SECTION 1
Scope of the Study
When the Special Study Group was established in August, 1963, its
members were instructed to govern their deliberations in accordance
with three principal criteria.
Briefly stated, they were these:
1) military-style
objectivity
2) avoidance of preconceived value
assumptions
3) inclusion of all relevant areas of theory and data
These guideposts are by no means as obvious as they may appear at
first glance, and we believe it necessary to indicate clearly how
they were to inform our work.
For they express succinctly the
limitations of previous "peace studies," and imply the nature of
both government and unofficial dissatisfaction with these earlier
efforts. It is not our intention here to minimize the significance
of the work of our predecessors, or to belittle the quality of their
contributions. What we have tried to do, and believe we have done,
is extend their scope.
We hope that our conclusions may serve in
turn as a starting point for still broader and more detailed
examinations of every aspect of the problems of transition to peace
and of the questions which must be answered before such a transition
can be allowed to get under way.
It is a truism that objectivity is more often an intention expressed
than an attitude achieved, but the intention - conscious,
unambiguous, and constantly self-critical - is a precondition to its
achievement.
We believe it no accident that we were charged to use a
"military contingency" model for our study, and we owe a
considerable debt to the civilian war planning agencies for their
pioneering work in the objective examination of the contingencies of
nuclear war.
There is no such precedent in peace
studies. Much of
the usefulness of even the most elaborate and carefully reasoned
programs for economic conversion to peace, for example, has been
vitiated by a wishful eagerness to demonstrate that peace is not
only possible, but even cheap or easy.
One official report is
replete with references to the critical role of "dynamic optimism"
on economic developments, and goes on to submit, as evidence, that
it "would be hard to imagine that the American people would not
respond very positively to an agreed and safeguarded program to
substitute an international rule of law and order," etc.
[1] Another
line of argument frequently taken is that disarmament would entail
comparatively little disruption of the economy, since it need only
be partial; we will deal with this approach later. Yet genuine
objectivity in war studies is often criticized as inhuman. As Herman
Kahn, the writer on strategic studies best known to the general
public, put it: "Critics frequently object to the icy rationality of
the Hudson Institute, the Rand Corporation, and other such
organizations. I’m always tempted to ask in reply, ’Would you prefer
a warm, human error? Do you feel better with a nice emotional
mistake?’"
[2] And, as Secretary of Defense
Robert S. McNamara has
pointed out, in reference to facing up to the possibility of nuclear
war, "Some people are afraid even to look over the edge. But in a
thermonuclear war we cannot afford any political acrophobia."
[3]
Surely it should be self-evident that this applies equally to the
opposite prospect, but so far no one has taken more than a timid
glance over the brink of peace.
An intention to avoid preconceived value judgments is if anything
even more productive of self-delusion. We claim no immunity, as
individuals, from this type of bias, but we have made a continuously
self-conscious effort to deal with the problems of peace without,
for example, considering that a condition of peace is per se "good"
or "bad." This has not been easy, but it has been obligatory; to our
knowledge, it has not been done before. Previous studies have taken
the desirability of peace, the importance of human life, the
superiority of democratic institutions, the greatest "good" for the
greatest number, the "dignity" of the individual, the desirability
of maximum health and longevity, and other such wishful premises as
axiomatic values necessary for the justification of a study of peace
issues.
We have not found them so. We have attempted to apply the
standards of physical science to our thinking, the principal
characteristic of which is not quantification, as is popularly
believed, but that, in Whitehead’s words, "... it ignores all
judgments of value; for instance, all esthetic and moral judgments."
[4] Yet it is obvious that any serious investigation of a problem,
however "pure," must be informed by some normative standard. In this
case it has been simply the survival of human society in general, of
American society in particular, and, as a corollary to survival, the
stability of this society.
It is interesting, we believe, to
note that the most dispassionate
planners of nuclear strategy also recognize that the stability of
society is the one bedrock value that cannot be avoided. Secretary
McNamara has defended the need for American nuclear superiority on
the grounds that it "makes possible a strategy designed to preserve
the fabric of our societies if war should occur."
[5] A former
member of the Department of State policy planning staff goes
further.
"A more precise word for peace, in terms of the practical
world, is stability... Today the great nuclear panoplies are
essential elements in such stability as exists. Our present purpose
must be to continue the process of learning how to live with them."
[6] We, of course, do not equate stability with peace, but we accept
it as the one common assumed objective of both peace and war.
The third criterion - breadth - has taken us still farther afield
from peace studies made to date.
It is obvious to any layman that
the economic patterns of a warless world will be drastically
different from those we live with today, and it is equally obvious
that the political relationships of nations will not be those we
have learned to take for granted, sometimes described as a global
version of the adversary system of our common law.
But the social
implications of peace extend far beyond its putative effects on
national economies and international relations. As we shall show,
the relevance of peace and war to the internal political
organization of societies, to the sociological relationships of
their members, to psychological motivations, to ecological
processes, and to cultural values is equally profound. More
important, it is equally critical in assaying the consequences of a
transition to peace, and in determining the feasibility of any
transition at all.
It is not surprising that these less obvious factors have been
generally ignored in peace research.
They have not lent themselves
to systematic analysis. They have been difficult, perhaps
impossible, to measure with any degree of assurance that estimates
of their effects could be depended on. They are "intangibles," but
only in the sense that abstract concepts in mathematics are
intangible compared to those which can be measured, at least
superficially; and international relationships can be verbalized,
like law, into logical sequences.
We do not claim that we have discovered an infallible way of
measuring these other factors, or of assigning them precise weights
in the equation of transition.
But we believe we have taken their
relative importance into account to this extent: we have removed
them from the category of the "intangible," hence scientifically
suspect and therefore somehow of secondary importance, and brought
them out into the realm of the objective. The result, we believe,
provides a context of realism for the discussion of the issues
relating to the possible transition to peace which up to now has
been missing.
This is not to say that we presume to have found the answers we were
seeking.
But we believe that our emphasis on breadth of scope has
made it at least possible to begin to understand the questions.
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