fantasy, reality, and the arms race: dilemmas of national security and human survival

Amer. J . Orthopsychiat. 52(4), October 1982

FANTASY, REALITY, AND THE ARMS RACE: Dilemmas of National Security and Human Survival

Richard J. Barnet

Senior Fellow. Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, D.C.

The recent history of the U.S . military build-up is reviewed and its rationale questioned. It is suggested that, as a means of making the nation’s citizens more secure, the reliance on nuclear armaments is counterproductive. A sh$t of economic priorities to better serve the nation’s more immediate, pressing, and real needs is urged.

learly , the number-one health issue C for the planet is the question of our very survival as a species. It is no longer a startling statement to conclude that the species, the race, humanity itself, is in danger-in danger principally from the very instruments that we human beings have devised to preserve and protect us. That is probably the first dilemma of our present security situation, one that re- quires us to rethink the making of national security: what security is both in- dividually and collectively for people today, and what it will take to think our way through to a less insecure environ- ment. We can take some encouragement from the knowledge that the human animal shows remarkable capabilities for adaptation. Areas such as the envi- ronment, for example, offer some limited good news, although not nearly

enough. When we saw that Lake Erie was dying, we found it could be re- versed; when we saw that London was dying from the fumes, it could be re- versed. But we have not begun, as a nation, as agroup of citizens, to take the action that would reverse the very serious security problem that we face: with each additional nuclear weapon, the nuclear threat becomes more of a menace to the security of each of us.

Why do we seem incapable of seeing in time the dreadful contradictions, the dilemmas of our security system?

Why is it that a man like Admiral Rickover can spend a lifetime making weapons and, on his retirement, make the stunning statement-a most wel- come statement, however belated-that the United States is overspending itself on defense and creating the conditions

Presented at a symposium of Physiciansfor Social ResponsibilitylNYC. February 1982. in New York.

582 0002-9432/82/040582-08$00.75 01982 American Orthopsychiatric Association, Inc.

RICHARD J. BARNET 583

for its own destruction, and that he wished he could have sunk most of the ships that he had spent his lifetime building?

Why is it that President Eisenhower, at the end of his career, would say something very similar about the irrational momentum of the military-industrial complex?

Or, why is it that General MacArthur could talk so eloquently, again at the end of his career, about the madness of war, any kind of war, in the world that we had built?

And why is it that we have spent so much money on the military-about 2.5 trillion dollars, I calculate, since 1945-and are contemplating spending in the next four years an amount that approaches in dollars what we spent over generations?

The dollar, of course-thanks to the inflation caused in large part by military spending-is not what it was, but the Administration plans to spend 1.6 trillion dollars in the next four years. So we are talking about a figure approaching two trillion dollars just in the period that this Administration will be in office. Yet it is manifestly clear that, having spent this money, we are less secure than we were when the process began. The people of the United States are, in ob- jective terms, less secure; more missiles are facing the United States today than there were twenty years ago, or ten years ago, or five years ago; and there is still no defense against the nuclear weapons in the hands of other nations. We have created a situation in which we are not only objectively less secure, but we feel less secure; that is perhaps the most significant new development of the past four or five years.

A recent national Gallup Poll reported

the extraordinary finding that some 47% of the respondents believed that nuclear war is likely within five years. When asked by the pollster if they really un- derstood what that meant, with the question, “What are your personal chances of survival in such a war?“, the overwhelming majority came out with the view that their chance for personal survival was less than fifty-fifty.

What does it mean to a nation that as a result of its security policies-the war- prevention system for which we spend so much money-almost half the country thinks it will fail within a very short period of time, and that when it fails, they will die? What does that mean to the security and power of the nation? What does it do to our capacity as a people to adapt to the reality that we face? I suspect that we find ourselves unable to grasp the danger because it is all too unpleasant to think about: so most of us do not, at least not at the conscious level. We are trapped by the very lan- guage we have developed. The way we have devised to talk about security plays havoc with logic and with our own pos- sibilities for saving our civilization.

The word “defense” is itself the ulti- mate irony: at almost the very moment in 1947 when we changed the name of the War Department to the Department of Defense, we lost the capacity to defend the nation. In 1967, we had a Sec- retary of Defense who made public for the first time some of the grisly arithme- tic of nuclear war. One hundred nuclear weapons falling on either the United States or the Soviet Union, in the high- kiloton range, would destroy something like 40 million people on either side and destroy two-thirds of the industrial capacity. The United States today has an arsenal of nuclear weapons of about

THE ARMS RACE

30,000 of all kinds; the Soviet Union, about 20,000. So we are talking about a situation in which neither side can possibly defend itself in the traditional sense. The dictionary definition of “defense” is “to ward off, to protect;” and we use beguiling metaphors such as “shield,” as in the “nuclear shield.” But there is no shield. And when we thought seriously about building an actual shield, an antiballistic missile, the pros- pect was so absurd, so costly, so tech- nologically beyond our capacity, that we abandoned it; we made one of our few agreements with the Russians based on that fundamental perception on both sides that there could not be a defense in the traditional sense. Yet day after day, we go on using that word.

