Disarming critics (1983)

From the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Michael Heseltine, who did not get where he is today through any diffidence about upsetting people, is robustly enjoying his job as the government’s scourge of the nuclear disarmers. He could hardly be expected to jeopardise this happy state by publicly debating with CND although the reason he gave for refusing — that CND have closed minds — has the deterring implication that Heseltine has an open mind on the issue and that it is not therefore beyond possibility that he could be converted to CND. That would mean more than the end of his pullulating ambition to be Prime Minister; he would have to exchange all those elegant pin-stripe suits for a demo-battered anorak and trim his hair so that it is no longer a ready handhold for a policeman dragging him away from a protest lie-down.

But until that happens — or at least until the next general election — we must endure Heseltine's audacious claim to be both a leader of the peace movement and a last line of defence against the menace of a Russian dictatorship. For it is unlikely that the government feels it has anything to fear from CND; more to the point is the decision of the last Labour Party conference to support unilateral nuclear disarmament, which may have given the Tories an electoral weapon to extinguish the last twitches of life from Labour’s ravaged body. This situation has its irony, for every Labour government since the bomb first went off have been firm supporters of British nuclear weapons and only the silliest of Labour Party supporters are likely to believe that this gruesome tradition is not safe with Michael Foot who, since that embarrassing conference, has industriously applied his oratorical gifts to fudging the issue.

The Thatcher government, like its Labour predecessors, base their case on the deterrent theory, which appeals to anyone who is able to set aside difficult things like historical facts. The theory begins with the crude nationalist assumption that it is always the other side which needs to be deterred — in this case Russia, no longer a staunch ally in the war to save the world for democracy but a ruthless aggressor:

  . . . as early as 1949 Russia was plainly showing her belief that Soviet ideology must dominate the world, and her readiness to use military force to achieve that. (Government film, The Peace Game.)

No nuclear power has yet admitted to having weapons which are aggressive; they all claim that their bombs are defensive and a contribution to world peace. It has been like that from the very beginning; Truman did not describe Hiroshima as an avoidable disaster but as an "overwhelming success”. The first Russian bomb in September 1949 was greeted by Moscow’s British mouthpiece, the Daily Worker, as "tremendous news” which would encourage "peace loving people everywhere”. When the first British bomb exploded Churchill "warmly congratulated” all those concerned, not forgetting Attlee and his Labour government who had initiated it. In 1964 the Chinese government was exultant about its bomb:

  . . . a major achievement of the Chinese people . . . The development of nuclear weapons by China is for defence and for protecting the Chinese people from the danger of the United States launching a nuclear war.

Then there are the statistics about how many tanks, guns, aircraft, bullets, the Russians and the rest of the Warsaw Pact states have. According to The Peace Game, they outnumber the NATO forces 2½ to one in tanks, nearly 3 to one in guns, well over 2 to one in aircraft. To adjust this imbalance, and so to prevent a "conventional” war, the NATO powers say they need a strong nuclear force:

  . . . the last war was the worst we have ever experienced. It is wars like that which we are trying to prevent with the nuclear deterrent . . . (Margaret Thatcher, Sunday Telegraph, 20 February 1983.)

But it is not just "conventional” wars which nuclear weapons are supposed to guard against; Heseltine sees them as also stopping the "unconventional”, nuclear type: "If we want to be safe from nuclear attack we must possess a nuclear deterrent that is effective”. (Party Political Broadcast, TV. 23 February 1983.)

The confidence in that statement imbued Heseltine's entire performance that evening; he put the deterrent case in a few pointed words: "History shows one nation will only attack another when it is too weak to defend itself". But he then rather spoiled the effect by instancing the Argentinian attack on the Falklands, perhaps forgetting that this was an example of a non-nuclear, and therefore weaker, power attacking a nuclear, and therefore stronger, one. This gap in Heseltine’s argument was soon smothered with a blood-stirring shot of a Union Jack being run up a flagpole. Patriotism is often a handy substitute for logical argument.

But there can be no substituting for reality. The deterrent theory has masked an arms race unprecedented in human history. Since those quaint days of Hiroshima. when there was a bomb which could kill only in tens of thousands, the weapons and their delivery systems have been refined and strengthened to the point when they have the power to kill in millions. Thirty-six countries now have the bomb or the capability to produce it. The world nuclear stockpile represents the equivalent of four tons of TNT for everybody on earth. This, in a rare flash of candour, the nuclear powers call overkill and it exists not to protect human freedom or to make us happier or more secure but to protect the interests of some of the minority class in society who. although their numbers are relatively small, own the world in the sense that they monopolise the means of life.

If the deterrent theory works then major war will have been eliminated, the nations will go on developing more and more horrific weapons and stockpiling enough of them to kill us all several times over but all of this will be a sort of game because there will be no intention, or opportunity, to fire them. Capitalism will have undergone a character change which would have no precedent in human history. Wealth will still be produced as commodities, with the minority class continuing to own the means of production but what has hitherto been an inevitable result of this — international conflicts — will no longer be inevitable. The capitalist class will still have interests to defend but will suddenly lose the will to do so.

