploded in a way where the prevailing winds would carry them south-east over Russia, what would be the effect in the way of death?

General Gavin replied:

Current planning estimates run on the order of several hundred million deaths. That would be either way depending on which way the wind blew. If the wind blew to the south-east they would be mostly in the USSR, although they would extend into the Japanese and perhaps down into the Philippine area. If the wind blew the other way they would extend well back into Western Europe.

This answer was disliked by the authorities, though they did not question its accuracy. There is every reason to believe that he was expressing the opinions of the United States authorities although they did not wish these opinions to be published at that moment.

More authoritative than General Gavin’s statement is an estimate of probable casualties in the United States made by the Federal Civil Defense Administration. (Presumably similar estimates have been made and been similarly accepted in Russia.) This statement considers what would be likely to happen if nuclear weapons having a combined yield of 2,500 megatons were dropped on the United States. Taking the population as that of 1950—namely, 151 million—they estimate that, on the first day, 36 million would be dead and 57 million injured, and that by the sixtieth day there would be 72 million dead and 21 million injured, leaving 58 million uninjured. Mr Dulles’s own Government made this estimate, and we must therefore suppose that he would regard such an outcome as constituting a victory providing the number of the Russian dead were even larger. The above figures, being based on the population of 1950, must all be increased in the same proportion to be applicable to the present increased population.

The bare figures, however, fail to give a picture of what the state of affairs would be. In the first place, many of those listed as uninjured would, inevitably, suffer from fallout in moving from place to place. In the second place, there could be no adequate medical care of the injured since most medical supplies and hospitals would be destroyed and a very large number of medical men and nurses would be dead. In the third place, since communications and water supplies would almost certainly be disrupted, it would be almost impossible to feed the surviving populations of large cities. In the fourth place, since drains and sewers would be largely destroyed, there would probably be severe epidemics. Furthermore, it is impossible to be sure that in such an appalling situation any kind of social cohesion would survive. For all these reasons, one must expect the a...