The effect of the bombs, and their purpose, were not mainly the military
destruction
they accomplished but the pain and the shock and the promise of more.
Schelling - The Diplomacy of Violence
We did not even have to say what we could do to Mexico City to make the Mexican government understand what they had at stake.
(They had undoubtedly got the message a month earlier, when Vera Cruz was being pounded into submission.
After forty-eight hours of shellfire,
the foreign consuls in that city approached General Scott's headquarters to ask for a truce so that women, children, and neutrals could evacuate the city. General Scott, "counting on such internal pressure to help bring about the city's surrender," refused their request and added that anyone, soldier or noncom- batant, who attempted to leave the city would be fired upon. ) 2
Whether spoken or not, the threat is usually there. In earlier eras the etiquette was more permissive. When the Persians wanted to induce some Ionian cities to surrender and join them, without having to fight them, they instructed their ambassadors to
make your proposals to them and promise that, if they aban- don their allies, there will be no disagreeable consequences
2. Otis A. Singletary, The Mexican War (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 75-76. In a similar episode the Gauls, defending the town of Alesia in 52 B. C. , "decided to send out of the town those whom age or infirmity incapacitated for fighting. . . . They came up to the Roman fortifications and with tears besought the soldiers to take them as slaves and relieve their hunger. But Caesar posted guards on the ramparts with orders to refuse them admission. " Caesar, The Conquest ofGaul, s. A. Handford, transL (Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1951), p. 227.
for them; we will not set fire to their houses or temples, or threaten them with any greater harshness than before this trouble oc- curred. If, however, they refuse, and insist upon fighting, then you must resort to threats, and say exactly what we will do to them; tell them, that is, that when they are beaten they will be sold as slaves, their boys will be made eunuchs, their girls carried off to Bactria, and their land confiscated. 3
It sounds like Hitler talking to Schuschnigg. "I only need to give an order, and overnight all the ridiculous scarecrows on the frontier will vanish . . . Then you will really experience something. . . . After the troops will follow the S. A. and the Legion. No one will be able to hinder the vengeance, not even myself. "
Or Henry V before the gates of Harfleur:
W e may as bootless spend our vain command Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil
As send precepts to the leviathan
To come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfleur, Take pity of your town and of your people, Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command; Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace 0 ' erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil and villainy.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters; Y our fathers t~en by the silver beard,
And their most reverent heads dash'd to the walls, Y our naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused Do break the clouds . . .
What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?
(Act III, Scene iii)
3. Herodotus, The Histories, Aubrey de Selincourt, trans! . (Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1954), p. 362.
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ARMS AND INFLUENCE The Strategic Role of Pain and Damage
THE DIPLOMACY OF VIOLENCE 13
not give in. . . . He sent some of the prisoners into the hills and told them to say that if the inhabitants did not come down and settle in their houses to submit to him, he would bum up their villages too and destroy their crops, and they would die of hunger. 4
Military victory was but the price ofadmission. The payoffde- pended upon the successful threat of violence.
Like the Persian leader, the Russians crushed Budapest in 1956andcowedPolandandotherneighboringcountries. There was a lag of ten years between military victory and this show of violence, but the principle was the one explained by Xenophon. Military victory is often the prelude to violence, not the end of it, and the fact that successful violence is usually held in reserve should not deceive us about the role it plays.
What about pure violence during war itself, the infliction of pain and suffering as a military technique? Is the threat of pain involved only in the political use of victory, or is it a decisive technique of war itself?
Evidently between unequal powers it has been part of war- fare. Colonial conquest has often been a matter of "punitive ex- peditions" rather than genuine military engagements. If the tribesmen escape into the bush you can bum their villages with- out them until they assent to receive what, in strikingly modem language, used to be known as the Queen's "protection. " British air power was used punitively against Arabian tribes- men in the 1920s and 30s to coerce them into submission. 5
4. Xenophon, The Persian Expedition, Rex Warner, trans\. (Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1949), p. 272. "The 'rational' goal of the threat of vio- lence," says H. L. Nieburg, "is an accommodation of interests, not the provocation of actual violence. Similarly the 'rational' goal of actual violence is demonstration of the will and capability of action, establishing a measure of the credibility of future threats, not the exhaustion of that capability in unlimited conflict. " "Uses of Violence," Journal of Conflict Resolution, 7 (1963), 44.
5. A perceptive, thoughtful account of this tactic, and one that empha- sizes its "diplomatic" character, is in the lecture of Air Chief Marshal Lord Portal, "Air Force Cooperation in Policing the Empire. " "The
Pure violence, nonmilitary violence, appears most conspicu- ously in relations between unequal countries, where t~e:eis no substantial military challenge and the outcome of mllttary engagement is not in question. Hitler could make his threats contemptuously and brutally against Austria; he could make them, ifhe wished, in a more refined way against Denmark. It is noteworthy that it was Hitler, not his generals, who used this kind of language; proud military establishments do not like to think of themselves as extortionists. Their favorite job is to deliver victory, to dispose of opposing military force and to leave most of the civilian violence to politics and diplomacy.
But if there is no room for doubt how a contest in strength will come out, it may be possible to bypass the military stage altogether and to proceed at once to the coercive bargaining.
A typical confrontation of unequal forces occurs at the end of a war, between victor and vanquished. Where Austria was vulnerable before a shot was fired, France was vulnerable after its military shield had collapsed in 1940. Surrender negotiations are the place where the threat of civil violence can come to the fore. Surrender negotiations are often so one- sided, or the potential violence so unmistakable, that bargain- ing succeeds and the violence remains in reserve. But the fact
that most of the actual damage was done during the military stage of the war, prior to victory and defeat, does not mean that violence was idle in the aftermath, only that it was latent and the threat of it successful.
Indeed, victory is often but a prerequisite to the exploitation of the power to hurt. When Xenophon was fighting in Asia Minor under Persian leadership, it took military strength to disperse enemy soldiers and occupy their lands; but land was not what the victor wanted, nor was victory for its own sake.
Next day the Persian leader burned the villages to the ground, not leaving a single house standing, so as to strike terror into the other tribes to show them what would happen if they did
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ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE DIPLOMACY OF VIOLENCE 15
If enemy forces are not strong enough to oppose, or are unwilling to engage, there is no need to achieve victory as a prerequisite to getting on with a display of coercive violence. When Caesar was pacifying the tribes of Gaul he sometimes had to fight his way through their armed men in order to subdue them with a display of punitive violence, but sometimes he was virtually unopposed and could proceed straight to the punitive display. To his legions there was more valor in fighting their way to the seat of power; but, as governor of Gaul, Caesar could view enemy troops only as an obstacle to his political control, and that control was usually based on the power to inflict pain, grief, and privation. In fact, he preferred to keep several hundred hostages from the unreliable tribes, so that his threat of
violence did not even depend on an expedition into the country- side.
Pure hurting, as a military tactic, appeared in some of the military actions against the plains Indians. In 1868, during the war with the Cheyennes, General Sheridan decided that his best hope was to attack the Indians in their winter camps. His reasoning was that the Indians could maraud as they pleased during the seasons when their ponies could subsist on grass, and in winter hide away in remote places. "To disabuse their minds from the idea that they were secure from punishment, and to
strike at a period when they were helpless to move their stock and villages, a winter campaign was projected against the large bands hiding away in the Indian territory. " 6
These were not military engagements; they were punitive attacks on people. They were an effort to subdue by the use of violence, without a futile attempt to draw the enemy's military forces into decisive battle. They were "massive retaliation" on a
law-breaking tribe must be given an alternative to being bombed and . . . be told in the clearest possible terms what that alternative is. " And, "It would be the greatest mistake to believe that a victory which spares the lives and feelings of the losers need be any less permanent or salutary than one which inflicts heavy losses on the fighting men and results in a 'peace' dictated on a stricken field. " Journal ofthe Royal United Services Institution (London, May 1937), pp. 343-58.
6. Paul 1. Wellman, Death on the Prairie (New York, Macmillan, 1934), p. 82.
diminutive scale, with local effects not unlike those of Hiroshima. The Indians themselves totally lacked organization and discipline, and typically could not afford enough ammuni- tion for target practice and were no military match for the cavalry; their own rudimentary strategy was at best one of harassment and reprisal. Half a century ofIndian fighting in the West left us a legacy of cavalry tactics; but it is hard to find a serious treatise on American strategy against the Indians or Indian strategy against the whites. The twentieth is not the first centuryinwhich"retaliation"hasbeenpartofourstrategy,but it is the first in which we have systematically recognized it.
