The weapons themselves are not the threat. U.S. imperialism is.

In summer 1982 I could have really used this issue of The Militant, especially the David Frankel review below of Schell's The Fate of the Earth.

That was the summer of the Malvinas, the contras, the death squads.

And the big NYC anti-nuke demo.

I knew I hated the U.S. government. I knew, just from nightly news, that I was on the side of the FMLN and the Sandinistas.

I just finished 10th grade. Age 16. In a small town in Ohio and very confused. Because I could not figure out an understanding of the whole ruling class debate about nuclear disarmament.

Mostly because the terms of debate I could access were all firmly with both feet in bourgeois politics. A Kennedy supposedly wanted reduction; so did a Kennan. Some on Nightline wanted a freeze. There was lots of information about extinction scenarios and horrible poisoned death - treating viewers and readers like cattle that had to be frightened and stampeded into demanding Washington decrease it's stockpiles.

Schell was only the most insufferable and effete abstractionist on this score; I knew that, but I couldn't think it through.

It would be a few more years before I figured it out. All it took was a communist party, its newspaper, and ultimately the cadre that recruited me.

Jay

The fight against war and nuclear weapons 

A reply to 'The Fate of the Earth'

The Fate of the Earth, by Jonathan 

Schell. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 

1982. 244 pages, $11.95. 

BY DAVID FRANKEL 

Since atomic bombs were first used by the United States in August 1945, the world has lived under the shadow of these fiendish weapons. Yet, Jonathan Schell observes in The Fate of the Earth, "Only very recently have there been signs, in Europe and in the United States, that public opinion has been stirring awake, and that ordinary people may be beginning to ask themselves how they should respond to the nuclear peril." 

Why is it that masses of people have suddenly been aroused to the nuclear danger? 

Schell does not attempt to answer this question, but it is crucial to the issues he raises in his book. 

Working people around the world sense that the Reagan administration is set on a course toward war. Washington is already waging an undeclared war against the workers and peasants of Central America, and it has repeatedly announced its readiness to fight in the Middle East. 

Meanwhile, British imperialism has launched a war in the South Atlantic with U.S. support, and British Foreign Secretary Francis. Pym has already threatened Argentina with the possible use of "tactical" nuclear weapons. The development of a new generation of nuclear weapons such as the Cruise missile and the neutron bomb has aroused millions because it comes as part of the imperialist drive toward actual wars in which these weapons are most likely to be used. 

It is within this context that Schell's book appears. 

Focus on weapons themselves Schell's focus is on nuclear weapons and the possibility of human extinction that their existence poses. As he puts it on the very first page of the book, "These bombs were built as 'weapons' for 'war,' but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to an-nihilate men." 

"A Republic of lnsects and Grass,'' the first of Schell's three essays, takes its title from the fact that these forms of life are most resistant to nuclear radiation. It succeeds in presenting the threat of extinction hanging over humanity in the starkest terms. 

Having described this dire and ever-present threat, however, Schell draws back from discussing its specific origins and what to do about it. Quotations from Kant, Hegel, Kafka, Hannah Arendt, and Bertrand Russell explore the philosophical implications of the annihilation of humanity, while submerging and obscuring the urgent political task of what is to be done. 

Nuclear weapons do threaten the extinction of the human race. Because of this, Schell argues that their signifi-mcance "transcends war and all its causes and outcomes." He says that the extinction of humanity would rob all past and present human life of its meaning. 

But if such extinction comes about, it will be precisely because of "war and all its causes." We cannot turn our backs on war and its causes, any more than we can turn our backs on the lessons of history - even though, as Schell says, nuclear weapons "threaten to end history." Yet it is these issues that Schell fails to address. 

His concern is with the weapons themselves, which he sees as having escaped human control. As he puts it at one point, "Strategic theory seems to have taken on a weird life of its own, in which the weapons are pictured as having their own quarrel to settle, irrespective of mere human purposes." 

