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The Seventh Corbishley
Memorial Lecture - 5th
July 1983 FOREWORD by Professor George Wedell This Seventh Thomas Corbishley Memorial Lecture was given by Professor Dr C F Freiherr von Weirsacker on Tuesday 5th July 1983 in London. Professor von Weizsacker is one of the leading theoretical physicists in Germany, having held chairs in this subject in the universities of Strasbourg and Goettingen. He became Professor of Philosophy in Hamburg in 1957. Professor von Weizsacker has been an opponent of nuclear armament by the Federal Republic. As a Christian philosopher Professor von Weizsacker in the last twenty-five years has devoted much of his time to the analysis of the social, economic, strategic and religious causes of war and to the exploration of ways of promoting peaceful coexistence. In 1979 he was invited to be a candidate for the Presidency of the German Republic but declined. Until recently he was Director of the Max Planck Institute, Starnberg. The lecture makes a significant contribution to the search for a viable relationship between East and West. Professor von Weizsacker’s approach is multi-faceted and as such avoids the sterile arguments between unilateral and multilateral disarmament. Professor von Weizsacker’s approach is also mindful of the long term need for a much more creative relationship between the countries of East and West. He applies to this analysis a sober, religious commitment which enables him to combine realism with a lively hope. The Wyndham Place Trust is very happy to make the lecture available to a wider readership. STRATEGIES FOR PEACE "Strategies for Peace" implies that peace is not a good which we possess but an end at which we aim. I accepted this title because I believe indeed that the present peace is threatened because it was never a true peace. This view induces me to sub-divide my speech into three parts:
The first part is a piece of political analysis, trying to say why I consider peace to be actually threatened. The second part is an ethical or theological consideration on the question of what we would mean by true peace. The third part is about possible programmes of action for peace in our time. I shall begin by reminding you of a few emotional premonitions or perceptions of the underlying crisis of our world. Before 1914, poets of all great European nations predicted a great war. Fifty years after the event the great scholar, Sir Maurice Bowra of Oxford, collected these voices in an impressive essay on the prediction of the first world war in European literature. The poets were not alone. A few of the leading statesmen of the time sensed with horror the possible tragedy of the drama whose main actors they were. Marxism had a theory, even if an inadequate one, on a final war. And primitive people told each other doomsday prophecies, of which the children’s vision of Fatima in 1917 later became the most famous. Yet "they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage and knew nothing until the flood came". (St Matthew 24 38-39). I cannot imagine that this undercurrent of European consciousness should have announced only two great wars which would move the centres of world power from Britain, France and Germany to the United States of America and Russia. It is true that, in the Pax Americana under which we have lived since 1945, progress and optimism have seen a most vigorous revival. But the warning voices were never silenced. Art, probably the most sensitive seismograph of a culture, has obstinately refused to endorse the optimism of these decades. In the centuries since the Renaissance art has presented to us this world as a well-ordered reality; this order was shining through in artistic beauty even in the midst of tragedy. The art of our century is consistently undoing this vision of order. Why? What is the undercurrent sensed by all the great artists of our time? In the late sixties a wave of protest ran through our planet, from San Francisco to Paris and Prague, even to Peking and Tokyo. In the final event it changed little, but it expressed profound discontent. And since 1980, peace movements in many countries seem to have been awakened into a perception of the real danger. Emotional perceptions can be more subtle than our intellect but they lack the -factual precision needed as a basis for considered action. Hence I shall now turn towards an attempt at rational analysis. 1. THE PRESENT DANGER It is impossible to give a coherently argued but brief analysis of the present political situation in the world. Hence I shall condense the conclusions to which I have been led into a number of propositions with brief explanations. The propositions are subdivided into four groups:
Each group will contain four propositions so there will be sixteen altogether. I General remarks on history PROPOSITION 1: -There has always been war in human history. We have not learned to overcome the causes of war. The fact cannot be denied that there have been wars through at least 6,000 years of history. More than 130 wars have been fought since 1945. There are people who believe that war between the great powers of the Northern Hemisphere is no longer possible due to nuclear deterrence. I shall soon explain why I consider this view erroneous. First we should turn our attention to the causes of wars. Generally speaking, we may see power conflicts as one of the main reasons for war and mutual fear as one of the main reasons for power conflicts. So I take the power structure as given and try to understand its probable future. PROPOSITION 2: -Human culture is at present growing rapidly into an unknown and probably