Hurting, as a strategy, showed up in the American Civil War, but as an episode, not as the central strategy. For the most part, the Civil War was a military engagement with each side's military force pitted against the other's. The Confederate forces hoped to lay waste enough Union territory to negotiate their independence, but hadn't enough capacity for such violence to make it work. The Union forces were intent on military victory, and it was mainly General Sherman's march through Georgia that showed a conscious and articulate use of violence. "If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war . . . I f they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war," Sherman wrote. And one of his associates said, "Sherman is perfectly right . . . The only possible way to end this unhappy and dreadful conflict . . . is to make it terrible beyond endurance. " 7
Making it "terrible beyond endurance" is what we associate with Algeria and Palestine, the crushing of Budapest and the tribal warfare in Central Africa. Butin the great wars of the last hundred years it was usually military victory, not the hurting of the people, that was decisive; General Sherman's attempt to make war hell for the Southern people did not come to
7. J. F. C. Fuller reproduces some of this correspondence and remarks, "For the nineteenth century this was a new conception, because it meant that the deciding factor in the war-the powerto sue for peace-was transferred from government to people, and that peacemaking was a product of revolution. This was to carry the principle of democracy to its ultimate stage. . . . " The Conduct ofWar: 1789-1961 (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1961), pp. 107-12.
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ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE DIPLOMACY OF VIOLENCE 17
epitomize military strategy for the century to follow. To seek out and to destroy the enemy's military force, to achieve a crushing victory over enemy armies, was still the avowed pur- pose and the central aim of American strategy in both world wars. Military action was seen as an alternative to bargaining, not a process of bargaining.
The reason is not that civilized countries are so averse to hurting people that they prefer "purely military" wars. (Nor were all ofthe participants in these wars entirely civilized. ) The reason is apparently that the technology and geography of war- fare, at least for a war between anything like equal powers dur- ing the century ending in World War II, kept coercive violence from being decisive before military victory was achieved. Blockade indeed was aimed at the whole enemy nation, not concentrated on its military forces; the German civilians who died of influenza in the First World War were victims of violence directed at the whole country. It has never been quite clearwhetherblockade-oftheSouthintheCivilWarorofthe
Central Powers in both world wars, or submarine warfare against Britain-was expected to make war unendurable for the people orjust to weaken the enemy forces by denying economic support. Both arguments were made, but there was no need to be clear about the purpose as long as either purpose was regarded as legitimate and either might be served. "Strategic bombing" ofenemy homelands was also occasionally rational- ized in terms of the pain and privation it could inflict on people and the civil damage it could do to the nation, as an effort to display either to the population or to the enemy leadership that surrenderwasbetterthanpersistenceinviewofthedamagethat could be done. It was also rationalized in more "military" terms, as a way of selectively denying war material to the troops or as a
way of generally weakening the economy on which the military effort rested. 8
8. Forareexaminationofstrategic-bombingtheorybeforeandduringWorldWarII, inthelightofnuclear-ageconcepts,seeGeorgeH. Quester,DeterrencebeforeHiroshima (New York, John Wiley and Sons,1966). See also the first four chapters ofBemard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 3-146.
But as terrorism-as violence intended to coerce the enemy rather than to weaken him militarily-blockade and strategic bombing by themselves were not quite up to the job in either world war in Europe. (They might have been sufficient in the war with Japan after straightforward military action had brought American aircraft into range. ) Airplanes could not quite make punitive, coercive violence decisive in Europe, at least on a tolerable time schedule, and preclude the need to defeat or to destroy enemy forces as long as they had nothing but conven- tional explosives and incendiaries to carry. Hitler's V-1 buzz bombandhisV-2rocketarefairlypurecasesofweaponswhose purpose was to intimidate, to hurt Britain itself rather than Allied military forces. What the V-2 needed was a punitive payload worth carrying, and the Germans did not have it. Some of the expectations in the 1920s and the 1930s that another major war would be one of pure civilian violence, of shock and terror from the skies, were not borne out by the available technology. The threat of punitive violence kept occupied countries quiescent; but the wars were won in Europe on the basis of brute strength and skill and not by intimidation, not by the threat of civilian violence but by the application of military force. Military victory was still the price of admission. Latent violence against people was reserved for the politics of surren- der and occupation.
The great exception was the two atomic bombs on Japanese cities. These were weapons of terror and shock. They hurt, and promised more hurt, and that was their purpose. The few "small" weapons we had were undoubtedly of some direct military value, but their enormous advantage was in pure violence. In a military sense the United States could gain a little by destruction of two Japanese industrial cities; in a civilian sense, the Japanese could lose much. The bomb that hit Hiroshima was a threat aimed at all ofJapan. The political target of the bomb was not the dead of Hiroshima or the factories they worked in, but the survivors in Tokyo. The two bombs were in the tradition of Sheridan against the Comanches and Sherman in Georgia. Whether in the end those two bombs saved lives or
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ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE DIPLOMACY OF ViOLENCE 19 tant, they do not help to identify just what is new about war
when so much destructive energy can be packed in warheads at a price that permits advanced countries to have them in large numbers. Nuclear warheads are incomparably more devastat- ing than anything packaged before. What does that imply about war?
It is not true that for the first time in history man has the capability to destroy a large fraction, even the major part, of the human race. Japan was defenseless by August 1945. With a combination of bombing and blockade, eventually invasion, and if necessary the deliberate spread of disease, the United States could probably have exterminated the population of the Japanese islands without nuclear weapons. It would have been a gruesome, expensive, and mortifying campaign; it would have taken time and demanded persistence. But we had the economic and technical capacity to do it; and, together with the Russians or without them, we could have done the same in many pop- ulouspartsoftheworld. Againstdefenselesspeoplethereisnot much that nuclear weapons can do that cannot be done with an ice pick. And it would not have strained our Gross National Product to do it with ice picks.
It is a grisly thing to talk about. We did not do it and it is not imaginablethatwewouldhavedoneit. Wehadnoreason;ifwe had had a reason, we would not have the persistence of purpose, once the fury of war had been dissipated in victory and we had takenonthetaskofexecutioner. Ifweandourenemiesmightdo such a thing to each other now, and to others as well,
prove in practice-I admit I cannot prove it in theory-capable of giving complete immunity. IftwoPowersshowthemselvesequallycapableofinflictingdamageupon each other by some particular process of war, so that neither gains an advantage from its adoption and both suffer the most hideous reciprocal injuries, it is not only possible but it seems probable that neither will employ that means. " A fascinating reexamina- tion of concepts like deterrence, preemptive attack, counterforce and countercity warfare, retaliation, reprisal, and limited war, in the strategic literature of the air age from the turn of the century to the close of World War II, is in Quester's book, cited above.
wasted them, Japanese lives or American lives; whether puni- tive coercive violence is uglier than straightforward military force or more civilized; whether terror is more or less humane than military destruction; we can at least perceive that the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented violence against the country itself and not mainly an attack on Japan's material strength.
The effect of the bombs, and their purpose, were not mainly the military destruction they accomplished but the pain and the shock and the promise of more.
The Nuclear Contribution to Terror and Violence
Man has, it is said, for the first time in history enough military power to eliminate his species from the earth, weapons against which there is no conceivable defense. War has become, it is said, so destructive and terrible that it ceases to be an instrument of national power. "For the first time in human history," says Max Lerner in a book whose title, The Age ofOverkill, conveys the point, "men have bottled up a power . . . which they have thus far not dared to use. " 9 And Soviet military authorities, whose party dislikes having to accommodate an entire theory of history to a single technological event, have had to reexamine a
set of principles that had been given the embarrassing name of "permanently operating factors" in warfare. Indeed, our era is epitomized by words like "the first time in human history," and by the abdication of what was "permanent. "
For dramatic impact these statements are splendid. Some of them display a tendency, not at all necessary, to belittle the catastropheofearlierwars. Theymayexaggeratethehistorical noveltyofdeterrenceandthebalanceofterror. 10 Moreimpor-
9. New York. Simon and Schuster, 1962, p. 47.
10. Winston Churchill is often credited with the term, "balance of terror," and the following quotation succinctly expresses the familiar notion of nuclear mutual deter- rence. This, though, is from a speech in Commons in November 1934. "The fact re- mains that when all is said and done as regards defensive methods, pending some new discovery the only direct measure of defense upon a great scale is the certainty of being able to inflict simultaneously upon the enemy as great damage as he can inflict upon ourselves. Do not let us undervalue the efficacy of this procedure. It may well
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ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THEDIPLOMACYOFVIOLENCE 21
it is not because nuclear weapons have for the first time made it feasible.