He raises the possibility that the world may "simply blunder into extinction by mistake." 

Role of social relations 

It is hardly surprising that Schell should express such an idea. The irrationality of capitalist society has always encouraged the idea that our lives are controlled by anarchic social forces that are beyond human influence. The growth of productive forces results in economic crisis. New advances in science are turned into the means of our destruction. 

Karl Marx pointed to this characteristic of capitalist society in a speech he delivered in 1856: 

"There is one great fact, characteristic of this our 19th century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the later times of the Roman Empire. 

"In our days, everything seems pregnant with this contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want. . . . At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultify-ing human life into a material force. 

"This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted." 

It is the social relations - the existence of a society divided into classes - that Schell ignores. As a result, he cannot explain the origin and real character ofthe nuclear threat. The problem is not that the weapons are out of control; it is that they are under the control of an imperialist ruling class whose interests and objectives conflict with those of working people everywhere. 

Nuclear war has been threatened many times, as will be seen below. But the threats have not come about due to accident or blunders. 

Origin of nuclear peril 

For Schell, "the fundamental origin of the peril of human extinction by nuclear arms lies not in any particular social or political circumstances of our time but in the attainment by mankind as a whole, after millenia of scientific progress, of a certain level of knowledge of the physical universe." 

He insists that the origins of "the nuclear predicament . . . lie in scientific knowledge rather than in social circumstances." 

And later on, he repeats ·that "the origin of the nuclear peril lies, on the one hand, in our nature as rational and inquisitive beings and, on the other, in the nature of matter." 

This argument takes the political problem of war and mass destruction in today's world and turns it into an existential dilemma, removed from any specific historical context, from the actual play of events and from the clash of contending class forces. 

After all, it was not "our nature as rational and inquisitive beings" that resulted in the production of the atomic bomb. Scientific knowledge was necessary, but so were certain social circumstances - specifically, World War II and the mobilization of scientific and material resources in the Manhattan Project. 

Furthermore, why was the bomb used -not once, but twice- when Japan was already on the verge of surrender? 

Did this have nothing to do with "particular social or political circumstances" - specifically, the explosion of the colonial revolution in Asia toward the end of World War II, and the determination of U.S. imperialism to confront these revolutions, and with them the Soviet Union? 

A 'race' with one runner 

We frequently hear reference to the nuclear arms race. The image is of two contestants crouched at the starting line, then racing neck-and-neck. But the reality was different. 

As Daniel Ellsberg notes in his introduction to Protest and Survive (a collection of essays on the issue of nuclear arms, edited by E.P. Thompson), "The U.S. Strategic Air Command was established in early 1946 with the function of delivering nuclear attacks upon Russia when so directed, at a time when it was publicly proclaimed by the president and high military that the Soviet Union was not expected to possess operational nuclear weapons systems for a decade or longer." 

Schell does not place responsibility on the U.S. government for the nuclear threat. He tries to avoid this issue by taking the existence of nuclear weapons and the current level of nuclear armament as his starting point. The potential for the extinction of humanity, he says, makes all political ideologies fade into irrelevance. 

But as soon as we turn from the destructive power of nuclear weapons in the abstract to the actual instances in which their use has been threatened, we run into the problem of "war and its causes," and specifically the role of U.S. imperialism, once again. 

U.S. nuclear threats 

In the essay quoted above, Daniel Ellsberg refers to 12 instances in which the U.S. government is known to have directly threatened the use of nuclear weapons. There is no instance of the Soviet government ever having made such a threat. 

Of the 12 instances listed by Ellsberg 10 grew directly out of Washington's ef-forts to defeat revolutionary struggles in Asia and Latin America. These were: 

• Iran in 1946, when Truman demanded that the Soviets halt their support for nationalist regimes that had been set up in Kurdistan and Azerbaijan as a result of the revolutionary upheaval that had erupted in Iran. 

