Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare

Bertrand Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135642235
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Available for the first time in many years, Commonsense and Nuclear Warfare presents Russell's keen insights into the threat of nuclear conflict, and his argument that the only way to end this threat is to end war itself.
Written at the height of the Cold War, this volume is crucial for understanding Russell's involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and his passionate campaigning for peace. It remains an extremely important book in today's uncertain nuclear world, and is essential reading for all those interested in Russell and postwar history.
Includes a new introduction by Ken Coates, Chairman of The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.

Foreword

Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare was first published in 1959, in an effort ‘to prevent the catastrophe which would result from a large scale H-bomb war’. Nuclear technology had already evolved more and deadlier weapons, and these had created a new and more precarious balance of power. Public concern was growing. Russell's views changed in the years following Hiroshima, and were to change again, as the arms race became institutional and ever more costly. Military planning soared away into the realms of fantasy, but the reality was that mankind had developed hitherto unimagined destructive capacities.

Inevitably, Russell's writing about the bomb was dominated by the fact of the Cold War. Fear of Communism had already ranged the United States and its European allies into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. An Eastern Alliance, the Warsaw Treaty Organisation, had emerged shortly afterwards. Fear of Communism did not only stimulate military co-ordination: for a time, it also promoted economic co-operation, and the ascendancy throughout the West of what is now thought of as the Keynesian world order. These were to be the years of a social welfare consensus in Western Europe, and of the emerging Common Market. Public planning and governmental intervention prospered in the West European economy as never before. Undoubtedly leaders such as Jean Monnet drew support from the business communities with which they were working, on the supposition that their policies would help to fortify the institutions of liberal democracy in the West. Were not Stalin's tanks massed along the newly defined Eastern border? And were not the Communist Parties in Italy and France able to count their votes in many millions?

But if the phobias of the time guaranteed a long period of full employment and relative prosperity, they also launched frenetic military competition. Ultimately the welfare consensus began to wear off: but the military confrontation proved more enduring.

Those who had worked on the development of the bomb in the United States had not expected that it should be tried out on cities without prior warning. They had presumed that a public test of its powers might be made at sea, or in some unpopulated area. In fact, the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki seems to have had little to do with military exigencies in the war with Japan, which was already drawing to a close. The presumption of many, politicians and scholars alike, is that the first nuclear bombardment took place in answer to the felt need of the American leadership, to send a chilling message to the Soviet Union.

In a very short time, Stalin showed that he had understood, and the Russians detonated their own bomb four years after the Hiroshima explosion. The Soviet hydrogen bomb followed inexorably, just as had the American fusion device.¹ The nuclear race was on. Soon after there opened the race to perfect intercontinental and other rockets, which might deliver the new weapons.

This contest was precisely encapsulated in the metaphor which Russell presented to describe it:

‘Since the nuclear stalemate became apparent, the Governments of East and West have adopted the policy which Mr. Dulles calls “brinkmanship”. This is a policy adapted from a sport which, I am told, is practised by some youthful degenerates. This sport is called “Chicken!”. It is played by choosing a long straight road with a white line down the middle and starting two very fast cars towards each other from opposite ends. Each car is expected to keep the wheels of one side on the white line. As they approach each other, mutual destruction becomes more and more imminent. If one of them swerves from the white line before the other, the other, as he passes, shouts “Chicken!”, and the one who has swerved becomes an object of contempt. As played by irresponsible boys, this game is considered decadent and immoral, though only the lives of the players are risked. But when the game is played by eminent statesmen, who risk not only their own lives but those of many hundreds of millions of human beings, it is thought on both sides that the statesmen on one side are displaying a high degree of wisdom and courage, and only the statesmen on the other side are reprehensible. This, of course, is absurd. Both are to blame for playing such an incredibly dangerous game. The game may be played without misfortune a few times, but sooner or later it will come to be felt that loss of face is more dreadful than nuclear annihilation. The moment will come when neither side can face the derisive cry of “Chicken!” from the other side. When that moment is come, the statesmen of both sides will plunge the world into destruction.’²