Nuclear weapons can do it quickly. That makes a difference. When the Crusaders breached the walls of Jerusalem they sacked the city while the mood was on them. They burned things that they might, with time to reflect, have carried away instead and raped women that, with time to think about it, they might have married instead. To compress a catastrophic war within the span of time that a man can stay awake drastically changesthepoliticsofwar,theprocessofdecision,thepossibil- ity of central control and restraint, the motivations of people in charge, and the capacity to think and reflect while war is in progress. It is imaginable that we might destroy 200,000,000 Russians in a war ofthe present, though not 80,000,000 Japa-
neseinawarofthepast. Itisnotonlyimaginable,itisimagined. It is imaginable because it could be done "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. "
This may be why there is so little discussion ofhow an all-out war might be brought to a close. People do not expect it to be "brought" to a close, but just to come to an end when everything has been spent. It is also why the idea of "limited war" has become so explicit in recent years. Earlier wars, like World Wars I and II or the Franco-Prussian War, were limited by termination, by an ending that occurred before the period of greatest potential violence, by negotiation that brought the threat of pain and privation to bear but often precluded the massive exercise of civilian violence. With nuclear weapons available, the restraint of violence cannot await the outcome of a contest of military strength; restraint, to occur at all, must
occur during war itself.
This is a difference between nuclear weapons and bayonets.
It is not in the number of people they can eventually kill but in the speed with which it can be done, in the centralization of decision, in the divorce of the war from political processes, and in computerized programs that threaten to take the war out of human hands once it begins.
That nuclear weapons make it possible to compress the fury
of global war into a few hours does not mean that they make it inevitable. Wehavestilltoaskwhetherthatisthewayamajor nuclear war would be fought, or ought to be fought. Neverthe- less, that the whole war might go off like one big string of firecrackers makes a critical difference between our conception of nuclear war and the world wars we have experienced.
There is no guarantee, of course, that a slower war would not persist. The First World War could have stopped at any time after the Battle of the Marne. There was plenty of time to think about war aims, to consult the long-range national interest, to reflect on costs and casualties already incurred and the prospect of more to come, and to discuss terms of cessation with the enemy. The gruesome business continued as mechanically as if it had been in the hands of computers (or worse: computers might have been programmed to learn more quickly from experience). One may even suppose it would have been a blessing had all the pain and shock of the four years been compressed within four days. Still, it was terminated. And the victors had no stomach for doing then with bayonets what nuclear weapons could do to the German people today.
Thereisanotherdifference. Inthepastithasusuallybeenthe victors who could do what they pleased to the enemy. War has often been "total war" for the loser. With deadly monotony the Persians, Greeks, or Romans "put to death all men of military age, and sold the women and children into slavery," leaving the defeated territory nothing but its name until new settlers arrived sometime later. But the defeated could not do the same to their victors. The boys could be castrated and sold only after the war had been won, and only on the side that lost it. The power to hurt could be brought to bear only after military strength had achieved victory. The same sequence characterized the great wars of this century; for reasons oftechnology and geography, military force has usually had to penetrate, to exhaust, or to col- lapse opposing military force-to achieve military victory- before it could be brought to bear on the enemy nation itself. The Allies in World War I could not inflict coercive pain and suffering directly on the Germans in a decisive way until they
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ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE DIPLOMACY OF VIOLENCE 23
could defeat the German army; and the Germans could not coerce the French people with bayonets unless they first beat the Allied troops that stood in their way. With two-dimensional warfare, there is a tendency for troops to confront each other, shielding their own lands while attempting to press into each other's. Small penetrations could not do major damage to the people; large penetrations were so destructive of military orga- nization that they usually ended the military phase of the war.
Nuclear weapons make it possible to do monstrous violence to the enemy without first achieving victory. With nuclear weapons and today's means of delivery, one expects to pen- etrate an enemy homeland without first collapsing his military force. What nuclear weapons have done, or appear to do, is to promote this kind of warfare to first place. Nuclear weapons threaten to make war less military, and are responsible for the loweredstatusof"militaryvictory"atthepresenttime. Victory is no longer a prerequisite for hurting the enemy. And it is no assurance against being terribly hurt. One need not wait until he has won the war before inflicting "unendurable" damages on his enemy. One need not wait until he has lost the war. There was a time when the assurance of victory-false or genuine assurance-could make national leaders not just willing but
sometimes enthusiastic about war. Not now.
Not only can nuclear weapons hurt the enemy before the war
has been won, and perhaps hurt decisively enough to make the military engagement academic, but it is widely assumed that in a major war that is all they can do. Major war is often discussed as though it would be only a contest in national destruction. If thisisindeedthecase-ifthedestructionofcitiesandtheirpop- ulations has become, with nuclear weapons, the primary object in an all-out war-the sequence of war has been reversed. Instead of destroying enemy forces as a prelude to imposing one's will on the enemy nation, one would have to destroy the nation as a means or a prelude to destroying the enemy forces. I f one cannot disable enemy forces without virtually destroying the country, the victor does not even have the option of sparing the conquered nation. He has already destroyed it. Even with
blockade and strategic bombing it could be supposed that a country would be defeated before it was destroyed, or would elect surrender before annihilation had gone far. In the Civil War it could be hoped that the South would become too weak to fight before it became too weak to survive. For "all-out" war, nuclear weapons threaten to reverse this sequence.
So nuclear weapons do make a difference, marking an epoch in warfare. The difference is not just in the amount of destruc- tion that can be accomplished but in the role of destruction and in the decision process. Nuclear weapons can change the speed of events, the control of events, the sequence of events, the relation ofvictor to vanquished, and the relation ofhomeland to fighting front. Deterrence rests today on the threat of pain and extinction, not just on the threat of military defeat. We may argue about the wisdom of announcing "unconditional sur- render" as an aim in the last major war, but seem to expect "unconditional destruction" as a matter of course in another one.
Something like the same destruction always could be done. With nuclear weapons there is an expectation that it would be done. It is not "overkill" that is new; the American army surely had enough 30 caliber bullets to kill everybody in the world in 1945, or if it did not it could have bought them without any strain. What is new is plain "kill"-the idea that major war might be just a contest in the killing of countries, or not even a contest butjust two parallel exercises in devastation.
That is the difference nuclear weapons make. At least they may make that difference. They also may not. If the weapons them- selvesarevulnerabletoattack,orthemachinesthatcarrythem,a successful surprise might eliminate the opponent's means of retribution. That an enormous explosion can be packaged in a single bomb does not by itself guarantee that the victor will receive deadly punishment. Two gunfighters facing each other in a Western town had an unquestioned capacity to kill one another; that did not guarantee that both would die in a gun- fight--only the slower of the two. Less deadly weapons, per- mitting an injured one to shoot back before he died, might have
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24
ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE DIPLOMACY OF VIOLENCE 25 "The United States has come to the conclusion," said Secre-
tary MeNamara,
that to the extent feasible, basic military strategy in a possible general war should be approached in much the same way that more conventional military operations have been regarded in the past. That is to say, principal military objectives . . . should be the destruction of the enemy's military forces, not of his civilian population . . . giving the possible opponent the strongest imaginable incentive to refrain from striking our own cities. 1I
This is a sensible way to think about war, if one has to think about it and of course one does. But whether the Secretary's "new strategy" was sensible or not, whether enemy populations should be held hostage or instantly destroyed, whether the primary targets should be military forces or just people and their source of livelihood, this is not "much the same way that more conventional military operations have been regarded in the past. " This is utterly different, and the difference deserves emphasis.
In World Wars I and II one went to work on enemy military forces, not his people, because until the enemy's military forces had been taken care of there was typically not anything decisive that one could do to the enemy nation itself. The Germans did not, in World War I, refrain from bayoneting French citizens by the millions in the hope that the Allies would abstain from shooting up the German population. They could not get at the French citizens until they had breached the Allied lines. Hitler tried to terrorize London and did not make it. The Allied air forces took the war straight to Hitler's territory, with at least some thought o f doing in Germany what Sherman recognized he was doing in Georgia; but with the bombing technology of World War II one could not afford to bypass the troops and go eX~lusively for enemy populations-not, anyway, in Germany. WIth nuclear weapons one has that alternative.