unstable future. Here the key word is "growing". We speak about growth of the economy, of the population, of armaments. Growth seems to be ambivalent. Economic growth is considered good and necessary by economists and politicians, but not by ecologists Growth of national armaments is deemed necessary by most national governments; its collective effect is called the arms race and is publicly condemned. I suggest that this ambivalence about growth is not specific to our time. PROPOSITION 3: -Political stability seems to presuppose some degree of economic growth, but in every culture there are specific limits to growth. This may be one of the reasons for the recurrent political instability in all higher cultures. I make this hypothetical proposition in order to help us to avoid the common fallacy of most political debates, the fallacy of searching for the villain. A structural problem may be accentuated by malevolent or stupid action, but it will not disappear by eliminating such special causes. This remark may describe the difference between an election slogan and a responsible policy. I ought to give a brief historical argument for the proposition. Economic growth permits government by compromise; stagnation renders harsh decisions indispensable. Even in long-lived cultures like ancient Egypt and classical China, the chroniclers tell us of good emperors and a prosperous dynasty, of bad emperors with harsh measures, barbarian conquest, centuries of trouble, and a new beginning. Were the beloved emperors those who governed by compromise in a growing economy, and were the bad ones the victims of the limits of growth? PROPOSITION 4: -The present growth and the present danger are beyond historical comparison II Problems of the world economy PROPOSITION 5: -The population growth has so far been peacefully delayed by economic welfare. Only the rich nations have so far slowed down their growth. In all traditional poor societies it is an advantage for any family to have many children; who, if not the children, will feed the parents when they grow old? Let it be seen whether the present Chinese or Indian rulers will survive politically if they try to limit the growth by force. Thus population growth is a strong, perhaps a cogent, argument for rapid economic growth. PROPOSITION 6:-It still seems probable that ecological conditions will not permit more than a few decades of further economic growth along traditional lines. The Club of Rome’s detailed arguments were partly erroneous. The first report confounded raw materials as known at the time with those which would be found by further prospecting. But its models, simple as they were, showed that the man-made changes in our natural environment are now approaching the same order of magnitude as natural influences. Hence the natural balance is now at the mercy of human reason. No political mechanism has so far been able to apply reason to these world-wide problems. PROPOSITION 7:-It is not evident that the present crisis of the world economy can be overcome in the present political structure of the world. Unemployment - the most striking example - can only be overcome by a redistribution of labour even if the economic growth rates should increase again within plausible limits. This will not be achieved without public action. In my personal view, socialism is less able to promote an economy than is the market. Yet, according to Adam Smith, the market economy needs the State for three purposes: protection of peace, the rule of law and non-profitable enterprises like beacons or roads. In the world market of our own day protection of peace means not just a national army, but an international peace system. The rule of law must be internationally enforceable, and non-profitable enterprises mean both infrastructure and the protection of the environment. PROPOSITION 8: -A political world system with enforceable rules and decisions is necessary while not sufficient, for a functioning world economy. Today the power to enforce such a system resides only in the United States of America in co-operation with Western Europe and Japan; but it needs a consensus of a relevant majority of the Third World Nations and coexistence with the Soviet bloc. Let us pray for reason! Ill The political danger of war PROPOSITION 9: -The likelihood of conflict in the Third World is prone to increase rather than decrease. Most of these conflicts have genuine local reasons. The end of political colonialism left the liberated nations with a power gap in which new systems of domination were bound to arise. The unsolved problems of the world economy produce both abject poverty in rural districts and urban slums and, on the other hand, a new class of those who are sufficiently fed and educated to recruit new technocrats and also an elite of ardent revolutionaries. PROPOSITION 10: -The two super-powers are objectively entrenched in a competition for hegemony. I say "objectively" to indicate that it is not in the free personal decision of the leaders of either power to disengage their respective nation from this contest. Conflicts for hegemony are as old as the different organised political units within a culture. In general, both sides in such a conflict see their own role subjectively and honestly as defensive. The other side is always the aggressor. Since the early sixties I have expected and then observed a world-political cycle. The cold war, a system of antagonistic bipolarity, led to a mutual political paralysis of the two super-powers in an increasingly pluralistic world structure. Hence the super-powers found a common interest in some degree of co-operative bipolarity, which is called