Review of "Weapons and Hope" from August '85

War Stories, Weapons Talks, and the Legacy of World Wars



"THE DEVIL:  And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. . . . There is nothing in man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons."

--from Man and Superman, by George Bernard Shaw (1903).

"Our lives are fairly good, fairly peaceful. We seem to go on almost untouched except as the arms race gives employment to many. Overt hysteria has declined since the fifties. Perhaps people will have time to think. No one should say there is no hope."
 
--J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted in the final paragraph of Lawrence and Oppenheimer, by Nuel Pharr Davis (1968).



WEAPONS AND HOPE by Freeman Dyson; Harper Colophon Books, Harper and Row; $6.95.

 

By David Trulock

“I was sitting at home eating a quiet breakfast with my mother, when the morning paper arrived with the news of Hiroshima,” writes Freeman Dyson in Weapons and Hope.  “I understood at once what it meant.  ‘Thank God for that,’ I said.  I knew that Tiger Force would not fly, and I would never have to kill anybody again.”

Tiger Force was a fleet of 300 bombers that Winston Churchill planned to use to help the United States defeat Japan.  The bombers were to be based in Okinawa, and in early August 1945, when the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, Dyson was awaiting orders to leave.  However, he was not expected to fly with the bombers over Japan.  He would have stayed in Okinawa, as he had stayed in England during the bombing of Germany, “calculating how to murder people more efficiently,” as he puts it.

In more technical but less accurate terms, Dyson did operations research for the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command.  He was assigned to the job in July 1943, when he was 19 years old and had completed two years of college mathematics.

Dyson is now a physics professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Although he is also a consultant to the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the Department of Defense, he no longer calculates how to kill people more efficiently.  His hope is that the ideas in Weapons and Hope could bring civilians and military people together in a way that might prevent the extremely efficient form of killing that would occur in a nuclear war.

Cultural Patterns More Durable

Dyson’s straightforward style of writing is, in itself, enough to make one hopeful.  “I chose the title Weapons and Hope for this book,” he explains, “because I want to discuss the gravest problem now facing mankind, the problem of nuclear weapons, from a human rather than a technical point of view.”

He continues by saying, “Central to my approach is a belief that human cultural patterns are more durable than either the technology of weapons of the political arrangements in which the weapons have become embedded.”

The nuclear weapons problem is exacerbated by the difference in the worlds inhabited by the people Dyson refers to as the victims of current weaponeering plans and the warriors who make those plans.  The victims deplore the strategies of the warriors and the warriors ignore the moral indignation of the victims.  It is Dyson’s hope that the two groups will start listening to each other.

In the first chapter of the book, “Agenda for a Meeting of the Minds,” Dyson discusses why the victims and warriors don’t now listen to each other:                          

    

If it is difficult to translate their [the peace movement’s] message effectively into the language of the generals, it is even more difficult to translate the legitimate concerns of the generals into a language which pays some respect to ordinary human values and feelings. … The military establishment looks on the peace movement as a collection of ignorant people meddling in a business they do not understand, while the peace movement looks on the military establishment as a collection of misguided people protected by bureaucratic formality from all contact with human realities.  Both these preconceptions create barriers to understanding.  Both preconceptions are to some extent true.

One point of contention existing now between victims and warriors is the question of how many people would survive a nuclear war.  The question is usually answered in quantitative terms by both sides.  The victims, often quoting Jonathan Schell or Carl Sagan, say the answer is zero—nobody would survive a nuclear war.  The warriors produce various quantitative answers quite different from zero, using calculations based partially on civil defense measures.  Dyson proposes to “break the deadlock” by dogmatically adopting a third position:

My dogma is that the question of survival is undecidable … .   It says, since survival may be possible, it makes sense to try to save lives.  It says, since survival may be impossible, it makes no sense to count the lives saved.