What they really mean by defense, they explain if we press the point, is deterrence-war prevention. There, again, we are asked to hark back to a long history that we have left behind us, the history of some ten thousand years of our species, in which the idea that you prepare for war to get peace perhaps had some plausibility. The idea that it was better to have more bows and arrows than less, more tanks and planes than less, had a certain plausibility.

But we are now again in the extraordinary situation where producing more weapons not only does not make a war less likely, but makes it more likely. Not only does it fail to create more security for the people who are ostensibly being protected by the weapons, it creates less security in very specific ways. The weapons that both we and the Soviet Union are building today are increas- ingly so-called counterforce weapons: they are weapons designed to strike other weapons, and they are highly accurate, programmed by very complex

communication systems and computers to strike quickly to reduce the reaction time on both sides. Thus it becomes impossible to have the luxury that even President Kennedy had in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, to think for a few hours, a few days, about whether or not to make the fatal decision to go to all-out war. The memoirs of the participants in that crisis provide unique insight into how tenuous this war-prevention system is, and how, for all the high technology, it ultimately depends upon human judgment and human rationality under the worst possible conditions: in the hermetic world of the White House basement or ‘some basement in the Kremlin, without sleep, without re- course to anything but the immediate decision before them, and cut off from all human communication save the very special preprogrammed communica- tions from the military forces that our leaders have developed for precisely such a crisis.

This deterrent system, this war- prevention system that we have developed, is clearly out of control, because it is violating the very precepts of rationality which the priests of this system were espousing only ten to fifteen years ago. At that time some of the very same people who today are joining this movement to warn about the dangers of nuclear war were themselves rather complacent, because they put great faith in technology and in human rationality. They believed in something called a “stable deterrent,” that it would be possible for both sides, recognizing their shared common interests, to build “good” weapons instead of “bad” weapons. Good weapons are weapons with a slow reaction time. They are not accurate and do not threaten the other

RICHARD J. BARNET

side, or make the other side think that one is going to launch a first-strike. They are not vulnerable, and not susceptible to a surprise attack from the other side. These were the weapons that were going to guarantee our nuclear future.

ut what happened? We gave the B contracts to human beings, to en- gineers, to scientists, and this very bizarre definition of what a good weapon is simply was beyond them-because the new notion of a good weapon is, in classic terms, a bad weapon. En- gineers and technicians like to build accurate weapons, fast weapons, weapons that work, weapons that do all kinds of sophisticated things, weapons that give all kinds of options to the military plan- ners. So we got a generation of good weapons in the old sense but, in the new sense, they are very, very bad weapons indeed.

This development has demonstrated beyond doubt that we are unable to control the arms race as a technological problem, that there is no technological solution to the arms race, and that there is no way in which this war-prevention system can work other than by a massive, political intervention into this technological process. Today the war- prevention system is closer to a break- down than it has ever been. The weapons that the other side is about to build are far more threatening than anything that is already in the arsenal on either side. And that is not only because the weapons are inherently more dangerous-they are-but each new weapon carries with it a declaration of intentions. Each side asks, “Why is the other side building on top of the 30,000, on top of the 20,000? Knowing what 100 weapons will do, what are they doing

this for?” So the very momentum of the arms race, as it continues at whatever level, is extremely destabilizing because it creates justifiable apprehension on both sides.

Thus, there is no military balance, and there never can be one. That is another one of those words that is flung at us in the newpapers and in government documents. There is no such thing as a military balance in the first place, because neither side in an uncontrolled arms race will permit it to happen. We will spend our trillion and a half dollars; the Rus- sians will spend theirs. Make no mis- take, the notion that was presented in the presidential campaign, and hinted at by the President subsequently, that somehow the Soviet Union would opt out of an arms race if we really chal- lenged them with this massive ex- penditure, has been belied by every- thing we know in their 65-year history. That is one of the myths on which this false security system rests, because otherwise there is no denouement in this continuing arms race except war. We are presented with a false reassurance about the Russians collapsing under the pressure of the arms race to push us on to make the “final” effort to achieve security. We have been told this again and again, ever since the arms race began.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the American people do not feel safe, and that below the surface, below the easy sense of fatalism and acceptance that characterizes so many Americans, is a deep-seated apprehension and crippling fear, which in itself seriously undermines the security of our nation.