detente. Yet they were bound to rediscover that they were still hegemonial competitors. This is the present phase, probably more dangerous for peace than was the cold war in the time of American military superiority. PROPOSITION 11: -The Soviet empire is today a threat to the world due to its combination of military strength, political immobility and economic, demographic and ideological weakness. Russia has a long tradition of steady and cautious power politics, filling every power gap near its borders and preparing for defence against great powers. Defence against Mongol, Polish, Swedish, French or German armies of conquest is the Russian experience of history. Marxism added the idea of world revolution, entailing an expected aggression of Capitalism against the Socialist leader. Today the Soviet Union is second to none in the military field, but weak in all other aspects. Thus it lives in fear and it excites fear in the very world whose encirclement it fears. PROPOSITION 12: -The present American reaction to the Soviet threat is positively increasing the danger. A perilous aspect of American foreign policy is its large pendulum swings. The Soviet regime has no reason whatsoever for embarking on a big war as long as it can safely survive without it. But it is absurd to believe that it would ever fall down "not with a bang but a whimper". A policy which would try to achieve this is dangerous even if it is only rhetorical. The tiger in the circus constantly retreats from the slow moves of the trainer, but if cornered, the tiger will jump and kill the trainer. The hegemonial confrontation might have led to a Third World War long since, had it not been prevented by the justified fear of nuclear warfare. IV The technical danger PROPOSITION 13: -Peace cannot be perpetually stabilised by technology: it needs a political stabilisation. Let me give the following two illustrations: PROPOSITION 14: -We cannot completely rule out an outbreak of war by technological failure. Throughout the past thirty-five years I have considered this a minor danger. Technology is what our civilisation has learned to master; our shortcomings are in the political and moral fields. But with the increasingly short warning times, and with the idea of "launch on warning" - an idea as natural as it is horrible - the danger cannot be excluded. And one failure could lead to catastrophe. PROPOSITION 15: -Small nuclear weapons for special uses are constantly being developed ft is quite probable that some day they will be used. The rationale for these weapons was to make deterrence credible at every level. But the temptation actually to use them rests precisely in the fact that escalation is not automatic. In the Third World nuclear weapons might well be used, either by a third power or by one of the super-powers, without ensuing escalation and with military success. But breaking the nuclear taboo once is extremely dangerous even if successful. And even the European theatre is not safe from such temptations. The debate between true believers in the safety of deterrence and prophets of the absolute holocaust is dangerously superficial, for it distracts attention from the more probable limited but still unprecedented horror in the intermediate range. I conclude: PROPOSITION 16: -A nuclear world war is actually possible, even probable, in the remaining years of this century. 2. PEACE AND ETHICS The picture which I have painted in an attempt at rational analysis is dark and dramatic, yet it is less dramatic than my true feelings. What is required from a human being in the light of this situation? I think we need the courage to despair, and the strength not to despair. Twenty-five years ago a friend asked me: "Do you believe that the possible war of which you speak will actually happen?". Without hesitation I said, "I don’t know". After a second I continued "I am not permitted to know". Indeed if either I knew that the war would happen or else if I knew that it would not happen, I would do nothing: but it is my duty to do something. Later on my feelings became even less optimistic. He who has not felt the total despair in his heart is unable to help; he will escape into the cowardice of unreal optimistic solutions. But he who stays within the field of despair can do nothing. Yet the strength not to despair is a gift of grace. I return to an analysis of the possible ethical answers to the challenge of the nuclear age. I do this in two steps. First I shall seek the answer in the field of secular political ethics. Then I shall ask what Christian faith means in this situation. The field of secular political ethics has been opened mainly by the Age of Reason. In my German tradition, nobody has reflected on this field more profoundly than Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason and his ensuing but little known writings on the philosophy of history, culminating in his wonderful essay, Perpetual Peace. Let me share with you some of the ideas I hope to have learned from Kant. Kant says that the civilised state has been achieved within our nations, but that between the nations the natural state still prevails. The civilised state means the rule of law. Kant distinguishes between legality and morality. I think this well-known distinction is one of the greatest moral achievements of modern times. In Kant’s words, legality means to act in accordance with the law, morality means to act out of respect for the law. In the civilised state we are permitted, and the courts of law are even requested, to judge the legality of the action of our fellow citizens. But we are not permitted to judge the morality of our neighbour. The moral