• Korea in 1950, and again in 1953. In both cases the threat was against the Chinese revolution as well as the Korean revolution. 

• Vietnam in 1954, when Washington secretly offered the French three tactical nuclear weapons to relieve the colonial troops beseiged at Dienbienphu. 

• The Middle East in 1958, when Eisenhower authorized the use of nuclear weapons if these were deemed necessary to prevent the extension of the Iraqi revolution of that year. 

• Also in 1958, Eisenhower directed the Pentagon to use nuclear weapons to defend the Chaing Kaishek dictatorship's military outpost on the island of Quemoy, a few miles off the Chinese mainland. 

• In 1962 there was the Cuban missile crisis - a confrontation that grew out of Washington's attempts to crush the Cuban revolution. 

• The Vietnamese revolution was again threatened by nuclear weapons in 1968, when thousands of U.S. Marines were surrounded at Khe Sanh. The Vietnamese never did make a final assault on the Marines trapped at Khe Sanh, and during the 1969-1972 period, they were repeatedly threatened with a massive escalation of the war, including the use of nuclear weapons. 

• The latest U.S. nuclear threat came 

in the context of the Iranian revolution. It was first enunciated in January 1980, after President Carter staked out the Persian Gulf region as U.S. turf. After taking office a year later, Reagan reaffirmed Washington's determination to use nuclear weapons if necessary to hold onto Middle Eastern oil. 

In addition to these explicit threats to use nuclear weapons, there have been numerous actions such as the worldwide alert of U.S. forces during the October 1973 Mideast war. 

How Schell sees the world 

The scramble for profits by giant corporations, the struggles of the colonial peoples for independence, revolution, imperialist war - all this is missing from Schell's version of the nuclear threat. Although his book is newly published, it never once mentions the criminal U.S. intervention in Central America, where Washington is preparing the next Vietnam.

Far from blaming the warmakers in Washington and helping to show the way toward disarming them, Schell blames us. "The world's political leaders," he says, are not the enemy because, "though they now menace the earth with nuclear weapons, [they] do so only with our permission, and even at our bidding. At least, this is true for the democracies." 

Schell speaks of "our role as both the victims and the perpetrators of mass murder." But the U.S. people never voted to build the atomic bomb, nor to drop it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. U.S. workers and farmers first found out about those decisions in the newspapers. Nor did working people vote in favor of any of the acts of nuclear blackmail or any of the imperialist interventions that Washington has carried out since World War II. On the contrary, only years of massive opposition at home finally forced the imperialists to get out ofVietnam. 

Disarmament is Schell's solution for the nuclear threat - "what everyone is now called on to do is to sink all the ships, and also ground all the planes, and fill in all the missile silos, and dismantle all the warheads." 

As he makes clear a few pages later, his actual political perspectives do not go beyond the measures already proposed by various figures in the U.S. ruling class. Schell suggests that "at a minimum, a freeze on the further deployment of nuclear weapons, participated in both by countries that now have them and countries that do not yet have them, is called for. Even better would be a reduction in nuclear arms -for example, by cutting the arsenals of the superpowers in half, as George Kennan suggested recently." 

Who should be disarmed? 

Socialists are fighting for a society in which war and the weapons of war would be abolished. But the question is how to get there, and who the demand of disarmament should be aimed at today. There is a war going on right now in southern Africa. The racist South African regime, armed with nuclear weapons, is occupying Namibia and southern Angola, and carrying out repeated massacres of the civilian population there. Working people around the world would like to see the South African imperialists disarmed, but to raise that demand against Angola would be a betrayal. We should support the right of Angola and the freedom fighters in Namibia to have more ships, more planes, more missiles. 

The same is true in Central America. 

The butchers in El Salvador, the U.S.-backed death squads in Guatemala, and above all, the imperialists in Washington who are ultimately responsible for the survival of every reactionary dictatorship in the region, should be disarmed. At the same time, we should support the right of Cuba, of Nicaragua, of Grenada, and of the liberation fighters in El Salvador to obtain whatever weapons they need to defend themselves against imperialist aggression. And that includes nuclear weapons. 