The time has come to redefine what we mean by security. The foreign policy of the United States is now clearly in crisis. We face the most dangerous mo-

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ment in our national history since the Second World War, and the weapons build-up does not make it any less dangerous. Chairman Brezhnev of the Soviet Union recently expressed the same view. We are heading toward an all-out arms race, the consequences of which we do not understand. Our government is engaged in a massive military build-up without any demonstration that it has either a political or a military strategy that would carry out the stated objectives.

It is important, in strictly economic and technical terms, to look much more closely at what we mean by a military build-up. It is not true that even when you spend large amounts of money for the Department of Defense that you are even increasing military hardware. So much waste, so much superfluous spending is included in the billions that we provide to the Department of De- fense that it is very difficult to point to additional military capabilities. We are spending a great deal of money, for example, to take some battleships out of mothballs, battleships that are highly vulnerable to even a primitive enemy attack. Is that an increase in military capabilities? We have followed the rather stunning policy of providing highly sophisticated rockets to some of the very countries we hope to impress by sending into their waters ships that are totally vulnerable to those same missiles. There are, throughout the military budget, contradictions that need to be addressed and that even raise ques- tions about whether such a swollen military establishment actually provides increased military capabilities. But, even more important, the relationship between these new military capabilities,

if they exist, and the political options or purposes that these capabilities would supposedly serve is becoming increas- ingly unclear.

Thus we have come to the point of obsolescence with regard to another traditional word that we use: war. The whole idea of war is to use violence in a controlled way for political objectives. We have reached the point where a nuclear war is certainly a threat to commit suicide; it is beyond politics, it has burst politics. It is also clear that many of the other ways in which we purport to use our military power-so-called con- ventional war strategies-create such dangers of a nuclear escalation that they, too, carry with them a very un- certain basis for extending or projecting the power of this nation.

We have ceased to understand the political change in the world that has occurred since what I would call “the first nuclear age.” In the first nuclear age, the United States had either a monopoly or a near monopoly of nuclear weapons. The world was pretty much under the political control of decision- makers in two cities in the world, Washington and Moscow, divided between the spheres of influence of those two powers. Today, that is not the case. Today, there are many more nations with nuclear weapons as a result of ac- tions that the United States and the Soviet Union have taken. Power is more and more diffused by sending in sophisticated hardware to countries that we hope thereby to control.

We have created the situations where our own influence has been greatly re- duced and threatened. It is not only the United States that has had this experi- ence. The U.S. sent 20 billion dollars to


the Shah-the result: a nation that con- siders itself an enemy of the United States. The Soviet Union sent billions to Egypt, to Sudan, to Indonesia-nation after nation, they have been thrown out and their influence undercut. The traditional notion that we can use the arms economy to buy influence in the old way-and it worked in the old days-no longer is possible. At a time when the Soviet Union is more isolated than it has been since the Second World War, the United States is now devoting its diplomatic energies to isolating itself. The web of relationships that the United States developed with other industrial nations all over the world is seriously frayed. Europe and Japan are no longer clients of the United States, but they are still being treated as such. This failure to understand changes in the real world, the complex reality that we face, seriously undermines the security of the American people.

e do not face the real problems that W confront us; there is little hope of significant recovery of the economic momentum that characterized that very brief period that historians will call the “Pax Americana,” that period that Henry Luce said would be the “Ameri- can Century.” It was the American century between 1945 and 1971, and it has been over for more than ten years, but we have not caught up with what has happened. If we do not reform the world monetary system; if we do not find a new set of ground rules for the world economy to operate under; if we do not solve the problems of world debt, of what is happening in the Third World, of massive unemployment around the world which directly impinges on the

American economy (our workers are part of a global pool, and what happens around the world directly affects what happens here), if we do not address these problems and direct our energy to their solution instead of to the insoluble problem of finding the technological an- swer to security in the arms race, we will be in ever-increasing trouble. But the present Administration sees these problems as annoying byproducts of the United States-Soviet confrontation and seems to ignore them as the security threat that they are.