But apt though it was in the beginning, the game of ‘Chicken!’ was soon to become a most inadequate guide to the state of the nuclear threat as it extended into wider areas. The polarisation of world conflict was not to remain absolute. New nuclear powers continuously arrived. At first, people in the grip of the Cold War mentality perceived the French and British bombs as if they were at the service of the overarching Western alliance. The British bombs may have been, but the French were something different. Later the Chinese bomb was also mythically assimilated to the Russian armoury. But in truth the nuclear potential divided allies, as well as cementing enmities: the French bomb was manufactured as a result of an intense political argument about the autonomy of France within the Western alliance system: and the birth of the Chinese nuclear capacity was engendered in a ferocious dispute with China's Russian ally. The growth of Chinese nuclear armaments was simultaneously the eruption of the Sino-Soviet dispute, which was in due time to generate actual military exchanges, and to cause the Chinese to ‘dig deep and store grain’ by constructing vast labyrinths of nuclear shelters under their main cities, in preparation for Soviet nuclear attacks.

So rooted had the Cold War mentality become by this time, that senior American Intelligence officers went to considerable lengths to persuade the United States Government and its allies that the quarrel between Russia and China was a mock-battle, got up especially in order to mislead the West, as part of an extremely subtle campaign of world domination. The most eminent proponent of the notion that the Sino-Soviet conflict was an elaborate deception was James Angleton of the CIA, who was much influenced by a Soviet defector called Anatoli Golytsin. The split, he said, was

‘simply a clever ruse to tempt the United States into commitments and aid to China, which would then be used to weaken and exploit the United States.’

Angleton's suspicions were apparently indulged by Morris Oldfield of MI6, who also refused to believe those of his own specialists who confirmed the reality of the split.³

But in reality it was the repeated specific American nuclear threats against China which had convinced the Chinese Government that it needed its own nuclear weapons in order to guarantee its continued independence. Relentless and systematic pressure were undoubtedly a key feature of America's China policy.

This first became public knowledge on the 30th November 1950, during the Korean War, when President Truman called a press conference to announce that he was considering a nuclear bombardment of China. The resultant outcry persuaded Clement Attlee to fly at once to Washington, in order to dissuade the Americans. But after the departure of Truman, the same thought recurred. President Eisenhower told us in his memoirs:

‘In order to compel the Chinese Communists to accede to an armistice, it was obvious that if we were to go over to a major offensive the war would have to be expanded outside of Korea—with strikes against the supporting Chinese airforce in Manchuria, a blockade of the Chinese coast and similar measures … Finally, to keep the attack from becoming overtly costly, it was clear that we would have to use atomic weapons … we dropped the word, discreetly, of our intention.’⁴

So the Korean War concluded in the truce at Panmunjon in 1953.

Subsequently Sherman Adams, the White House Chief of Staff, gave his view of these events.

‘Talking one day with Eisenhower about the events that led up finally to the truce in Korea, I asked him what it was that brought the Communists into line. “Danger of an atomic war”, he said without hesitation. “We told them we could not hold a limited war any longer if the Communists welched on any truce. They didn't want a full-scale war or an atomic attack”.’⁵

The tensions created in the Korean War were not to die away with the cessation of that conflict. There remained a strong American engagement in the continuing conflict between the two Chinas: mainland China and Taiwan. After the Communist victory in 1949, the United States, and for a long time some of its allies, recognised the exiled government of Chiang Kai-Shek, which established itself in the island of Taiwan, as the legitimate authority in all China. Taiwan occupied the Chinese seat in the Security Council of the United Nations. More American threats, lacking nothing in explicitness, were evoked by the ensuing disputes between China and Taiwan, concerning the Tachen Islands in 1954, and the Islands of Quemoy and Matsu in 1955 and again in 1958. Chiang Kai-Shek was using these islands for the continued molestation of Chinese shipping, and as jumping off grounds for hit and run raids on the mainland. The Americans confirmed their support for Chiang at each point in this stand off, with direct nuclear warnings. Of course, nuclear confrontation can involve generalised non-specific threats, such as visible deployments or warning manoeuvres. But these threats were direct, anything but hints. In the end, Eisenhower sent the 7th Fleet to the Taiwan Straits, and announced that the United States Air Force had, in readiness for any eventuality, been equipped with nuclear missiles during the Quemoy crisis. This mobilisation cost a billion dollars. Small wonder that the Chinese Communists turned to their Russian allies with a request for countervailing power.

