There Will Be War Volume IV

by Jerry Pournelle

  Does that remind you of anything? You say Poland? I was thinking rather of Nicaragua vis-a-vis the USA… not to mention Panama, the Philippines, and recently Grenada.

  To quote The Guardian (London), 26 Oct 83, when commenting on the last-mentioned invasion:

  For exactly half of this century so far, a total of 42 years, American troops have been occupying one or another of the countries and islands of Central America and the Caribbean… according to Gordon Connell Smith of Hull University, the historian of the Organisation of American States.

  The article concludes by listing more than twenty American interventions, beginning in 1899.

  Confronted with such a record, one can scarcely wonder at the fact that many Europeans take America’s endless claims about “Soviet aggression” in the light of the parable about having a mote in one’s own eye.

  Incidentally, the main reason the Soviets went into Afghanistan in support of its just-deposed pro-Russian government was effectively identical to the grounds on which America invaded Grenada: One-sixth of the population of the territory the Russians inherited from the Czarist Empire is Moslem, and thanks to the way the czars used to treat the Moslems, it took two generations to persuade them they would be better off under socialism—which, in material terms at least, they are. If the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary (sc. reactionary) version of Islam were to take root within their frontiers, there would be a risk of civil war.

  Is this not analogous to the way the American government felt about Grenada and still feels about Cuba—that there is a threat to the established order within its own sphere of influence?

  I have dwelt on the foregoing matters at such length in support of my belief that the NATO countries have not made a proper assessment of the “other side’s” intentions.

  I’ll go farther and suggest that many of them have not made a proper assessment of their major allies’ intentions.

  As further evidence, let me set alongside that quotation from Khrushchev one that the Guardian lately reprinted from the Jerusalem Post. The speaker is President Reagan, on the phone to Mr. Tom Dine, executive director of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee:

  You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament for the signs foretelling Armageddon and I find myself wondering if we’re the generation that’s going to see that come about. I don’t know if you’ve’ noted any of these prophecies lately but, believe me, they certainly describe the times we’re going through.

  Faced with remarks like that, informed circles in Europe, and particularly in Britain, are seriously questioning the wisdom of the course on which we are embarked.

  Because, let’s face it, neither the eschatological content of Marxism nor a belief in prophecies of Armageddon can constitute the basis for a “defense” policy that genuinely defends what it’s claimed to defend.

  And no more do nuclear weapons, on which the Western Alliance has relied so long that its entrenched attitudes have become a habit as formidable and threatening to life as is a junkie’s dependence on heroin.

  Besides, former Pentagon strategic-planner Rear-Admiral Gene La Roque once said, “We fought World War I in Europe, we fought World War II in Europe, and if you dummies let us, we’ll fight World War III in Europe!”—which is where I happen to reside.

  I’m frightened. And I’m not alone.

  Today’s world can be summed up by the image of two rival families, each rich, powerful and quarrelsome, in an apartment building shared by many other people, most of them considerably poorer and quite a few of them immigrants who don’t speak the same language. One of the rich families lives on the entrance floor and boasts, when visitors call, about the gilt and glass and marble in the foyer. The other rich family—not by any means so well off in objective fact—occupies the top floor and boasts about its splendid view… although now and then their visitors don’t arrive on time because the elevators are out of order and the people on the ground floor, saying they don’t have any call to use them, refuse to contribute to their maintenance.

  Whenever the people on the top floor malign those on the bottom floor, the latter cry, “We’ll dynamite the elevator shafts!”

  Whenever those at street level slander them, those on the top floor shout, “We’ll drop Molotov cocktails down the elevator shafts!”

  Caught between the threat of having the walls blown out at ground level and the whole structure being turned into a chimney for a fire storm, a small, concerned group of other occupants pleads and wheedles and begs for a hint of common sense… and is mocked for its pains.

  Speaking as an inhabitant of one of the middle floors, that’s my honest view of the nuclear-armed world that America and Russia have created—or, strictly, that America has created as the country that came up first with the A bomb, the H bomb, the submarine-launched ballistic missile, MIRVing, the cruise missile… The history of the arms race since 1945 has been that of Russia frantically trying to catch up. About the only things the USSR did first were to launch an orbital satellite and to send a human being into orbit. Check the records of the Apollo-Soyuz linkup for an idea of the desperate expedients to which the Russians were driven in order to achieve those goals.

  Nobody except maybe T.K. Jones imagines that a nuclear war can be fought and won. There is exactly one way that it could happen, and that’s if one of the nuclear superpowers (I use the word, but do bear in mind that Russia is not a superpower in the American sense: rather, a third-world country with grandiose ambitions… Do you know how far apart emergency telephones are on Russian highways? One hundred and fifty kilometers!)—if one of the nuclear superpowers, anyway, were to throw everything in its arsenal at its adversary, targeted on the means of retaliation, ideally with no warning whatsoever. But even that, according to the latest findings which indicate a subsequent “nuclear winter” during which solar radiation would be cut to five percent of normal, doesn’t look like a particularly good bet anymore.