A security policy that would work for the United States, that would promote the stability that this nation needs, must rest on a stable relationship with the Soviet Union. Whatever we may think of the Russians there are only two relationships to have with them: one is a stable relationship based on shared interests in preserving the species and civilization; the other is war. There is no other way. Detente broke down, in my view, because, it was not serious enough, comprehensive enough, or realistic enough; it was not that detente is impossible, or that it is any less neces- sary than it was when Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon proclaimed it ten years ago. The fact is that we spent so long in our negotiations with the Soviet Union and so narrow and technical were these negotiations, that while the negotiators were meeting, the technology raced ahead; like our war-prevention system itself, the negotiating system was too clever. We were trying to have it both ways: to have a managed arms race on the weapons that we both wanted to build, and to get some limited agreements on the weapons that we did not want to build, but would build if the

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other one went ahead unilaterally. That agreement was beyond us politically, and we did not move to create the political conditions in this country that would support detente. And while I believe President Carter sincerely wished to have detente, he did not defend the policy sufficiently against those who put forward the wisdom of the past to undermine the realistic policies of the present.

There is evidence that the Soviet Union still wishes to make a deal with the United States, a deal based on a fundamental principle of equality: that there can be no such thing as victory, there can be no such thing as superior- ity, and that the rules that apply to one great power in using and deploying its military power around the world must apply to the other. If we can get some agreerhent that will first establish this notion of equality-an agreement that will then require greater changes in the life of both societies-we will have a new psychological basis for a more secure form of coexistence. That is why we need changes in our military policy that will be visible to the other side, and why they need to make changes too. These changes would require substan- tially emptier parking lots at the Penta- gon and the Department of Defense in Moscow. When we begin to see Soviet consumer production getting the prior- ity attention now available only to the Soviet military, and their tanks looking as dowdy as their hotel lobbies, then I think that we will believe that something important has been done. When they begin to see that we have a real sense of what our security problem is, and that we are actually dealing with our security problem, they will be reassured. We live in a time when our security, in

fact, increases their security, and their security increases ours.

n observer from space looking down A at Washington, D.C.-the city where the decisions are made to spend the trillions to counter the Russian threat, or the Nicaraguan threat, or the Libyan threat, or whatever-would be astounded by our failure to act on much less hypothetical menaces nearer home. Ourcapital city, in which I have lived for more than 20 years, is an advanced state of social dissolution. This is not an exaggeration. Large numbers of persons are ill-housed and ill-fed. More than a dozen persons have frozen to death on the streets of Washington this year. Crime is so widespread that fear stalks the city everywhere; you cannot have a middle-class conversation without talking about fear, and in the neighbor- hoods of the poor the shadow of crime hangs over daily life all the time. The drug trade is so pervasive that the un- derground economy, millions of dollars over which neither the government nor legitimate business has any control, is the only growth industry in town. The education system is in such shambles that we have seriously crippled a large part of a whole generation to deal with these incredibly complex problems that we face, as Americans and as members of the species.

The observer from space would see this situation in other cities too, and would absolutely wonder why it is that we seem unable to deal with the far more plausible threats that face us, why we seem obsessed, transfixed by distant and highly implausible dangers while immediate social and economic problems threaten to undermine our very culture, even if we manage to avoid


stumbling into nuclear war. Billions of dollars are going into combating un- likely threats with a defense and security strategy that is fundamentally, literally, incredible. Americans are becoming more and more insecure because we are putting our money and our energy into combating these remote threats instead of addressing what is really bothering us.

Indeed, to marshall the funds and the talents to meet the remote threats, we are diverting the energy and resources we need to deal with challenges to our survival as a free society. Unless we begin to address these problems, we will find ourselves more and more unable to face reality, and as we fail to face reality, we will find ourselves sucked more and more into the nuclear fantasy. Our 200- year history has exerted far more influence in the world than our weapons have. A democratic system, however imperfect, struggling to achieve humane values, offering unprecedented levels of consumption for ordinary people has excited hope around the world; but, in- creasingly, the leaders of other nations are coming to the conclusion that

neither the United States nor the Soviet Union has the ideas for the times that we live in, that both nations are frozen in the past. At a dangerous time, the great menace that we face is not the Russians-although they could push that button at any time, and there is nothing we can do about it-but the fact that we ourselves will scare ourselves into impotence and possibly oblivion because we have forgotten what we are doing here and why we became a nation. At this moment we have an enormous opportunity to devote our resources to developing an economic system that is democratic, that meets basic needs, that encourages creativity, and that, above all, civilizes power. Unless we do this there will be absolutely no security for Americans or for anyone else. It is a hopeless goal unless it becomes the central task that commands our energy, our imagination, and our resources. The primary mental health task in this country is to liberate the energies and the feelings of empowerment in our citizens so that we can address this task even as we fight to move the shadow of nuclear destruction from our lives.

For reprints: Richard J . Barnet, Institute for Policy Studies, 1901 Q St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20009.

fantasy, reality, and the arms race: dilemmas of national security and human survival

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