To concentrate on the enemy's military installations while deliberately holding in reserve a massive capacity for destroying
11. Commencement Address. University of Michigan, June 16,1962.
been more conducive to a restraining balance of terror, or of caution. The very efficiency of nuclear weapons could make them ideal for starting war, if they can suddenly eliminate the enemy's capability to shoot back.
And there is a contrary possibility: that nuclear weapons are not vulnerable to attack and prove not to be terribly effective against each other, posing no need to shoot them quickly for fear they will be destroyed before they are launched, and with no task available but the systematic destruction of the enemy country and no necessary reason to do it fast rather than slowly. Imagine that nuclear destruction had to go slowly-that the bombs could be dropped only one per day. The prospect would look very different, something like the most terroristic guerilla warfare on a massive scale. It happens that nuclear war does not have to go slowly; but it may also not have to go speedily. The mere existence of nuclear weapons does not itself determine that everything must go off in a blinding flash, any more than that it must go slowly. Nuclear weapons do not simplify things quite that much.
In recent years there has been a new emphasis on distinguish- ing what nuclear weapons make possible and what they make inevitable in case of war. The American government began in
1961 to emphasize that even a major nuclear war might not, and need not, be a simple contest in destructive fury. Secretary McNamara gave a controversial speech in June 1962 on the idea that "deterrence" might operate even in war itself, that belligerents might, out of self-interest, attempt to limit the war's destructiveness. Each might feel the sheer destruction of enemy people and cities would serve no decisive military purpose but that a continued threat to destroy them might serve a purpose. The continued threat would depend on their not being destroyed yet. Each might reciprocate the other's re-
straint, as in limited wars of lesser scope. Even the worst of enemies, in the interest of reciprocity, have often not mutilated prisoners of war; and citizens might deserve comparable treat- ment. The fury of nuclear attacks might fall mainly on each other's weapons and military forces.
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THED~LOMACYOF~OLENCE 27
his cities, for exterminating his people and eliminating his soci- ety, on condition that the enemy observe similar restraint with respect to one's own society, is not the "conventional ap- proach. "InWorldWarsIandIIthefirstorderofbusinesswasto destroy enemy armed forces because that was the only prom- ising way to make him surrender. To fight a purely military engagement "all-out" while holding in reserve a decisive ca- pacity for violence, on condition the enemy do likewise, is not the way military operations have traditionally been approached. Secretary McNamara was proposing a new approach to warfare in a new era, an era in which the power to hurt is more impres- sive than the power to oppose.
From Battlefield Warfare to the Diplomacy of Violence
Almost one hundred years before Secretary McNamara's speech, the Declaration of St. Petersburg (the first of the great modem conferences to cope with the evils of warfare) in 1868 asserted, "The only legitimate object which states should en- deavor to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces ofthe enemy. " And in a letter to the League of Nations in 1920, the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross wrote; "The Committee considers it very desirable that war should resume its former character, that is to say, that it should be a struggle between armies and not between popula- tions. The civilian population must, as far as possible, remain outside the struggle and its consequences. "12 His language is remarkably similar to Secretary McNamara's.
The International Committee was fated for disappointment, like everyone who labored in the late nineteenth century to devise rules that would make war more humane. When the Red Cross was founded in 1863, it was concerned about the disre- gard for noncombatants by those who made war; but in the Second World War noncombatants were deliberately chosen
12. InternationalCommitteeoftheRedCross,DraftRulesfortheLimitation ofthe
Dangers Incurred by the Civilian Population in Time of War (2d ed. Geneva, 1958), pp. 144,151.
as targets by both Axis and Allied forces, not decisively but nevertheless deliberately. The trend has been the reverse of what the International Committee hoped for.
In the present era noncombatants appear to be not only deliberate targets but primary targets, or at least were so taken for granted until about the time of Secretary McNamara's speech. In fact, noncombatants appeared to be primary targets at both ends of the scale of warfare; thermonuclear war threat- ened to be a contest in the destruction of cities and populations; and, at the other end of the scale, insurgency is almost entirely terroristic. We live in an era ofdirty war.
Why is this so? Is war properly a military affair among combatants, and is it a depravity peculiar to the twentieth century that we cannot keep it within decent bounds? Or is war inherently dirty, and was the Red Cross nostalgic for an artifi- cial civilization in which war had become encrusted with etiquette-a situation to be welcomed but not expected?
To answer this question it is useful to distinguish three stages in the involvement of noncombatants-of plain people and their possessions-in the fury of war. These stages are worth distinguishing; but their sequence is merely descriptive of Western Europe during the past three hundred years, not a historical generalization. The first stage is that in which the people may get hurt by inconsiderate combatants. This is the status that people had during the period of "civilized warfare" that the International Committee had in mind.
From about 1648 to the Napoleonic era, war in much of Wes- tern Europe was something superimposed on society. It was a contest engaged in by monarchies for stakes that were mea- sured in territories and, occasionally, money or dynastic claims. The troops were mostly mercenaries and the motivation for war was confined to the aristocratic elite. Monarchs fought for bits of territory, but the residents of disputed terrain were more concerned with protecting their crops and their daughters from marauding troops than with whom they owed allegiance to. They were, as Quincy Wright remarked in his classic Study of War, little concerned that the territory in which they lived had a
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28
ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE DIPLOMACY OF VIOLENCE 29
new sovereign. 13 Furthermore, as far as the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria were concerned, the loyalty and enthusiasm of the Bohemian farmer were not decisive consid- erations. It is an exaggeration to refer to European war during this period as a sport of kings, but not a gross exaggeration. And the military logistics of those days confined military operations to a scale that did not require the enthusiasm of a multitude.
Hurting people was not a decisive instrument of warfare. Hurting people or destroying property only reduced the value of the things that were being fought over, to the disadvantage of both sides. Furthermore, the monarchs who conducted wars often did not want to discredit the social institutions they shared with their enemies. Bypassing an enemy monarch and taking the war straight to his people would have had revolutionary implications. Destroying the opposing monarchy was often not in the interest of either side; opposing sovereigns had much more in common with each other than with their own subjects, andtodiscredittheclaimsofamonarchymighthaveproduceda disastrous backlash. It is not surprising-or, if it is surprising, not altogether astonishing-that on the European continent in that particular era war was fairly well confined to military
activity.
One could still, in those days and in that part of the world, be
concerned for the rights of noncombatants and hope to devise rules that both sides in the war might observe. The rules might well be observed because both sides had something to gain from preserving social order and not destroying the enemy. Rules might be a nuisance, but if they restricted both sides the disadvantages might cancel out.
This was changed during the Napoleonic wars. InNapoleon's France, people cared about the outcome. The nation was mobi- lized. The war was a national effort, not just an activity of the elite. It was both political and military genius on the part of Napoleon and his ministers that an entire nation could be mobilized for war. Propaganda became a tool of warfare, and war became vulgarized.
13. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1942, p. 296.
Many writers deplored this popularization of war, this in- volvement of the democratic masses. In fact, the horrors we attribute to thermonuclear war were already foreseen by many commentators,somebeforetheFirstWorldWarandmoreafter it; but the new "weapon" to which these terrors were ascribed was people, millions of people, passionately engaged in na- tional wars, spending themselves in a quest for total victory and desperate to avoid total defeat. Today we are impressed that a small number of highly trained pilots can carry enough energy to blast and bum tens of millions of people and the buildings they live in; two or three generations ago there was concern that tens of millions of people using bayonets and barbed wire, machine guns and shrapnel, could create the same kind of
destruction and disorder.
