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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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