Some Western writers, and some people in Russia too, argue that the best way to minimize the explosive quality of the present arms race is somehow to develop a stable balance of terror or deterrence. This means developing nuclear weapons and delivery systems so strong and so varied that no surprise attack could knock out the power to retaliate.
I can see some force in this argument. Effective deterrence depends to some extent on a mutual conviction that the other man can and will do what he threatens if he is attacked. And it may be that this is, for the time being, the only practical way of curbing hasty action. But, in fact, attempting to produce stability in this way also means continuing the arms race. Because, as the power to retaliate increases, there is bound to be a corresponding search for improved weapons which will increase the element of surprise. In any case, inaction through fear, which is the basis of deterrence, is not a positive way to secure peace at any rate in the long run. I feel bound to doubt whether safety, as Winston Churchill once claimed, can really become the 'sturdy child of terror'.
It is important to remember that, so far, the United Nations has not contemplated the abolition of all armaments. The first article of the Charter of the United Nations charges the Organisation with the duty of suppressing acts of aggression and other breaches of the peace', and Article 51 allows the Organisation to use force for this purpose. Indeed, right at the beginning a Military Staffs Committee was set up at the United Nations headquarters and charged with the strategic direction of whatever military forces were to be made available to the Security Council.
In practice, however, the United Nations Organization does not have any military force permanently at its disposal or any staff to plan operations in advance and direct them when they become necessary. Whatever operations the Organization has undertaken have been conducted on an entirely ad hoc and improvised basis. In fact, in 1958, Mr. Hammerskjold himself argued against the creation of a permanent United Nations military force. One of the main reasons for this failure to develop a United Nations peace-keeping capacity in terms of military forces has undoubtedly been the opposition of some of the Great Powers. And it must be admitted that there is no prospect of the United Nations coercing the Great Powers into keeping the peace at present. But perhaps we can make virtue of necessity here.
I have tried to suggest that international agreements, like any system of municipal law, demand a sanction of force if observance is normally to be guaranteed and non-observance controlled before it explodes into general disorder. In other words, legislative decision demands as its corollary some form of executive action. It was surely this which Mr. Hammerskjold had in mind in presenting his last annual report as Secretary-General. Some people, he said, wanted the United Nations to work simply as a conference system producing reconciliation by discussion. Others – and clearly himself among them – looked upon the Organization primarily as a dynamic instrument of government through which they, jointly and for the same purpose, should seek such reconciliation but through which they should also try to develop forms of executive action undertaken on behalf of all members, aiming at forestalling conflicts and resolving them, once they have arisen, by appropriate diplomatic or political means. The word ‘military’ was. not used. But at that very moment, the United Nations had in the Congo, and largely through Mr. Hammerskjold's efforts, a military force expressly designed to re-establish order and to prevent civil strife from exploding into general war.
It seems to me that any international organization designed to keep the peace must have the power not merely to talk but also to act. Indeed I see this as the central theme of any progress towards an international community in which war is avoided not by chance but by design. Nor need our present limitations daunt us. This is a slow process in which experience grows into habit, and habit into trust. Many people have already suggested how this development could be encouraged. The United Nations could have a bigger permanent staff to act as observers and intelligence officers in potential trouble spots. Here would be part of the political basis of control. It could develop much more detailed methods in advance of drawing on national armed forces when police action becomes inevitable, even without possessing a big military establishment of its own. It could prepare training manuals for the police action its forces are likely to undertake, and for which the ordinary soldier is not normally trained. And it could begin to hold under its own control small specialist staffs, for example, multi-lingual signallers, and some small stocks of equipment such as transport aircraft, which its operations almost inevitably demand.
The fact that coercion of the Great Powers is impossible does not invalidate any of these suggestions. If these Powers can, for the time being, avoid major war among themselves by nuclear deterrence, then the likeliest explosive situations will occur in areas not of vital interest to them. It is there that the United Nations can experiment and develop.