That was the second stage in the relation of people to war, the
second in Europe since the middle of the seventeenth century. In the first stage people had been neutral but their welfare might be disregarded; in the second stage people were involved because it was their war. Some fought, some produced materi- als ofwar, some produced food, and some took care ofchildren; but they were all part of a war-making nation. When Hitler attacked Poland in 1939, the Poles had reason to care about the outcome. When Churchill said the British would fight on the beaches, he spoke for the British and not for a mercenary army. The war was about something that mattered. If people would rather fight a dirty war than lose a clean one, the war will be between nations and not just between governments. If people have an influence on whether the war is continued or on the termsofatruce,makingthewarhurtpeopleservesapurpose.
the foreign consuls in that city approached General Scott's headquarters to ask for a truce so that women, children, and neutrals could evacuate the city. General Scott, "counting on such internal pressure to help bring about the city's surrender," refused their request and added that anyone, soldier or noncom- batant, who attempted to leave the city would be fired upon. ) 2
Whether spoken or not, the threat is usually there. In earlier eras the etiquette was more permissive. When the Persians wanted to induce some Ionian cities to surrender and join them, without having to fight them, they instructed their ambassadors to
make your proposals to them and promise that, if they aban- don their allies, there will be no disagreeable consequences
2. Otis A. Singletary, The Mexican War (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 75-76. In a similar episode the Gauls, defending the town of Alesia in 52 B. C. , "decided to send out of the town those whom age or infirmity incapacitated for fighting. . . . They came up to the Roman fortifications and with tears besought the soldiers to take them as slaves and relieve their hunger. But Caesar posted guards on the ramparts with orders to refuse them admission. " Caesar, The Conquest ofGaul, s. A. Handford, transL (Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1951), p. 227.
for them; we will not set fire to their houses or temples, or threaten them with any greater harshness than before this trouble oc- curred. If, however, they refuse, and insist upon fighting, then you must resort to threats, and say exactly what we will do to them; tell them, that is, that when they are beaten they will be sold as slaves, their boys will be made eunuchs, their girls carried off to Bactria, and their land confiscated. 3
It sounds like Hitler talking to Schuschnigg. "I only need to give an order, and overnight all the ridiculous scarecrows on the frontier will vanish . . . Then you will really experience something. . . . After the troops will follow the S. A. and the Legion. No one will be able to hinder the vengeance, not even myself. "
Or Henry V before the gates of Harfleur:
W e may as bootless spend our vain command Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil
As send precepts to the leviathan
To come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfleur, Take pity of your town and of your people, Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command; Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace 0 ' erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil and villainy.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters; Y our fathers t~en by the silver beard,
And their most reverent heads dash'd to the walls, Y our naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused Do break the clouds . . .
What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?
(Act III, Scene iii)
3. Herodotus, The Histories, Aubrey de Selincourt, trans! . (Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1954), p. 362.
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ARMS AND INFLUENCE The Strategic Role of Pain and Damage
THE DIPLOMACY OF VIOLENCE 13
not give in. . . . He sent some of the prisoners into the hills and told them to say that if the inhabitants did not come down and settle in their houses to submit to him, he would bum up their villages too and destroy their crops, and they would die of hunger. 4
Military victory was but the price ofadmission. The payoffde- pended upon the successful threat of violence.
Like the Persian leader, the Russians crushed Budapest in 1956andcowedPolandandotherneighboringcountries. There was a lag of ten years between military victory and this show of violence, but the principle was the one explained by Xenophon. Military victory is often the prelude to violence, not the end of it, and the fact that successful violence is usually held in reserve should not deceive us about the role it plays.
What about pure violence during war itself, the infliction of pain and suffering as a military technique? Is the threat of pain involved only in the political use of victory, or is it a decisive technique of war itself?
Evidently between unequal powers it has been part of war- fare. Colonial conquest has often been a matter of "punitive ex- peditions" rather than genuine military engagements. If the tribesmen escape into the bush you can bum their villages with- out them until they assent to receive what, in strikingly modem language, used to be known as the Queen's "protection. " British air power was used punitively against Arabian tribes- men in the 1920s and 30s to coerce them into submission. 5
4. Xenophon, The Persian Expedition, Rex Warner, trans\. (Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1949), p. 272. "The 'rational' goal of the threat of vio- lence," says H. L. Nieburg, "is an accommodation of interests, not the provocation of actual violence. Similarly the 'rational' goal of actual violence is demonstration of the will and capability of action, establishing a measure of the credibility of future threats, not the exhaustion of that capability in unlimited conflict. " "Uses of Violence," Journal of Conflict Resolution, 7 (1963), 44.
5. A perceptive, thoughtful account of this tactic, and one that empha- sizes its "diplomatic" character, is in the lecture of Air Chief Marshal Lord Portal, "Air Force Cooperation in Policing the Empire. " "The
Pure violence, nonmilitary violence, appears most conspicu- ously in relations between unequal countries, where t~e:eis no substantial military challenge and the outcome of mllttary engagement is not in question. Hitler could make his threats contemptuously and brutally against Austria; he could make them, ifhe wished, in a more refined way against Denmark. It is noteworthy that it was Hitler, not his generals, who used this kind of language; proud military establishments do not like to think of themselves as extortionists. Their favorite job is to deliver victory, to dispose of opposing military force and to leave most of the civilian violence to politics and diplomacy.
But if there is no room for doubt how a contest in strength will come out, it may be possible to bypass the military stage altogether and to proceed at once to the coercive bargaining.
A typical confrontation of unequal forces occurs at the end of a war, between victor and vanquished. Where Austria was vulnerable before a shot was fired, France was vulnerable after its military shield had collapsed in 1940. Surrender negotiations are the place where the threat of civil violence can come to the fore. Surrender negotiations are often so one- sided, or the potential violence so unmistakable, that bargain- ing succeeds and the violence remains in reserve. But the fact
that most of the actual damage was done during the military stage of the war, prior to victory and defeat, does not mean that violence was idle in the aftermath, only that it was latent and the threat of it successful.
Indeed, victory is often but a prerequisite to the exploitation of the power to hurt. When Xenophon was fighting in Asia Minor under Persian leadership, it took military strength to disperse enemy soldiers and occupy their lands; but land was not what the victor wanted, nor was victory for its own sake.
Next day the Persian leader burned the villages to the ground, not leaving a single house standing, so as to strike terror into the other tribes to show them what would happen if they did
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ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE DIPLOMACY OF VIOLENCE 15
If enemy forces are not strong enough to oppose, or are unwilling to engage, there is no need to achieve victory as a prerequisite to getting on with a display of coercive violence. When Caesar was pacifying the tribes of Gaul he sometimes had to fight his way through their armed men in order to subdue them with a display of punitive violence, but sometimes he was virtually unopposed and could proceed straight to the punitive display. To his legions there was more valor in fighting their way to the seat of power; but, as governor of Gaul, Caesar could view enemy troops only as an obstacle to his political control, and that control was usually based on the power to inflict pain, grief, and privation. In fact, he preferred to keep several hundred hostages from the unreliable tribes, so that his threat of
violence did not even depend on an expedition into the country- side.
Pure hurting, as a military tactic, appeared in some of the military actions against the plains Indians. In 1868, during the war with the Cheyennes, General Sheridan decided that his best hope was to attack the Indians in their winter camps. His reasoning was that the Indians could maraud as they pleased during the seasons when their ponies could subsist on grass, and in winter hide away in remote places. "To disabuse their minds from the idea that they were secure from punishment, and to
strike at a period when they were helpless to move their stock and villages, a winter campaign was projected against the large bands hiding away in the Indian territory. " 6
These were not military engagements; they were punitive attacks on people. They were an effort to subdue by the use of violence, without a futile attempt to draw the enemy's military forces into decisive battle. They were "massive retaliation" on a
law-breaking tribe must be given an alternative to being bombed and . . . be told in the clearest possible terms what that alternative is. " And, "It would be the greatest mistake to believe that a victory which spares the lives and feelings of the losers need be any less permanent or salutary than one which inflicts heavy losses on the fighting men and results in a 'peace' dictated on a stricken field. " Journal ofthe Royal United Services Institution (London, May 1937), pp. 343-58.
6. Paul 1. Wellman, Death on the Prairie (New York, Macmillan, 1934), p. 82.
diminutive scale, with local effects not unlike those of Hiroshima. The Indians themselves totally lacked organization and discipline, and typically could not afford enough ammuni- tion for target practice and were no military match for the cavalry; their own rudimentary strategy was at best one of harassment and reprisal. Half a century ofIndian fighting in the West left us a legacy of cavalry tactics; but it is hard to find a serious treatise on American strategy against the Indians or Indian strategy against the whites. The twentieth is not the first centuryinwhich"retaliation"hasbeenpartofourstrategy,but it is the first in which we have systematically recognized it.
