The Conditions of Disarmament

Abstract

THE PRESIDENT electrified the Geneva conference when he suddenly proposed an exchange of military blueprints with Russia, followed by mutual aerial reconnaissance, in order to eliminate the fear of surprise attack. Was this, the world wondered, the bold new plan which could banish the fear of an atomic war? The conviction that some radically new approach would be required was growing in all parts of the world as the fantastic character of the technological revolution in warfare began to permeate men's minds. How fundamental this revolution really is can perhaps be grasped in terms of this simple fact. In the last war a ton of TNT cost $iooo. Today, the same explosive effect can be delivered via the hydrogen bomb for io cents. This is a stepup in destructive power by a factor of io,ooo. Now differences of degree of this magnitude are tantamount to differences in kind. This is not simply an aggravation of a condition that we have somehow managed to survive in the past: it is in a fundamental sense a new kind of situation. For example, even the relatively small number of deaths suffered by our armed forces in World War II, when the war never reached our shores, would if multiplied by io,ooo be almost twice the population of the whole world. Moreover, this leaves out of account the radiation effects which could well turn out to be far more dangerous. One authority has estimated that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and the various atomic tests undertaken up to now, have raised the level of radiation in the atmosphere about I/IOOO of the distance to the level which would be fatal to human survival. Now it is readily possible, even likely, that an all-out hydrogen bomb war could diffuse 999 times as