question 1 must address to myself, or only as a friend, to a friend. The rule of law preserves civic freedom. Freedom is not what I crave for my own wilful actions, but what I grant my fellow citizen. Freedom is a precondition for the public search for truth, and truth is needed if a civilised community is to survive. This is, in outline, the theory of the liberal state. Kant continues that there will be no end to the sufferings and tragedies of history unless the civilised state, the rule of law, is also established between nations. I take this postulate into the present situation, two hundred years after Kant. At the beginning I said that our peace is threatened, since it was never a true peace. A minimal condition for a peace to deserve the name of true peace would mean a rule of enforceable law. I said this in connection with the world economy; and I add that I do not see what a political preservation of peace can mean unless it contains the rule of law. The political realist will ask how such a rule of law can possibly be established in the world as we know it. I would not use the word "despair" if I were not myself open to this doubt. But at present I act as the advocate of modern rationalism and I say that it is rational to expect the universal rule of law to be finally established. Imagine a man six hundred years ago saying (in 1383) that the time will come when the City of London would no longer need protection by city walls. The political realist would then have replied; "You fool! Not before the Second Coming". Yet in I 383 the two decisive secular inventions had already been made: artillery that finally rendered city walls useless and the territorial state that made them unnecessary. The weapons that may soon render national defence useless have already been invented. How could a world-wide rule of law stay unenforceable indefinitely? The pessimistic answer is that the territorial state was only established when many city walls had actually been broken in civil wars. Correspondingly by far the most probable way towards an efficient political union of the world would be the Third World War with all its consequences. One of these might be a world-wide dictatorship rather than a rule of law in a free society of nations. We approach here a profound weakness of secular rationalism. Kant’s idea of the civilised state rests on his categorical imperative which is no more nor less than a profound philosophical interpretation of the Golden Rule. The maxim of your action ought always 40 be apt as the principle of a universal legislation. Universality is a basic concept in the field of reason. The categorical imperative is, in other words, the self-imposed practical principle of reason: you should act in a manner that makes the common life of rational beings possible. I have no objection whatsoever against this rule. In my personal view, there is no political problem in the world that would not, in principle, admit of a rational solution if both sides sincerely wish to apply reason even to their own behaviour. But how will they be induced to do so? The blindness of our affections will only be overcome by a stronger affection. This affection is called love in Christian language. The prevalence of emotional motivation is the reason for which I chose in this lecture twice to preface my analytical attempts by appealing to your emotional perception. I did so by frankly presenting my own emotions. Let me do it a third time when I speak of Christian ethics. When I was a boy of eleven I read St. Matthew’s Gospel. I read the Sermon on the Mount. I was struck by terror. What I read was evidently and incontrovertibly true. But if it were true, my personal life was false and so was the life of our whole world, including the life of my beloved and revered parents. Not much later, at the age of sixteen, I lost forever my naive childhood faith - in the acceptance of the authority of tradition. I lost it by the simple consideration that other cultures implant other kinds of faith in their children. Being brought up as a Lutheran, as a Christian, in a religious tradition, proves nothing whatsoever about the truth of these belief. Yet up to this day I have never been able to deny the evident truth of the Sermon on the Mount. It strikes me in my heart. And still, as almost all Christians, I am not living according to its commandments. This is, in a nutshell, the problem of two thousand years of the Christian Church; it is the moral problem of human history. In the meantime I have learned what scholarship can tell us about the Sermon on the Mount. It must be read in conjunction with the parables and with the announcement of the last Judgement. This is precisely what struck me as a child. The world must be completely transformed if it is to live under the commandment of love. This change can begin here and now in every single person; the kingdom of heaven is already with us. As a moral law, the commandments cannot but produce terror. Who is able to obey them? But the essence is in the Beatitudes. This, as theologians say, is not law but gospel. It is an experience that can actually be made. But it is, to my mind, absolutely certain that Jesus did not intend merely to transform our minds leaving political history as it is. He believed in the Judgement, probably an impending one. The mythical, cosmic imagery of the revelation is not to deceive us; a real event in human history is meant. It means to establish the true sense of Creation. But, as God’s actions often are, this extreme bliss is preceded by destructive terror. Who can see God and live? History evolved quite differently from that which the early Christians