Hurting, as a strategy, showed up in the American Civil War, but as an episode, not as the central strategy. For the most part, the Civil War was a military engagement with each side's military force pitted against the other's. The Confederate forces hoped to lay waste enough Union territory to negotiate their independence, but hadn't enough capacity for such violence to make it work. The Union forces were intent on military victory, and it was mainly General Sherman's march through Georgia that showed a conscious and articulate use of violence. "If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war . . . I f they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war," Sherman wrote. And one of his associates said, "Sherman is perfectly right . . . The only possible way to end this unhappy and dreadful conflict . . . is to make it terrible beyond endurance. " 7
Making it "terrible beyond endurance" is what we associate with Algeria and Palestine, the crushing of Budapest and the tribal warfare in Central Africa. Butin the great wars of the last hundred years it was usually military victory, not the hurting of the people, that was decisive; General Sherman's attempt to make war hell for the Southern people did not come to
7. J. F. C. Fuller reproduces some of this correspondence and remarks, "For the nineteenth century this was a new conception, because it meant that the deciding factor in the war-the powerto sue for peace-was transferred from government to people, and that peacemaking was a product of revolution. This was to carry the principle of democracy to its ultimate stage. . . . " The Conduct ofWar: 1789-1961 (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1961), pp. 107-12.
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ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE DIPLOMACY OF VIOLENCE 17
epitomize military strategy for the century to follow. To seek out and to destroy the enemy's military force, to achieve a crushing victory over enemy armies, was still the avowed pur- pose and the central aim of American strategy in both world wars. Military action was seen as an alternative to bargaining, not a process of bargaining.
The reason is not that civilized countries are so averse to hurting people that they prefer "purely military" wars. (Nor were all ofthe participants in these wars entirely civilized. ) The reason is apparently that the technology and geography of war- fare, at least for a war between anything like equal powers dur- ing the century ending in World War II, kept coercive violence from being decisive before military victory was achieved. Blockade indeed was aimed at the whole enemy nation, not concentrated on its military forces; the German civilians who died of influenza in the First World War were victims of violence directed at the whole country. It has never been quite clearwhetherblockade-oftheSouthintheCivilWarorofthe
Central Powers in both world wars, or submarine warfare against Britain-was expected to make war unendurable for the people orjust to weaken the enemy forces by denying economic support. Both arguments were made, but there was no need to be clear about the purpose as long as either purpose was regarded as legitimate and either might be served. "Strategic bombing" ofenemy homelands was also occasionally rational- ized in terms of the pain and privation it could inflict on people and the civil damage it could do to the nation, as an effort to display either to the population or to the enemy leadership that surrenderwasbetterthanpersistenceinviewofthedamagethat could be done. It was also rationalized in more "military" terms, as a way of selectively denying war material to the troops or as a
way of generally weakening the economy on which the military effort rested. 8
8. Forareexaminationofstrategic-bombingtheorybeforeandduringWorldWarII, inthelightofnuclear-ageconcepts,seeGeorgeH. Quester,DeterrencebeforeHiroshima (New York, John Wiley and Sons,1966). See also the first four chapters ofBemard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 3-146.
But as terrorism-as violence intended to coerce the enemy rather than to weaken him militarily-blockade and strategic bombing by themselves were not quite up to the job in either world war in Europe. (They might have been sufficient in the war with Japan after straightforward military action had brought American aircraft into range. ) Airplanes could not quite make punitive, coercive violence decisive in Europe, at least on a tolerable time schedule, and preclude the need to defeat or to destroy enemy forces as long as they had nothing but conven- tional explosives and incendiaries to carry. Hitler's V-1 buzz bombandhisV-2rocketarefairlypurecasesofweaponswhose purpose was to intimidate, to hurt Britain itself rather than Allied military forces. What the V-2 needed was a punitive payload worth carrying, and the Germans did not have it. Some of the expectations in the 1920s and the 1930s that another major war would be one of pure civilian violence, of shock and terror from the skies, were not borne out by the available technology. The threat of punitive violence kept occupied countries quiescent; but the wars were won in Europe on the basis of brute strength and skill and not by intimidation, not by the threat of civilian violence but by the application of military force. Military victory was still the price of admission. Latent violence against people was reserved for the politics of surren- der and occupation.
The great exception was the two atomic bombs on Japanese cities. These were weapons of terror and shock. They hurt, and promised more hurt, and that was their purpose. The few "small" weapons we had were undoubtedly of some direct military value, but their enormous advantage was in pure violence. In a military sense the United States could gain a little by destruction of two Japanese industrial cities; in a civilian sense, the Japanese could lose much. The bomb that hit Hiroshima was a threat aimed at all ofJapan. The political target of the bomb was not the dead of Hiroshima or the factories they worked in, but the survivors in Tokyo. The two bombs were in the tradition of Sheridan against the Comanches and Sherman in Georgia. Whether in the end those two bombs saved lives or
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ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE DIPLOMACY OF ViOLENCE 19 tant, they do not help to identify just what is new about war
when so much destructive energy can be packed in warheads at a price that permits advanced countries to have them in large numbers. Nuclear warheads are incomparably more devastat- ing than anything packaged before. What does that imply about war?
It is not true that for the first time in history man has the capability to destroy a large fraction, even the major part, of the human race. Japan was defenseless by August 1945. With a combination of bombing and blockade, eventually invasion, and if necessary the deliberate spread of disease, the United States could probably have exterminated the population of the Japanese islands without nuclear weapons. It would have been a gruesome, expensive, and mortifying campaign; it would have taken time and demanded persistence. But we had the economic and technical capacity to do it; and, together with the Russians or without them, we could have done the same in many pop- ulouspartsoftheworld. Againstdefenselesspeoplethereisnot much that nuclear weapons can do that cannot be done with an ice pick. And it would not have strained our Gross National Product to do it with ice picks.
It is a grisly thing to talk about. We did not do it and it is not imaginablethatwewouldhavedoneit. Wehadnoreason;ifwe had had a reason, we would not have the persistence of purpose, once the fury of war had been dissipated in victory and we had takenonthetaskofexecutioner. Ifweandourenemiesmightdo such a thing to each other now, and to others as well,
prove in practice-I admit I cannot prove it in theory-capable of giving complete immunity. IftwoPowersshowthemselvesequallycapableofinflictingdamageupon each other by some particular process of war, so that neither gains an advantage from its adoption and both suffer the most hideous reciprocal injuries, it is not only possible but it seems probable that neither will employ that means. " A fascinating reexamina- tion of concepts like deterrence, preemptive attack, counterforce and countercity warfare, retaliation, reprisal, and limited war, in the strategic literature of the air age from the turn of the century to the close of World War II, is in Quester's book, cited above.
wasted them, Japanese lives or American lives; whether puni- tive coercive violence is uglier than straightforward military force or more civilized; whether terror is more or less humane than military destruction; we can at least perceive that the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented violence against the country itself and not mainly an attack on Japan's material strength.
The effect of the bombs, and their purpose, were not mainly the military destruction they accomplished but the pain and the shock and the promise of more.
The Nuclear Contribution to Terror and Violence
Man has, it is said, for the first time in history enough military power to eliminate his species from the earth, weapons against which there is no conceivable defense. War has become, it is said, so destructive and terrible that it ceases to be an instrument of national power. "For the first time in human history," says Max Lerner in a book whose title, The Age ofOverkill, conveys the point, "men have bottled up a power . . . which they have thus far not dared to use. " 9 And Soviet military authorities, whose party dislikes having to accommodate an entire theory of history to a single technological event, have had to reexamine a
set of principles that had been given the embarrassing name of "permanently operating factors" in warfare. Indeed, our era is epitomized by words like "the first time in human history," and by the abdication of what was "permanent. "
For dramatic impact these statements are splendid. Some of them display a tendency, not at all necessary, to belittle the catastropheofearlierwars. Theymayexaggeratethehistorical noveltyofdeterrenceandthebalanceofterror. 10 Moreimpor-
9. New York. Simon and Schuster, 1962, p. 47.
10. Winston Churchill is often credited with the term, "balance of terror," and the following quotation succinctly expresses the familiar notion of nuclear mutual deter- rence. This, though, is from a speech in Commons in November 1934. "The fact re- mains that when all is said and done as regards defensive methods, pending some new discovery the only direct measure of defense upon a great scale is the certainty of being able to inflict simultaneously upon the enemy as great damage as he can inflict upon ourselves. Do not let us undervalue the efficacy of this procedure. It may well
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ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THEDIPLOMACYOFVIOLENCE 21
it is not because nuclear weapons have for the first time made it feasible.