Perhaps this seems ironic. Nuclear weapons could be a force for peace in Central America? 

But it should be recalled that if it were not for the fact that the Soviet Union developed atomic weapons in 1949, the U.S. government in all likelihood would have used the bomb against the Korean and Chinese revolutions the next year, and against the colonial rebellion worldwide that sprang up at that time. 

Moreover, as Ellsberg explained above, the U.S. rulers had every intention of using the nuclear bomb on the Soviet Union itself. Once the Soviets obtained the bomb, Washington was forced to retreat from its plans for launching a third world war, against the Soviet Union. 

The weapons themselves are not the threat. U.S. imperialism is. 

Like E.P. Thompson, a leader of the antinuclear movement in Britain, Schell seeks to substitute the fight against nuclear weapons and for disarmament in the abstract for the fight against the actual wars going on today and their source. The only way to finally end the nuclear peril is to disarm the imperialist warmakers. 

Two different approaches 

The difference in the two approaches can be seen quite clearly in the debates occurring over the character of the June 12 demonstration called to coincide with the United Nations session on disarmament. 

Some peace groups, who look to the Democratic Party and are swayed and confused by capitalist ideological pressures, are opposed to including demands against the U.S. war in Central America and the British-U.S. war against Argentina in the June 12 demonstration. The demand for disarmament in the abstract is thus counterposed to the fight against war in the real world. 

Disarmament and war 

There is nothing new about the idea of disarmament in the abstract being counterposed to the actual fight against imperialism and imperialist war. Lenin explained in 1916, "The main defect in the demand for disarmament is its evasion of all the concrete questions of revolution .... 

"'Disarmament' means simply running away from unpleasant reality and not fighting against it" ("War Program of the Proletarian Revolution," Lenin Collected Works, Volume 23). 

Disarmament in the abstract was also in vogue on the eve of World War II. Leon Trotsky pointed out in 1935, "For Marxists the struggle against war coincides with the struggle against imperialism. The means for this struggle is not 'general disarmament' but the arming of the proletariat for the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of a workers' state" ("To Young Communists and Socialists Who Wish to Think," Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1935-36). 

It is through the workers and farmers taking governmental power, and using that power to reshape society in the interests of the toilers, that real disarmament can finally come about. As long as society is divided between oppressed and oppressing classes and ruled by a minority that subordinates everything to its search for profits, there can be no end to war. 

What we have accomplished 

Within this context, it is worth noting one of Schell's statements. "As a species," he says, "we have as yet done nothing to save ourselves" from the threat of nuclear extinction. 

Not true. 

As a species, we have been strugglingto overthrow an unjust, outmoded, and life-threatening social system, and to replace it with a higher form of human society. 

The Russian revolution of October 1917 was the first giant step in that process. The Chinese revolution, the Cuban revolution, the Vietnamese revolution, the Grenadian revolution, the Nicaraguan revolution - every one of these events has been a blow to imperialism and a step forward for humanity on the road to a better world. 

It is this process of social transformation that is essential for ending the threat of nuclear extinction. 

That is another reason why the context in which Schell's book appears is so important. Under the impact of the world economic crisis and the imperialist war drive, big changes are taking place inside the labor movement in the United States and other imperialist countries. Working people more and more feel that the capitalist system cannot guarantee them a better life, and even threatens life itself. 

The struggle for a workers and farmers government in the United States is becoming less and less of an abstraction. The need for such a government is increasingly posed by events in the class struggle. And that includes the rise of the peace movement. 

Ultimately, the working people of America will have the decisive say in whether the human race is to survive. Those are the real stakes in the fight for a workers and farmers government in the United States.

The Militant June 4,1982

http://themilitant.com/1982/4621/MIL4621.pdf