The less credulous — or perhaps the more aware — will find it easier to believe that the deterrent must eventually fail; capitalism cannot exist without conflict and sooner or later there will be such a clash as will make the use of nuclear weapons unavoidable if one power or group of them is to hold its own against its rival. If that happens. say the supporters of deterrence, there will be a massive riposte ending in mutual destruction — as if that would be some consolation, among the atomised ruins of our lives. There will in any case be very little time for those who believed in deterrence to realise how wrong they were; the refinements of all those deterring weapons will ensure that they are delivered on target with the very minimum of delay. So what is the theory worth?

Well in spite of what Heseltine said the fact is that Argentina should have been, but was not, deterred from attacking the Falklands by the knowledge that they might provoke a nuclear response from Britain — and there is of course some evidence that the Task Force did carry nuclear weapons. When the 1939/45 war — the sort which Thatcher says she wants to guard against with the bomb — started, there was an expectation, based on the experience of air raids in the first world war, the Spanish Civil War and the Sino/Japanese war, that there would be a swift, crushing air strike which would lay waste to many British cities and kill about 600,000 people. Such was the fear of this that trenches were dug in the parks and commons, 38 million gas masks were issued and plans were laid to evacuate 2 million people from the officially doomed cities. But this did not act as a deterrent to the British government declaring war, when they felt that the interests of their capitalist class left them no choice. When the German air attacks came they did so in spite of the fact that by then the deterrent was operating in the other direction; the British were building the bombers and the organisation which was to wreck far, far worse destruction on German cities and their people.

For the deterrent theory to hold good, it must be assumed that war is an ordered, rational affair which is governed all the time through a series of sage, balanced assessments of reality. Why then did the Germans attack Russia in 1941, landing themselves with massive problems of supply and communication, to say nothing of the hardships of the winter? The motivation for that attack took little account of such obstacles; in 1941 Hitler enthused: “Where is there a region capable of supplying iron of the quality of Ukrainian iron? Where can one find more nickel, more coal, more manganese, more molybdenum?” And a little later he told his generals: "II I do not get the oil of Maikop and Groznyi, then I must end the war".

The war was embarked on over the German expansion into the mineral fields and the markets of the world; from that point it was escalated to a climax in the ruins of Stalingrad, Berlin and Hiroshima. It was a procession of chaos, with its own grisly momentum and with episodes — for example the German policy of antagonising the people of the countries they conquered when a more successful attitude would have been one of reconciliation; for example the profitless destruction of Dresden by the Allied air forces — which fall outside even the requirements of war. If that war had been plannable, on some historical blueprint, it would hardly have moved beyond a stalemate. Today there are still the same basic conflicts of capitalism; only the sides have been shuffled. the uniforms changed, the regions of conflict may have shifted, the armouries are ever more frightful. In a recent advertisement designed (presumably) to encourage young people to join the Royal Navy, we are reminded of the development of the oil and gas fields in the North Sea, which did not exist twenty years ago:

   As a Royal Navy Officer your job would be to keep watch on them; ready to deploy surface and airborne units as well as the Royal Marines company specially trained for anything which might threaten their safety.

Perhaps it is a measure of the confidence which the nuclear powers place in the deterrent theory, that they do not spread the knowledge for the production of the bomb more widely. The effectiveness of a deterrent must be in direct proportion to the number of countries which have it. If every state had the most destructive weapons available then they could all deter each other into a perpetual stalemate. In fact no nuclear power has welcomed the development of the bomb by its rivals. The Russian bomb, said Harry Truman, emphasised “. . . the necessity for that truly effective, enforceable international control of atomic energy which this government . . . support”. When it became apparent that the British were about to explode a test bomb, the Daily Worker damned it as “. . . an unmitigated curse . . . a coward's weapon, designed for the unrestrained massacre of the civilian population". As the Chinese tested their first bomb the Foreign Office, with typical pin-stripe restraint. expressed “deep disappointment".

Capitalism has not changed its character; war cannot and will not be spirited away through the so-called deterrent any more than by an equally miraculous bout of CND-inspired pacifism among the nuclear powers. This social system provides no confidence that the interests of its people are of any consequence beside those of its master class. In fundamental terms, nuclear weapons are significant only as a development in the methods by which modern private property society carries through its conflicts. Here, for example, is how US Vice President Bush — whose finger is a mere coronary away from the Button — describes the attrition theory of the 1980s, in words to warm the cockles of the heart of the late Earl Haig:

  You have a survivability of command and control, a survivability of industrial potential protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict on you. That's the way you have a winner. (Observer, 6 February 1983.)

Before it gets to that, those citizens, might act; the fact that they have the power to do so, and to stop it all, is obscured by the false securities of both the deterrent theory and the exhalation of their fear and anger in futile demonstrations. The world's citizens could set up and operate a social system in which war could not happen; beside that overpowering fact, the debate between deterrence and disarmament is reduced to an irrelevance.

Ivan