Nuclear weapons can do it quickly. That makes a difference. When the Crusaders breached the walls of Jerusalem they sacked the city while the mood was on them. They burned things that they might, with time to reflect, have carried away instead and raped women that, with time to think about it, they might have married instead. To compress a catastrophic war within the span of time that a man can stay awake drastically changesthepoliticsofwar,theprocessofdecision,thepossibil- ity of central control and restraint, the motivations of people in charge, and the capacity to think and reflect while war is in progress. It is imaginable that we might destroy 200,000,000 Russians in a war ofthe present, though not 80,000,000 Japa-
neseinawarofthepast. Itisnotonlyimaginable,itisimagined. It is imaginable because it could be done "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. "
This may be why there is so little discussion ofhow an all-out war might be brought to a close. People do not expect it to be "brought" to a close, but just to come to an end when everything has been spent. It is also why the idea of "limited war" has become so explicit in recent years. Earlier wars, like World Wars I and II or the Franco-Prussian War, were limited by termination, by an ending that occurred before the period of greatest potential violence, by negotiation that brought the threat of pain and privation to bear but often precluded the massive exercise of civilian violence. With nuclear weapons available, the restraint of violence cannot await the outcome of a contest of military strength; restraint, to occur at all, must
occur during war itself.
This is a difference between nuclear weapons and bayonets.
It is not in the number of people they can eventually kill but in the speed with which it can be done, in the centralization of decision, in the divorce of the war from political processes, and in computerized programs that threaten to take the war out of human hands once it begins.
That nuclear weapons make it possible to compress the fury
of global war into a few hours does not mean that they make it inevitable. Wehavestilltoaskwhetherthatisthewayamajor nuclear war would be fought, or ought to be fought. Neverthe- less, that the whole war might go off like one big string of firecrackers makes a critical difference between our conception of nuclear war and the world wars we have experienced.
There is no guarantee, of course, that a slower war would not persist. The First World War could have stopped at any time after the Battle of the Marne. There was plenty of time to think about war aims, to consult the long-range national interest, to reflect on costs and casualties already incurred and the prospect of more to come, and to discuss terms of cessation with the enemy. The gruesome business continued as mechanically as if it had been in the hands of computers (or worse: computers might have been programmed to learn more quickly from experience). One may even suppose it would have been a blessing had all the pain and shock of the four years been compressed within four days. Still, it was terminated. And the victors had no stomach for doing then with bayonets what nuclear weapons could do to the German people today.
Thereisanotherdifference. Inthepastithasusuallybeenthe victors who could do what they pleased to the enemy. War has often been "total war" for the loser. With deadly monotony the Persians, Greeks, or Romans "put to death all men of military age, and sold the women and children into slavery," leaving the defeated territory nothing but its name until new settlers arrived sometime later. But the defeated could not do the same to their victors. The boys could be castrated and sold only after the war had been won, and only on the side that lost it. The power to hurt could be brought to bear only after military strength had achieved victory. The same sequence characterized the great wars of this century; for reasons oftechnology and geography, military force has usually had to penetrate, to exhaust, or to col- lapse opposing military force-to achieve military victory- before it could be brought to bear on the enemy nation itself. The Allies in World War I could not inflict coercive pain and suffering directly on the Germans in a decisive way until they
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ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE DIPLOMACY OF VIOLENCE 23
could defeat the German army; and the Germans could not coerce the French people with bayonets unless they first beat the Allied troops that stood in their way. With two-dimensional warfare, there is a tendency for troops to confront each other, shielding their own lands while attempting to press into each other's. Small penetrations could not do major damage to the people; large penetrations were so destructive of military orga- nization that they usually ended the military phase of the war.
Nuclear weapons make it possible to do monstrous violence to the enemy without first achieving victory. With nuclear weapons and today's means of delivery, one expects to pen- etrate an enemy homeland without first collapsing his military force. What nuclear weapons have done, or appear to do, is to promote this kind of warfare to first place. Nuclear weapons threaten to make war less military, and are responsible for the loweredstatusof"militaryvictory"atthepresenttime. Victory is no longer a prerequisite for hurting the enemy. And it is no assurance against being terribly hurt. One need not wait until he has won the war before inflicting "unendurable" damages on his enemy. One need not wait until he has lost the war. There was a time when the assurance of victory-false or genuine assurance-could make national leaders not just willing but
sometimes enthusiastic about war. Not now.
Not only can nuclear weapons hurt the enemy before the war
has been won, and perhaps hurt decisively enough to make the military engagement academic, but it is widely assumed that in a major war that is all they can do. Major war is often discussed as though it would be only a contest in national destruction. If thisisindeedthecase-ifthedestructionofcitiesandtheirpop- ulations has become, with nuclear weapons, the primary object in an all-out war-the sequence of war has been reversed. Instead of destroying enemy forces as a prelude to imposing one's will on the enemy nation, one would have to destroy the nation as a means or a prelude to destroying the enemy forces. I f one cannot disable enemy forces without virtually destroying the country, the victor does not even have the option of sparing the conquered nation. He has already destroyed it. Even with
blockade and strategic bombing it could be supposed that a country would be defeated before it was destroyed, or would elect surrender before annihilation had gone far. In the Civil War it could be hoped that the South would become too weak to fight before it became too weak to survive. For "all-out" war, nuclear weapons threaten to reverse this sequence.
So nuclear weapons do make a difference, marking an epoch in warfare. The difference is not just in the amount of destruc- tion that can be accomplished but in the role of destruction and in the decision process. Nuclear weapons can change the speed of events, the control of events, the sequence of events, the relation ofvictor to vanquished, and the relation ofhomeland to fighting front. Deterrence rests today on the threat of pain and extinction, not just on the threat of military defeat. We may argue about the wisdom of announcing "unconditional sur- render" as an aim in the last major war, but seem to expect "unconditional destruction" as a matter of course in another one.
Something like the same destruction always could be done. With nuclear weapons there is an expectation that it would be done. It is not "overkill" that is new; the American army surely had enough 30 caliber bullets to kill everybody in the world in 1945, or if it did not it could have bought them without any strain. What is new is plain "kill"-the idea that major war might be just a contest in the killing of countries, or not even a contest butjust two parallel exercises in devastation.
That is the difference nuclear weapons make. At least they may make that difference. They also may not. If the weapons them- selvesarevulnerabletoattack,orthemachinesthatcarrythem,a successful surprise might eliminate the opponent's means of retribution. That an enormous explosion can be packaged in a single bomb does not by itself guarantee that the victor will receive deadly punishment. Two gunfighters facing each other in a Western town had an unquestioned capacity to kill one another; that did not guarantee that both would die in a gun- fight--only the slower of the two. Less deadly weapons, per- mitting an injured one to shoot back before he died, might have
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24
ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE DIPLOMACY OF VIOLENCE 25 "The United States has come to the conclusion," said Secre-
tary MeNamara,
that to the extent feasible, basic military strategy in a possible general war should be approached in much the same way that more conventional military operations have been regarded in the past. That is to say, principal military objectives . . . should be the destruction of the enemy's military forces, not of his civilian population . . . giving the possible opponent the strongest imaginable incentive to refrain from striking our own cities. 1I
This is a sensible way to think about war, if one has to think about it and of course one does. But whether the Secretary's "new strategy" was sensible or not, whether enemy populations should be held hostage or instantly destroyed, whether the primary targets should be military forces or just people and their source of livelihood, this is not "much the same way that more conventional military operations have been regarded in the past. " This is utterly different, and the difference deserves emphasis.
In World Wars I and II one went to work on enemy military forces, not his people, because until the enemy's military forces had been taken care of there was typically not anything decisive that one could do to the enemy nation itself. The Germans did not, in World War I, refrain from bayoneting French citizens by the millions in the hope that the Allies would abstain from shooting up the German population. They could not get at the French citizens until they had breached the Allied lines. Hitler tried to terrorize London and did not make it. The Allied air forces took the war straight to Hitler's territory, with at least some thought o f doing in Germany what Sherman recognized he was doing in Georgia; but with the bombing technology of World War II one could not afford to bypass the troops and go eX~lusively for enemy populations-not, anyway, in Germany. WIth nuclear weapons one has that alternative.