  It remains unfortunately true that a nuclear war could be fought and lost not only by the combatants, but by everybody.

  Despite this knowledge, and despite the fact that every arms race in the whole of history has ended in the war it was allegedly intended to prevent, none of the so-called “multilateral” disarmament negotiations since 1945 have thus far resulted in the abolition of a single weapon. The ultimate hollowness of this “negotiating” approach and the insincerity of those participating were revealed in the claim that the deployment of cruise missiles would “force Russia back to the conference table.”

  Suppose the boot had been on the other foot, and it had been the Russians who said that about the Americans?

  We in the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (which my wife and I joined at its inaugural meeting in 1958) have been arguing for a quarter of a century that there is a way out of this impasse and that Britain is in an ideal position to blaze the trail. I speak as a patriot as distinct from a nationalist; I believe that our way of life is resilient enough to survive no matter what form of political or ideological threat, provided we have a government that adheres to its traditional principles (though our present regime gives cause for considerable doubt on that score), and I not only believe but I know that nuclear war would wipe my country from the slate of history.

  There are about a hundred and two foreign military bases in Britain, a figure not exceeded by any of the Warsaw Pact nations on the basis of available evidence, and they now include launch sites for nuclear-tipped missiles over which my government has no control.

  These bases make Britain an inevitable target even in a war that serves none of our national interests. The British Medical Association, in a study commissioned by the government but which the government later tried to suppress, concluded that even a one-megaton strike over a center of population would overload our medical resources and that a massive attack would kill up to forty million of our present population. That’s what we stand to lose.

  It is of course quite
true that no place would be totally immune from the consequences of a nuclear war (especially of the nuclear Fimbulwinter)—but at least countries where there are no nuclear missiles would stand a better chance than those countries that might be assailed in a preemptive strike, as the Swiss so rightly concluded.

  It follows that Britain should therefore become a country where there are no nuclear missiles. Furthermore, it should not be tied to any alliance that is prepared to consider first use of nuclear weapons.

  At the same time, Britain should adopt the only sane course for any small and densely populated nation: Establish a citizen militia system combined with a program of shelter-building of the kind that would appear provocative were it undertaken by a nuclear power, and likewise undertake the stockpiling of food and fuel in quantities sufficient to support its population for at least a year—costly, one must admit, but cheap compared with the risk of losing everything.

  Some would argue that for a time at least, in the context of this policy, Britain should retain nuclear weapons aboard submarines, provided they were permanently at sea and could thus be reserved for retaliation. (A commitment to “no first use” would obviously be called for.)

  I would dispute even this. The proper counter to “nuclear blackmail,” as it is sometimes termed, is never found in a threat to use nuclear weapons; such a threat could only make a bad situation worse inasmuch as it might easily provoke the war one was hoping to avoid.

  No: The proper counter is public and grand-scale recognition of the fact that nuclear weapons are useless for the defense of any country, no matter how large, no matter where in the world, but most of all for countries as small and populous as Britain, where their limited resources can better be spent on actually increasing the chances of survival.

  Faced with the reality of a nation coming to its collective senses and abandoning nuclear weapons for the reasons just outlined, it is not only possible but probable that the world community would respond with a gigantic sigh of relief. We are being bled dry by the cost of the nuclear arms race. Even the United States is in deficit largely because of spending demanded by the military, while the Soviet Union is permanently on the verge of bankruptcy owing to its efforts to keep up with the West. Every third-world country with ambitions is diverting cash and manpower that could be better applied elsewhere—in order to achieve these twentieth-century nuclear status symbols, which, as I trust I have shown, are effectively pointless.

  On the one hand, we have been duped into equating defense and revenge; on the other hand, we have failed in that fundamental strategic need to make a correct assessment of the other side’s intentions.

  Much of this, of course, is due to the bad habit of referring to “the enemy” in a time of peace. There is indeed a worldwide struggle going on between capitalism and communism… but how differently we would view it if we used the more accurate term of “rival,” or “competitor”!

  In fact, the Soviet Union is not militarily aggressive in the same sense as were the old imperial powers. It doesn’t need to be, and on the rare occasions when it tries to be, it makes a dreadful mess of things.

  However, in every place and at every time that the vaunted values of the Western way of life are betrayed by greedy, brutal ruling classes and America or Britain or another so-called democratic country allies itself with a dictatorship, another battle in the real World War III is lost and won.

  Worse yet: We have corrupted that Western way of life to the point where scarcely anyone admires it anymore—in many cases, not even our own citizens. And much of this corruption is due to the mere existence of nuclear weapons.

  I quote Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Lort-Phillips, ex-Brigade of Guards, who resigned his commission to become a Liberal Party spokesman on defense and frequently appeared on CND platforms to argue vehemently for independent nuclear disarmament. Lort-Phillips expressed his reasoning in the following terms:

  If, back in the nineteen thirties, anyone had told me the day would arrive when a British government predicated its defence policy on a declared willingness to exterminate cities-ful of women and children, I’d have said, “Maybe those Nazis over there in Germany—but never the British!”