expected. The Second Coming was delayed beyond every expectation. But the unredeemed world turned to Christian faith. Christians found themselves, amazingly enough, in responsible positions in the unredeemed world; they inherited the empire whose destruction had been their original hope. There were always two possible reactions to this fact. The official church accepted it’ it became imperial and responsible. Minority groups persisted in rejecting participation. Both groups had characteristic answers to the Sermon on the Mount. The official church re-interpreted it so as to show that the commandments were not meant to be literally obeyed in this present age. The minorities, like the Franciscan friars or the Quakers, renouncing any personal possession of power, had no difficulty in believing that Jesus’ words were meant to be obeyed. I should like to interject here a remark on human nature. Man is the animal that possesses a history. Human action, as distinct from instinctive behaviour, can interpret the chain leading from stimulus to response. Language, judgement and tradition endow us with a non-genetic inheritance of acquiring properties. One may say that human culture rests on a luxury of modes of behaviour, a luxury of means and of ends. One of man’s most efficient and most dangerous luxuries is power. I define power as the unlimited accumulation of means for personal or social ends. Wealth is power, as analysed by Marx. Knowledge is power as Francis Bacon said. Armament is power and this is our present problem. Power competition tends to produce self-contradictory situations. For every single competitor it is absolutely rational to acquire more power; given the competition this is his precondition of survival. But for the society in which all competitors have to live together, precisely this competition can turn out to be fatal. Every competitor sees himself on the defensive; so did Athens and Sparta, so do the United States and the Soviet Union. Adam Smith’s three tasks of the state, and especially the rule of law, are meant to mitigate this competition by reason. Our problem is: why is reason so weak? The ethics of the Sermon on the Mount have their forerunners in the Hebrew Prophets, but no less in the ascetic schools of India, most wonderfully expressed for example in the sermons of Buddha. I should call this great tradition a counter-luxury against the luxury of power, a luxurious effusion of good will, of self-denying love. These two luxuries have lived together in history for millennia. But the eschatological hope that the kingdom of flourishing power should finally be overcome has always stayed a rational hope. In the old times of undeveloped technology, the self-destructiveness of power competition was limited mainly by its inadequate means of destruction. There was Darwinian self-preservation for some of those who did not mix with the battle of the elephants. In our time the contradiction in the power competition comes to a climax: who will be spared? This climax has now become clearly felt throughout mankind. How can this feeling be transformed into action? There is the danger that it induces in us resignation and passive despair. The Christian tradition, however, offers other ways. One way is radical pacifism. This is a genuinely Christian attitude. Even quietism, as practised by minority groups all through Christian history, is a kind of action. Those who dissociated themselves from any participation of power and left history to the mercy of God presented a symbol of peace to the world. And who would deny that even a tacit example, with the intensity of prayer, changes something in the world? And by perceiving the suffering of their neighbours and giving active help, they can be drawn into ever-broader fields of action. Look at the achievements of the Society of Friends! Today pacifism has become a possible political principle. This leads us to the problem of practical strategies for peace. Perhaps even more impressive is what is happening today in mainstream Churches. I want to express my theological admiration for the American Catholic Bishops. They have taken the doctrine of the just war seriously. This doctrine was developed by the official church in the Middle Ages, not by the dissenting minorities. It meant to mitigate the power competition in this age and to give a lead towards Christian behaviour in the unredeemed world. Wars will continue to be fought until the List Events. A Christian in a politically responsible position can find it inescapable to fight in a war, even to wage a war. But two conditions must be fulfilled. The war must be fought for a just cause and with adequate means for the cause. The American Bishops have clearly understood that a nuclear war cannot possibly be a just war. And they have understood, too, that deterrence, by threatening a nuclear war, is equally inadmissible from a moral point of view if the threat is meant to be carried out, and is of little avail if it is not meant to be carried out. These two facts stand out clearly and, I think, undeniably. Yet it is hard to draw the casuistic conclusions from them. Can we get rid of nuclear weapons and retain the rest? My subjective impression is that "war as usual" will have no chance in the long run. I feel that we must overcome the institution of war, or face World War. Yet I shall not try here to prove such far-reaching statements. I must now speak about the details of peace strategies, not for a distant future, but for the coming ten years. 3. MEDIUM-RANGE STRATEGIES AND SHORT-TERM TACTICS What is a strategy for peace? The foundation of the League of Nations, 1919, and of the United Nations in 1945, was part of a political peace strategy. So was detente and so are the large peace movements of our days. The question is which strategy to embark on, considering chances and dangers. Some of the possible strategies are mutually exclusive while others are consistent with each other. I shall discuss four possible strategies:
I Quest for superiority: - This may look surprising in a list of peace strategies. But history gives us examples of imperial peace, of at least a temporary end to the competition for power by the victory of one power. An empire is, inevitably, morally ambivalent, but cultures have seen prosperous centuries under imperial rule. Such was the Pax Romana under which, among other things, the rapid spread of Christianity became possible. I dare to mention another much-debated example: India was given nearly two centuries of unity and progress in many fields under the British Raj. Who would not prefer a World Empire to a nuclear war? Yet in history, established empires were probably always preceded by hegemonial wars. Today both the United States and the Soviet Union think that the world would be safe under its own hegemony. I cannot exclude that America, had she used her military and economic superiority after 1945 for a consistently imperialistic policy, might have achieved a lasting world hegemony but, I fear, not without an early and victorious war against Russia. But this is an unrealistic fantasy. Of all hegemonial nations in history, America was probably the most reluctant imperialist. The ideals of the American Revolution, the lack of equal competitors on their own continent and the preoccupation with economic development, preserved an aversion against consistent imperialism. Today Russia has acquired approximate military parity. An American quest for military superiority, even hidden behind a rhetoric of restoring the military balance, is a profoundly perilous kind of brinkmanship. I had to mention the quest for superiority in order to say with rational arguments why I cannot believe in it as a possible peace strategy today. II Balance of power: - This is the diplomatic formula for the present negotiations in arms control. As such it is necessary, but I am afraid that it is no more than that. Historically, balance of power has never been a good way of preserving peace between competitors for supremacy. The famous European balance of five powers was preserved through centuries, but with wars recurrent in nearly every generation. Balance of forces is a permanent temptation to test the forces. Yet arms control is imperative in our times, and it cannot be achieved otherwise than under the diplomatic formula of balance, with the silly but necessary device of counting missiles, warheads, payloads, aircraft, submarines and tanks. Let me say a word on disarmament. I have always been deeply sceptical about the attempts at achieving disarmament. History offers almost no example of disarmament unless it was imposed by a victor or applied to obsolete weapons. This is not surprising. The natural form of the competition for power, motivated by mutual fear in an honestly defensive mood on both sides, is an unlimited arms race. Arms control was a great idea for two decades. It intended to stop the arms race by the existence of invulnerable second-strike capabilities. This has been achieved for strategic intercontinental missiles. But quite naturally the race went on with smaller weapons where assured destruction is not the question and where, hence, superiority counts. Arms control is indispensable today. A full additional lecture could be given on its details; at present I confine myself to a few remarks. Success in the Geneva and Vienna talks is necessary. It is vital for the future of Europe to put an agreed limit to all intermediate range missiles for which the arms race is raging today. It is desirable to reduce inter-continental missiles. It would be great progress to replace the destabilising multiple warhead missiles (MIRV) by missiles with one warhead. All this is a medium-range peace strategy. We will be lucky if we can avoid a destabilising new arms race, and we will be lucky also if our present statesmen avoid a nuclear war during the next ten years. It would be more than a medium-range strategy if it were possible in the long run to replace all nuclear weapons by new more refined conventional armaments. But we should not forget that this in itself is not yet a strategy for peace, but for damage limitation. In the European theatre it would be a great step forward if we could concentrate on such conventional weapons which can be used for defence only, so-called defensive defence, like infantry-borne precision-guided anti-tank missiles. They would not give rise to a new, conventional arms race because they would not threaten the other side’s territory. But all these limitations would have to be no more than measures to accompany a political initiative for peace. III Opening the frontiers: - This is the most important concrete peace strategy. I am not now speaking of the Third World problems. I discussed them, as far as was possible, in the first part of this lecture. Between the two blocs of the North, economic ties and a free exchange of persons and of their views are the elements of a political peace strategy. Yet we should not be deceived about the dangers waiting on this path. They can be seen in two directions. The present American administration seems to consider close economic ties with the Eastern bloc mainly as a strengthening of its military potential and hence as an unwelcome side effect of European business interests. I think both we Europeans and