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SECTION 3
Disarmament Scenarios
Scenarios,
as they have come to be called, are hypothetical constructions of future
events.
Inevitably,
they are composed of varying proportions of established fact, reasonable
inference, and more or less inspired guess-work. Those which have been
suggested as model procedures for effectuating international arms control and
eventual disarmament are necessarily imaginative, although closely reasoned;
in this respect they resemble the "war games" analyses of the Rand
Corporation, with which they share a common conceptual origin.
All such scenarios that have been seriously put forth imply dependence on
bilateral or multilateral agreement between the great powers. In general,
they call for a progressive phasing out of gross armaments, military forces,
weapons, and weapons technology, coordinated with elaborate matching
procedures of verification, inspection, and machinery for the settlement of
international disputes. It should be noted that even proponents of unilateral
disarmament qualify their proposals with an implied requirement of
reciprocity, very much in the manner of a scenario of graduated response in
nuclear war.
The
advantage of unilateral initiative lies in its political value as an
expression of good faith, as well as in its diplomatic function as a catalyst
for formal disarmament negotiations.
The READ model for disarmament (developed by the Research Program on Economic
Adjustments to Disarmament) is typical of these scenarios. It is a
twelve-year-program, divided into three-year stages. Each stage includes a
separate phase of: reduction of armed forces; cutbacks of weapons production,
inventories, and foreign military bases; development of international
inspection procedures and control conventions; and the building up of a
sovereign international disarmament organization.
It
anticipates a net matching decline in U.S. defense expenditures of only
somewhat more than half the 1965 level, but a necessary redeployment of some
five-sixths of the defense-dependent labor force.
The economic implications assigned by their authors to various disarmament
scenarios diverge widely. The more conservative models, like that cited
above, emphasize economic as well as military prudence in postulating
elaborate fail-safe disarmament agencies, which themselves require
expenditures substantially substituting for those of the displaced war
industries. Such programs stress the advantages of the smaller economic
adjustment entailed. [11]
Others
emphasize, on the contrary, the magnitude (and the opposite advantages) of
the savings to be achieved from disarmament.
One
widely read analysis [12] estimates the annual cost of the inspection
function of general disarmament throughout the world as only between two and
three percent of current military expenditures.
Both
types of plan tend to deal with the anticipated problem of economic
reinvestment only in the aggregate. We have seen no proposed disarmament
sequence that correlates the phasing out of specific kinds of military
spending with specific new forms of substitute spending.
Without examining disarmament scenarios in greater detail, we may
characterize them with these general comments:
· Given
genuine agreement of intent among the great powers, the scheduling of arms
control and elimination presents no inherently insurmountable procedural
problems.
· Any of
several proposed sequences might serve as the basis for multilateral
agreement or for the first step in unilateral arms reduction.
· No
major power can proceed with such a program, however, until it has developed
an economic conversion plan fully integrated with each phase of disarmament.
No such plan has yet been developed in the United States.
· Furthermore,
disarmament scenarios, like proposals for economic conversion, make no
allowance for the nonmilitary functions of war in modern societies, and offer
no surrogate for these necessary functions.
· One
partial exception is a proposal for the "unarmed forces of the United States," which we will consider in section
6.
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