  Well, now it is the British and the Americans and the Russians and the French and the Chinese, and very likely the South Africans and the Israelis and the Argentines and the Pakistanis and…

  Next year, how many more?

  Someone must reverse the nuclear arms race before a war breaks out, whether by design or by accident. Being, as I said, a patriot, I’d like it to be Britain that starts the process—but also being cynical, I don’t think our present government has the sense to see reason; so, being human too, I don’t care who does it, so long as it gets done.

  There’s one further advantage in the policy proposed by CND. Putting the responsibility for defending our country back on the shoulders of its citizens—instead of leaving everything to computers and a handful of ivory-towered “experts” who calculate with abstracts remote from the reality of blood and death—would do more to restore national pride and confidence than any other course one might imagine. And I honestly believe that the same would hold true in any country that has the guts to admit that nuclear weapons are not defensive but solely adapted to that uncivilized and futile act, revenge.

  A recent letter in the Guardian pointed out that while dying for one’s country might still be a noble deed, dying with one’s country is a different matter. And that is precisely the prospect that now faces all of us.

  It was well-said of the draft dodgers during the Vietnam War that they were the people of whom America should be most proud because a free and democratic way of life had taught them that authority must never be obeyed without question. If we survive long enough for future historians to write an account of the twentieth century, I hope they will say of the contemporary Peace Movement that it was made up of people courageous enough to accept the fact that nuclear weapons had made wars unfightable, people who decided that instead of dying with their countries, it made better sense to live for them… and for all mankind.

  Partial reference list:

  The Guardian, London, 26 Oct 83 (“US Interventions in Other Countries”); 29 Nov 83 (“Reagan’s Belief in Armageddon”)

  New Scientist, London, 3 Nov 83 (“Risk of Nuclear Winter”)

  The Times Atlas of World History, London, 1978 (“German Invasion of Countries Now Russian Satellites”)

  Disgrace Abounding by Douglas Reed, London, 1939 (“Fascist Governments in Europe in the 1930s”)

  World Aircraft, World War II, Part I, London, 1978

  (“Finnish Aircraft Wearing the Swastika”)

  The Modern Encyclopedia & World Atlas, London, n.d., prob. 1937-8 (“British Invasions of Afghanistan”)

  The Medical Effects of Nuclear War: The Report of the British Medical Association’s Board of Science and Education, London, 1983 (“Nuclear War Deaths in the UK”)

  Editor's Afterword to:

  A WAY OUT MAYBE… OR A DEAD END FOR SURE

  by John Brunner

  They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

  —Benjamin Franklin

  I asked John Brunner for this contribution because I was interested in his concept of a Swiss militia system. Britain is a small country, perilously near the Soviet Union. Perhaps a case could be made for basing British defense on something other than nuclear weapons.

  Consequently, I wasn’t surprised by his conclusions; but I am horrified by his assumptions. If this is what the sensible left truly believes, then God help us all.

  Begin with this. Brunner dismisses the enslavement of eastern Europe with an airy wave. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, “were ceded to the USSR under the Yalta agreement as its sphere of influence.” Ceded? Not by their own actions. They were delivered into the hands of their masters by others. It was no fault of their own, nor were they consulted; i
ndeed, the people of Britain and the United States were not consulted.

  If I cede your home to the local bully, are you bound by my decision?

  It is no matter, though. “All those listed, by the way, were either conquered by the Germans or allied with them during WWII.” Apparently it is an inexcusable crime to have been conquered by the Germans. Will Brunner argue next for the Soviet occupation of France? Moreover, he feels that any nation ever to have had a fascist government deserves to be enslaved by the communists. Can he really believe this? Perhaps it is more likely that he sees no hope for aiding the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Balts, Rumanians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, etc. Since he cannot help them, he comforts himself with the myth that they deserve the gulag archipelago. Of course those old enough to participate in government prior to 1940 are either dead or retired now; but Brunner is content that the sins of the fathers be visited on future generations, now and forever.

  It is the standard view of the left that the Soviet Union does no more than react to fear of invasion. This analysis of Soviet intentions leaves out too much. Whom do they fear now? In the years following 1945 the United States dismantled the most powerful military force ever assembled on this planet; the result was the conquest of Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade.

  The Soviet leadership needs much more than security. Communist officials can never declare permanent peace with the West, because to do so is to repudiate their legitimacy as rulers of the Soviet Union. If the Communist Party is not the vanguard of history—then what is it? What justification has it to be the only political party allowed? Surely not its economic accomplishments.

  The fact is that Soviet public opinion is cynically manipulated. Soviet citizens are ceaselessly bombarded with anti-western propaganda designed to prepare them for war. To this day most Soviet citizens seriously believe that the western democracies will invade Russia at the first opportunity. How could they know otherwise? Access to western newspapers and television is officially restricted, and the publications are severely censored to boot.