Dysons proposal is simple—possibly too simple for some people to understand—and far-reaching.  Accepting it would mean that peace activists, arms controllers, and military people could no longer engage each other in a war of numbers.  And, since all are interested in saving lives—although the military view of saving lives is rather one-sided—there is common ground, Dyson says, for a debate that would not be a “dialogue of the deaf.”

Targeting Policies Clash

Perhaps an even more important product of Dyson’s proposal is that it could provide a better foundation for Soviet and American nuclear weapons limitation treaties.  The current nuclear weapons policies of the Soviet Union and the United States are basically incompatible.  American strategic nuclear policy forbids a first strike of intercontinental missiles against the Soviet Union, but permits a first use of tactical nuclear weapons in the defense of Europe.  Soviet policy is just the reverse.  It forbids a first use in Europe, but allows a first strike against the U.S. in defense of Soviet troops already under tactical nuclear attack.  Dyson says the world would be a safer place if both nations adopted the same policy.

In addition to being an important tool for arms control and an eloquent statement of the nuclear weapons problem, Dyson's book offers also some illuminating and entertaining "war stories," as he calls them. One of the stories begins with Dyson as a high school student, walking home from a music lesson after school. On his daily walks home, Dyson passed through a World War I monument known as the War Cloister. It was dedicated to the soldiers from his small school who’d died in what was then referred to simply as The War.  The 600 names are carved on the outside wall of the monument.

On the day Dyson writes about, it is almost dark as he passes through one of the three openings in the War Cloister's wall. In the near darkness, he sees clearly, he says, "a young man in the uniform of The War." Dyson looks again, and the young man is not there. He tells his friends later and they do not find his story hard to believe. "We were agnostics," Dyson explains, "not quite believing in ghosts and not quite disbelieving."

Dyson and his friends were also ardent pacifists, no doubt in large part due to the stories they had heard their parents tell about The War. Dyson and his pacifist friends had trouble identifying with any of the politicians or movements of the time.  "Feeling ourselves doomed, we were comforted by the thought that the whole society in which we lived was doomed equally," he writes.  "We saw no hope that any acceptable future would emerge from the coming war. We had made up our minds that we would not be led like sheep to the slaughter as the class of 1915 had been."

But pacifism lost its moral luster for Dyson with the establishment of the Vichy government in France in 1940. The Vichy government was in a sense pacifist, having abandoned violent resistance to Hitler in favor of collaboration with the Nazis. Dyson writes that pacifism was destroyed as a moral force once it became impossible to distinguish the sincere pacifists from opportunists and collaborators.

War Stories as Parables

Soon after the capitulation of France, Dyson re-enlisted in the Officers Training Corps. In less than three years, he worked his way into the very headquarters of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command, where he found himself recommending flight patterns that would decrease the losses of Allied bombers to German fighters while at the same time increasing the number of bomber collisions.

"After the war ended," he writes, "I read reports of the trials of men who had been high up in the Eichmann organization. They had sat in their offices, writing memoranda and calculating how to murder people more efficiently, just like me. The main difference was that they were sent to jail or hanged as war criminals, while I went free. I felt a certain sympathy for these men. Probably many of them loathed the SS as much as I loathed Bomber Command, but they, too, had not had the courage to speak out. Probably many of them. like me, lived through the whole six years of the war without ever seeing a dead human being."

Throughout the book there are other stories that may better be described as parables. Dyson describes the importance of parables in the final paragraph of the first chapter of Weapons and Hope:

 When I look back into the past, I find in the two world wars the richest source of parables to help us see where we are going. That is why this book is filled with war stories. The most important lessons come from World War I.  World War I, taken as a whole, is a gigantic parable of the war we are trying to avoid. It was a war of peculiar ugliness, fought with exceptional stupidity and brutality. It destroyed permanently a great part of European civilization. It was started for reasons which in retrospect seem almost trivial. The damage and loss suffered by all parties were utterly out of proportion to the initial quarrel between Serbia and Austria.  In all these respects, the history of World War I holds up a mirror to us, showing us how small follies lead to great disasters, how ordinarily intelligent people walk open-eyed into hell.