The Lessons of History

Since long before Isaiah prophesied that nations would beat their swords into plowshares, men of good will have dreamed the noble dream of disarmament and everlasting peace. Great thinkers and artists--Kant and Rousseau, Goya and Daumier--have preached it in their works. During the interval between the two World Wars, it even seemed at times that the ancient dream was at last approaching fulfillment.

In Washington in 1922, the U.S., Britain, Japan, France and Italy signed a treaty limiting construction of capital warships. In Paris in 1928, these five nations and ten others solemnly renounced war "as an instrument of national policy." And in Geneva in 1932, delegates of 60 nations met in a grand-finale disarmament conference. So durable is human hope that the last surviving committee of the great 1932 conference lingered on in Geneva until 1937, after Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia, civil war had erupted in Spain, and Hitler had marched into the Rhineland.

Last week in Geneva, city of historic disappointments, representatives of the U.S., Britain, France, Italy, Canada, the U.S.S.R. and four Communist puppet governments sat around a table in the Palais des Nations and talked disarmament (see FOREIGN NEWS), while in the next room the U.S.S.R. laid down a counterproposal --real or propaganda?--to the U.S. and Britain on the abolition of nuclear tests (see The Atom). The conferences stirred in men's minds not only the ancient dream of peace, but also the modern nightmare of annihilation.

In the quarter-century since the survivors of the 1932 Geneva Conference gave up their last faint hopes and went home, a new dimension had entered into war and into men's horror of it: the threat of a war so terribly destructive that it would end all human hopes forever. "War is now utterly preposterous." said President Eisenhower in a speech to the Brazilian legislature during his tour of Latin America. "In nearly every generation the fields of earth have been stained with blood. Now war would not yield blood--only a great emptiness."

But if the new dimension of nuclear horror makes the search for peace through disarmament more urgent than ever, it has not made the lessons of history obso lete. Precisely because a single H-bomb can demolish a great city, a stock of H-bombs secreted in the vast expanses of the U.S.S.R. could become the instrument of Communist domination of the world. Neutralists and disarmament-at-any-price Westerners grow impatient at the West's insistence on discussing details of inspection and control in response to grandiose Soviet disarmament proposals, but upon that hardheaded insistence may rest the future of freedom. In negotiating disarmament with the U.S.S.R., the West might , do well to keep in mind the warning of Philosopher George Santayana: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Items:

Weapons of war have been used for good as well as evil ends. Horror of nuclear war has fostered a widespread state of mind that regards armaments as evil in themselves, but over the centuries, from the Greek swords at Thermopylae to the colonists' flintlocks at Lexington, to the British fighter planes in the Battle of Britain, arms have often served free men in the cause of liberty.

Horror of war has in the past undermined national morale, preparedness--and peace. In the 19305, it led to appeasement and the debacle of Munich. In the 19505, it led to another kind of paralysis: with voices crying that nuclear war is too horrible to contemplate, some men came to believe that it is therefore impossible.

Aggression-minded nations, notably Russia, have frequently tried to use disarmament to weaken their enemies. The European peace conference at The Hague in 1899 met at the urging of Czar Nicholas II--not because Russian leaders were eager for peace, but because they were worried about the superiority of other powers' armaments. During the 19205 and 19303, the U.S.S.R. persistently advocated disarmament--not because the Kremlin loved peace, but because the U.S.S.R. was weak and because once standing armies and navies were abolished, the nations of the West would be more vulnerable to subversion by Communist conspirators.

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