However, the Soviet leaders were nervous about devolving nuclear weapons into the control of their largest ally. They sensed that they might court total destruction themselves if they yielded the nuclear initiative to a proxy.

Even so, on 15th October 1957, a secret agreement was reached by which the Russians undertook to provide the Chinese with ‘a sample of an atomic bomb and technical data concerning its manufacture’. But after the later Quemoy crisis there were second thoughts about this issue, because the Soviet Government believed (and the historian Roy Medvedev tends to think they were right⁶) that the Chinese were provoking an incident for reasons of their own. From this distance, in the absence of inside information, it is quite impossible to provide categorical proof either way: but it does appear perfectly clear that Chiang Kai-Shek was himself an adept provocateur and had a permanent interest in maintaining the highest level of tension between People's China and his American backers. Quemoy was not an innocent desert island, but an advanced and active military base, and the Chinese bombardment of it was arguably a reasonable form of self-protection.

This indeed, whatever he thought privately, was the public assumption of Khrushchev in his message to Eisenhower on 8th September 1958. If we are to regard Khrushchev's memoirs as authentic, they show that in fact he went a great deal further than this.

‘We were all in favour of Mao Tse-Tung's liquidating these two islands as potential jumping off points’ he wrote.⁷

Chiang, he thought, was hoping to recover possession of the mainland and the Americans were ‘egging him on’. Indeed, Khrushchev expresses his impatience because the Chinese were not more resolute in pressing their offensive. ‘You can imagine our surprise’ he said, ‘when the balance tipped in favour of Mao Tse-Tung …’ but ‘they suddenly halted their offensive. As a result the whole operation came to nothing’.

In any case, what is not in dispute is that the Chinese later asserted publicly that after the Quemoy face-off, on 20th June 1959 the Russians unilaterally ‘tore up’ their 1957 promise. It is also beyond doubt that thereafter Moscow cut off all direct nuclear assistance to Beijing. Khrushchev indeed was attempting to promote the idea of an Asian nuclear-free zone in his discussions with the Americans, even though the Chinese were not parties to this proposal.

All the public polemics between Russia and China on ideological questions, including the acrimonious debate on the question of the alleged ‘inevitability'of war, followed these events. Not one of the main doctrinal quarrels preceded them. There were undoubtedly gross excesses in the polemic war which became known as the Sino-Soviet dispute. As often happens, this dispute appears to have gained a momentum of its own. However, it did not fall out of the blue, and its aggravation was to a very considerable degree influenced by specific events, which were far from being simply matters of doctrine.

In 1963 the Cold War stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union came to a head in the October crisis in Cuba. Khrushchev had agreed to deploy intermediate range nuclear missiles in Cuba, to deter any repetition of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. President Kennedy insisted on the withdrawal of all such missiles, and imposed a naval blockade to prevent the importation of arms to Cuba. The Cubans appealed to the Russians not to give way, and it became clear that a Soviet fleet of ships, some of which carried arms, was approaching Cuba. An armada awaited them. Here was the chicken game fully operational, on the high seas. In the event it was Khrushchev who swerved, and the world survived. But the Soviet Government drew the conclusion that the avoidance of any similar climb down required that it should embark upon a superhuman programme to construct overwhelming nuclear force. Cuba frightened the civilised world, but escalated the Cold War arms race beyond anyone's imagination. However, if most of the world saw the Cuba crisis as a momentary reprieve, and accepted it with relief, in China, it looked quite different. Now it was evident that the Russian leadership would not risk the destruction of Russia in order to defend its allies.

The Chinese thenceforward entered on a policy of self-reliance, and exploded their own atomic bomb in October 1964. Within the short space of three years they had progressed to the point where they were able to detonate a thermo-nuclear explosion on 17th June 1967. Delivery systems of such weapons were very much more difficult to perfect. A large part of the technical problem in preparing a nuclear explosion inheres in the difficulty involved in refining a sufficient quantity of fissionable material. This is much easier to do if there exists an expendable ...