|
|
| [This article first
appeared in The Nation on September 29, 1945] Post-Atomic National Defense By Charles G. Bolte Recent pronouncements from Washington and other centers of the higher thinking have left this observer with the dazed feeling that perhaps the atomic bomb was never dropped on Hiroshima at all but was only a horrible figment of our imaginations or a propaganda device to excuse the undignified exit of the Japanese from the war. The nation's political and military leaders, apparently with straight faces, are advancing plans for the future which seem largely to ignore the most revolutionary technological event since the invention of the steam engine. Policy-makers both here and abroad continue their old, tired talk of big navies, big armies, spheres of influence, colonial administrations, and strictly national control of forces which have burst out into the whole domain of the world. (The two generals who were at the head of the project that produced the atomic bomb have, as one might expect, a different point of view. At a War Department press conference on September 19 Major General Leslie Groves and Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell declared that there is "no conceivable defense" against atomic bombs except to hit your enemy with them before he hits you.) Only occasionally is a public toe dabbled in the icy and forbidding waters of the atomic age, to be hastily withdrawn again to the familiar but--shall we say ?-- somewhat shifting sands of the old era, where national boundaries could still be discerned. We have been living in the atomic age for six weeks now. It is time to take a deep breath and plunge into the strange ocean where time and space are so inextricably mixed. Item: The navy requests post-war appropriations to maintain a fleet equal to the combined present fleets of the world. The atomic bomb is not mentioned. Item: In defense of this request Secretary Forrestal explains that we need a great navy because airplanes must drop the atomic bomb--which he mentions by name--airplanes can best be stopped far from our borders, and the fleet can best do this stepping. Item: Admiral McCain's almost-last words, "Give me the fast carrier force and you can have the atomic bomb," Item: The navy demands that we keep a chain of the major bases we have won in the Pacific, from the Aleutians through the Ryukyus to the Solomons; it makes obvious eyes at an extended chain of bases in the Atlantic. Item: The army is reported to be still in favor of universal military training. Item: President Truman proposes control of atomic energy by having the United States government own all uranium-producing ore deposits in the country. Item: The Council of Foreign Ministers squabbles over who gets the old Italian colonies, and otherwise talks in terms which are even pre-San Francisco. This is the sort of talk we might logically have expected before the early morning event at Hiroshima. I submit we have grounds to hear something a little more imaginative, a little more realistic, a little more enlightened, after that event--some statement urging a drastic revision of the United Nations organization to make it a world federation of states, to place military power entirely under the control of the central world authority, to substitute the rule of law for the un-rule of national sovereignties clashing in the twentieth-century jungle. Meanwhile, it is important--though clearly of secondary importance--to discuss and decide upon an interim national-defense policy. For it is clear that we shall not see any major checks put on national sovereignty tomorrow, or next week; it is clear that until we have these checks we must have a national-defense policy; and it is becoming increasingly clear that if citizens do not take a loud and vocal interest in the shaping of this policy, we shall have foisted upon us an anachronistic policy that is positively damaging to the prospects of any future reorganization of the world along lines which will meet the challenge of the atomic age. Available historical evidence suggests that the most dangerous thing which can happen to a national-defense policy is for the nation to win a war. The defensive outstripped the offensive in the last war; so France and England and the United States planned foe another war in which the defensive alone could win. Germany, having lost, simply devised new means of taking the offensive. The items listed above lend weight to the unhappy rule of history. Having won this war after a hard struggle to train troops, many hard fights to seize outlying bases, and employment of a powerful fleet and a great air arm arduously developed, our military leaders are planning to win the next war more easily by having trained reserves, outlying bases, a powerful fleet, and a great air arm all ready for use. The military employment of atomic fission developed by a few long-haired scientists is dismissed as readily as were the tank and the airplane after 1918, If our present course is followed it will prove even more dangerous than our course after 1918. We cannot again expect to use countries across the oceans as buffer states: we would be the first target for any future aggressor with big ideas. The weapons of the future will make us an easy target. Our current mode of military thinking, if continued, will invite attack. Building a large armed force around the weapons and tactical concepts of the recent war is a positive peril in that it tends to discourage research and the development of new weapons and tactics, defensive as well as offensive. This will be recognized and taken advantage of by any potential aggressor, who must plan in terms of the new weapons in order to be successful. New techniques of war, already developed in primitive form and bound to be much more highly developed under the world's accelerating technology, will center in atomic explosives, rocket pro-pulsion, radar, and aerodynamics. It is probable that the chief offensive weapon of the future will be a rocket-propelled pilotless aircraft, loaded with an atom-disintegrating warhead, and guided to its target by radar. This is, unhappily, anything but fanciful. The scientists can do it, if the military men will let them. Already the United States Army Air Forces have in their possession a rocket drawn to its target by heat, light, or metal in the target area, a bomb guided by television from a plane fifteen miles away from the target, and a bomber with a range of 5,000 miles. The Germans in another six months might have produced a rocket bomb to cross the Atlantic in seventeen minutes. Any nation with competent scientists and adequate material and industrial resources can develop these techniques, as it can develop the atom-splitting technique. Consequently the advantage in another war would go to the nation which pushed its buttons first, launching the long-range explosives in a barrage against the chief cities and industrial centers of its antagonist. Such an initial advantage would be quickly followed up by the air-borne delivery of mechanized ground forces, to seize the key positions left intact. In these circumstances, the present squabble over outlying bases will seem childish, A large navy would be an interesting target, although the aggressor might simply choose to ignore it. A conscript army could hardly be assembled and if assembled would hardly find a place where it could fight to any good purpose--I hasten to withdraw my argument in favor of universal military training, advanced it these columns some months ago. What, then, is needed for our interim national-defense policy? Obviously the drawbacks to our present policy, and the advantages of an alternate policy, can only be suggested in this short article. But it would seem that we must explore very seriously the possibility of unifying our uncoordinated and jealous services into a single Department of National Defense, with under secretaries for the army, navy, and air forces, and perhaps a separate under secretary for research; that we must give every aid to government-controlled research and development of new techniques, weapons, and tactics; that we must establish a national intelligence and information service of sufficient scope to find out and make available the best data on military, scientific and economic activities in other countries as well as in on own; and that we must facilitate the promotion to responsible commands of the most energetic, talented, and imaginative officers in all branches of the armed forces. These are not objectives which are likely to be accomplished-or embraced--by senior officers and officials who have just won a war with obsolescent techniques. "This is a big job for big minds," Hanson Baldwin suggests:
|
|