To concentrate on the enemy's military installations while deliberately holding in reserve a massive capacity for destroying
11. Commencement Address. University of Michigan, June 16,1962.
been more conducive to a restraining balance of terror, or of caution. The very efficiency of nuclear weapons could make them ideal for starting war, if they can suddenly eliminate the enemy's capability to shoot back.
And there is a contrary possibility: that nuclear weapons are not vulnerable to attack and prove not to be terribly effective against each other, posing no need to shoot them quickly for fear they will be destroyed before they are launched, and with no task available but the systematic destruction of the enemy country and no necessary reason to do it fast rather than slowly. Imagine that nuclear destruction had to go slowly-that the bombs could be dropped only one per day. The prospect would look very different, something like the most terroristic guerilla warfare on a massive scale. It happens that nuclear war does not have to go slowly; but it may also not have to go speedily. The mere existence of nuclear weapons does not itself determine that everything must go off in a blinding flash, any more than that it must go slowly. Nuclear weapons do not simplify things quite that much.
In recent years there has been a new emphasis on distinguish- ing what nuclear weapons make possible and what they make inevitable in case of war. The American government began in
1961 to emphasize that even a major nuclear war might not, and need not, be a simple contest in destructive fury. Secretary McNamara gave a controversial speech in June 1962 on the idea that "deterrence" might operate even in war itself, that belligerents might, out of self-interest, attempt to limit the war's destructiveness. Each might feel the sheer destruction of enemy people and cities would serve no decisive military purpose but that a continued threat to destroy them might serve a purpose. The continued threat would depend on their not being destroyed yet. Each might reciprocate the other's re-
straint, as in limited wars of lesser scope. Even the worst of enemies, in the interest of reciprocity, have often not mutilated prisoners of war; and citizens might deserve comparable treat- ment. The fury of nuclear attacks might fall mainly on each other's weapons and military forces.
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THED~LOMACYOF~OLENCE 27
his cities, for exterminating his people and eliminating his soci- ety, on condition that the enemy observe similar restraint with respect to one's own society, is not the "conventional ap- proach. "InWorldWarsIandIIthefirstorderofbusinesswasto destroy enemy armed forces because that was the only prom- ising way to make him surrender. To fight a purely military engagement "all-out" while holding in reserve a decisive ca- pacity for violence, on condition the enemy do likewise, is not the way military operations have traditionally been approached. Secretary McNamara was proposing a new approach to warfare in a new era, an era in which the power to hurt is more impres- sive than the power to oppose.
From Battlefield Warfare to the Diplomacy of Violence
Almost one hundred years before Secretary McNamara's speech, the Declaration of St. Petersburg (the first of the great modem conferences to cope with the evils of warfare) in 1868 asserted, "The only legitimate object which states should en- deavor to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces ofthe enemy. " And in a letter to the League of Nations in 1920, the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross wrote; "The Committee considers it very desirable that war should resume its former character, that is to say, that it should be a struggle between armies and not between popula- tions. The civilian population must, as far as possible, remain outside the struggle and its consequences. "12 His language is remarkably similar to Secretary McNamara's.
The International Committee was fated for disappointment, like everyone who labored in the late nineteenth century to devise rules that would make war more humane. When the Red Cross was founded in 1863, it was concerned about the disre- gard for noncombatants by those who made war; but in the Second World War noncombatants were deliberately chosen
12. InternationalCommitteeoftheRedCross,DraftRulesfortheLimitation ofthe
Dangers Incurred by the Civilian Population in Time of War (2d ed. Geneva, 1958), pp. 144,151.
as targets by both Axis and Allied forces, not decisively but nevertheless deliberately. The trend has been the reverse of what the International Committee hoped for.
In the present era noncombatants appear to be not only deliberate targets but primary targets, or at least were so taken for granted until about the time of Secretary McNamara's speech. In fact, noncombatants appeared to be primary targets at both ends of the scale of warfare; thermonuclear war threat- ened to be a contest in the destruction of cities and populations; and, at the other end of the scale, insurgency is almost entirely terroristic. We live in an era ofdirty war.
Why is this so? Is war properly a military affair among combatants, and is it a depravity peculiar to the twentieth century that we cannot keep it within decent bounds? Or is war inherently dirty, and was the Red Cross nostalgic for an artifi- cial civilization in which war had become encrusted with etiquette-a situation to be welcomed but not expected?
To answer this question it is useful to distinguish three stages in the involvement of noncombatants-of plain people and their possessions-in the fury of war. These stages are worth distinguishing; but their sequence is merely descriptive of Western Europe during the past three hundred years, not a historical generalization. The first stage is that in which the people may get hurt by inconsiderate combatants. This is the status that people had during the period of "civilized warfare" that the International Committee had in mind.
From about 1648 to the Napoleonic era, war in much of Wes- tern Europe was something superimposed on society. It was a contest engaged in by monarchies for stakes that were mea- sured in territories and, occasionally, money or dynastic claims. The troops were mostly mercenaries and the motivation for war was confined to the aristocratic elite. Monarchs fought for bits of territory, but the residents of disputed terrain were more concerned with protecting their crops and their daughters from marauding troops than with whom they owed allegiance to. They were, as Quincy Wright remarked in his classic Study of War, little concerned that the territory in which they lived had a
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ARMS AND INFLUENCE
THE DIPLOMACY OF VIOLENCE 29
new sovereign. 13 Furthermore, as far as the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria were concerned, the loyalty and enthusiasm of the Bohemian farmer were not decisive consid- erations. It is an exaggeration to refer to European war during this period as a sport of kings, but not a gross exaggeration. And the military logistics of those days confined military operations to a scale that did not require the enthusiasm of a multitude.
Hurting people was not a decisive instrument of warfare. Hurting people or destroying property only reduced the value of the things that were being fought over, to the disadvantage of both sides. Furthermore, the monarchs who conducted wars often did not want to discredit the social institutions they shared with their enemies. Bypassing an enemy monarch and taking the war straight to his people would have had revolutionary implications. Destroying the opposing monarchy was often not in the interest of either side; opposing sovereigns had much more in common with each other than with their own subjects, andtodiscredittheclaimsofamonarchymighthaveproduceda disastrous backlash. It is not surprising-or, if it is surprising, not altogether astonishing-that on the European continent in that particular era war was fairly well confined to military
activity.
One could still, in those days and in that part of the world, be
concerned for the rights of noncombatants and hope to devise rules that both sides in the war might observe. The rules might well be observed because both sides had something to gain from preserving social order and not destroying the enemy. Rules might be a nuisance, but if they restricted both sides the disadvantages might cancel out.
This was changed during the Napoleonic wars. InNapoleon's France, people cared about the outcome. The nation was mobi- lized. The war was a national effort, not just an activity of the elite. It was both political and military genius on the part of Napoleon and his ministers that an entire nation could be mobilized for war. Propaganda became a tool of warfare, and war became vulgarized.
13. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1942, p. 296.
Many writers deplored this popularization of war, this in- volvement of the democratic masses. In fact, the horrors we attribute to thermonuclear war were already foreseen by many commentators,somebeforetheFirstWorldWarandmoreafter it; but the new "weapon" to which these terrors were ascribed was people, millions of people, passionately engaged in na- tional wars, spending themselves in a quest for total victory and desperate to avoid total defeat. Today we are impressed that a small number of highly trained pilots can carry enough energy to blast and bum tens of millions of people and the buildings they live in; two or three generations ago there was concern that tens of millions of people using bayonets and barbed wire, machine guns and shrapnel, could create the same kind of
destruction and disorder.
That was the second stage in the relation of people to war, the
second in Europe since the middle of the seventeenth century. In the first stage people had been neutral but their welfare might be disregarded; in the second stage people were involved because it was their war. Some fought, some produced materi- als ofwar, some produced food, and some took care ofchildren; but they were all part of a war-making nation. When Hitler attacked Poland in 1939, the Poles had reason to care about the outcome. When Churchill said the British would fight on the beaches, he spoke for the British and not for a mercenary army. The war was about something that mattered. If people would rather fight a dirty war than lose a clean one, the war will be between nations and not just between governments. If people have an influence on whether the war is continued or on the termsofatruce,makingthewarhurtpeopleservesapurpose.