our American friends ought to oppose this cowardly view. We are definitely not interested in strengthening the Soviet military build-up, and certain articles might well stay excluded from the trade list. But the main purpose of economic ties is precisely to open the frontiers and to create a common interest in the preservation of peace. This, as historical examples teach us, is not a sufficient means for preventing war, but it is useful. The main danger lies in the opposite direction. The Soviet rulers see a threat to their system in an opening of the frontiers. The preservation of an absolutist rule by closing frontiers is a Tsarist heritage (and was common in oriental despotisms). It is intensified by the survival interest of the new communist ruling class. They are clear sighted enough to know that their system would not stand the competition of a free market both of ideas and of material goods. This was, I think, the main reason for the limited success of the detente policy. But if this is so, it is not for us to renounce the policy of open frontiers. We will have to continue it consistently and unaggressively. In a profoundly dangerous world Situation we should not threaten Soviet rule by trying to promote dissent in their empire. Provide their people with more open access to the free world and let them take care of their future themselves. We may frankly express our view on their system as I have done, and we do not need to hide our admiration for heroes of peace and justice like Sakharov. But this does not exclude a diplomatic and trade policy of good relations. IV Unilateral disarmament: -This is a much-discussed topic. There are fields in which this can easily be done without detriment to strategic stability, for example in short-range battlefield nuclear weapons. When unilateralism is proposed as a matter of principle, it provokes in me an ambivalent reaction. Those who would go all the way towards a complete renunciation of protection by weapons, accepting the possible loss of political freedom, may be the ones to remind us that the commandments of the Sermon on the Mount were meant to be done. If a whole nation, knowing the possible consequences, were to go this way by democratic consensus, it might be spared some of the horrors even of a possible war and it would set a great example. I would personally be prepared to join such a decision if a true majority could be found for it. But this is not a political reality today. And those who advocate pacifism must act carefully. They should not forget that the immediate practical consequence of their action might further destabilise the present precarious truce which is called peace. It is to be expected that their step would be perceived by the Soviet leadership as a definite sign of Western decay and is thus as a proof that their intransigent policy was correct and will have to be continued. If however, we do not dare to go the full way to pacifism, unilateral arms limitation remains a meaningful diplomatic instrument, to be applied without fear in a number of cases, but not as a full peace strategy. So much for medium-range strategies. Let me finish by a few remarks on short-term tactics for peace. Short-term tactics for peace. I limit myself again to the field of arms control. Possible immediate measures have been proposed, like a nuclear freeze or a pledge not to use nuclear weapons first. In both cases, the correct official Western answer was that in the present situation such a step would favour the Soviet side. But this fact only shows that the West has moved itself into a situation which will not be morally and diplomatically tenable in the long run. Three years ago I publicly proposed to the Churches to urge a no-first-use pledge for merely moral reasons; with the purpose of inducing the policy-planners to invent a less dangerous, conventional strategy. This is still my view. The more urgent question is presented by the negotiations on medium-range missiles (INF). The strength of the Soviet position lies in the fact that they fill a gap in the treaties and negotiations which was left open between SALT I and MBRF, Vienna, by introducing a large new potential threat against Europe and both China and Japan by their SS-20 missiles. At present both sides are playing poker in Geneva taking intransigent and mutually irreconcilable positions. The main question is how to take account of the existing and the future British and French missiles. My personal view, which I pronounced in public in 1979 before the NATO dual-track decision, is that missiles which can reach Soviet territory, placed on the soil of a densely populated country like my own, are a threat to our country more than to the Soviets. I proposed a base at sea if they are considered necessary. Since NATO insisted on land-based missiles, the Soviets have now the great poker advantage of using the absolutely natural and rational public opposition to these missiles on our soil as an ally of Soviet intransigence. It is hard not to blame the Western leaders for having failed to foresee this impasse. I can only tell the Soviets that even now it is most dangerous for them to over-bid their cards. They must be interested in not joining Western public opinion to American intransigence. A negotiated solution is necessary, whatever its contents, if a most dangerous aggravation of the arms race is to be avoided. I hope you will forgive me for examining these matters of detail. There is no sensible strategy that would not need to be implemented in concrete tactics. Let us pray for peace, let us think about peace, let us act on peace.
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