Peace (39 page)

As economic diplomacies were backed by these military organizations, the latter were backed by the arms races upon which their success was predicated. Nuclear deterrence, the most costly and potentially deadly war strategy ever practiced, paradoxically was also among the most effective peace strategies ever implemented. As soon as Soviets developed nuclear weapons (1949), they reciprocated the US policy of “massive retaliation” should they attack anywhere outside their sphere. Vacant notions of “first strike” and “second strike” capabilities came into vogue by the 1960s when US Secretary of State Robert McNamara put forth the theory of and put into practice Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) in a nuclear war scenario, by which each superpower continued to increase first-strike destructive capabilities so as to make a second strike by the other impossible. Based on the premise of an interminable nuclear proliferation, the deterrent in these strategies was their elimination of the possibility of winning a nuclear war for either side because the only possible outcome could be total annihilation. Nuclear deterrence blurred the line between war and peace strategies at great costs but priceless benefits. MADness can be discerned in the development of missiles called “Peacekeepers” capable of carrying a dozen warheads multiple times stronger than the original atomic bomb. Sanity can be discerned in a small group of scientists who, while MADness was in the making, countered that eliminating not multiplying nuclear weapons is the only way to assure peace. In so doing, they propelled later worldwide anti-nuclear movements, turning them and themselves into peacemakers.

Albert Einstein and Leo Szilárd, whose work on particle physics made nuclear weapons feasible, founded the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists shortly after the first ones were deployed. Its eight members publicized the total annihilation made possible by nuclear war, drew attention to peaceful purposes for which atomic energy could be used, and promoted world peace as the only guarantee that nuclear weapons are never be deployed again in lectures, radio talks, and popular and academic publications. In four years of existence, the Committee effectively got anti-nuclear movements rolling. In 1955, two anti-nuclear statements were signed by prominent scientists and intellectuals. One was a Manifesto penned by Russell and seconded by Einstein days before he died, in which they and nine other renowned academicians affirmed that because of the advent of nuclear weapons, and to prevent the need for keeping hot peace cold,

We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group
we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?
³

Recognizing that doing so “will demand distasteful limitations of national sovereignty,” they called on governments to publicly renounce violence and legally commit themselves to peaceful conflict resolution methods, highlighting the role scientists could play. The Manifesto called for a conference of scientists crossing Cold War lines, first held in 1957 at its sponsor's hometown of Pugwash in eastern Canada. The ongoing Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs have informed several UN nuclear-related treaties, have over forty global branches and received the Nobel Peace Prize fifty years after the first deployment of atomic bombs.

Days after the Manifesto, fifty-two renowned scientists met in Mainau, Germany, to sign a Declaration highlighting long-lasting repercussive dangers of nuclear weapons even aside from their destructivity. Acknowledging “perhaps peace is being preserved precisely by the fear of these weapons,” they asserted that “all nations must come to the decision to renounce force as a final resort. If they are not prepared to do this, they will cease to exist.”
⁴
The Declaration, widely covered in newspapers and on television worldwide, was a sharp nail in the coffin of nuclear hazard disbelievers. An American chemist, Committee member and signatory of the Manifesto as well as the Declaration, Linus Pauling, went on to publish
No More War!
(1957), in which he described in detail what the Declaration only hinted at, to show that “it is the development of great nuclear weapons that requires that war be given up, for all time. The forces that can destroy the world must not be used.”
⁵
The popularity of the book and the subsequent petition circulated by Pauling, signed by 2000 American scientists, led to the first resolution in the US Congress to halt nuclear testing. Pauling's petition then circulated internationally and, with over 9000 signatures, was presented to the UN in 1958. The scientist-as-peacemaker approach has been adopted by other professional groups, from teachers to lawyers, who use their expertise and influence as weapons against the wars and injustices that make peace impossible.

MADness may have prevented, and scientist sanity steered public opinion against, direct attacks between the two superpowers, but did not prevent “proxy” wars within and between their potential or actual satellite states. The Greek Civil War (1946–49), acid test of this new take on an old kind of conflict, was like others ideologically supported by the visions of world peace the superpowers had to offer: the US, global capitalism based on independent democratic states; the USSR, global communism based on centrally coordinated socialist states. Within proxy
states, economic diplomacy and military aid made a bigger difference than ideologies of world peace, though without openly adhering to one neither would have been received. While these ideologies became stale rhetorics of peace and were often sufficient within the superpowers to start proxy wars, they just as often proved insufficient in sustaining them. As costs in lives and resources increased, public support decreased. In the US, for which data is available, 20 percent of people asked in a poll disagreed with the Korean War (1950–53) when it started. When Dwight Eisenhower won the Presidency on a “peace ticket” in 1953, disagreement was up to nearly 40 percent. After negotiations broke down, he threatened nuclear war, and an armistice lasting to this day, but not officially peace, was reached. Public opinion polls not only reflected the civilian disagreement with the war, but also helped change politicians' proxy war into peace policies. A periodic poll started in 1965 shows that 24 percent of respondents believed that sending troops into the Vietnam was a mistake and 64 percent did not. By 1973, when the Paris Peace Accord ending US involvement was signed, these figures had nearly reversed.
⁶
What MADness and sanity did help do, however, was to prevent hot proxy wars from escalating into direct cold war.

A considerable force in shifting US public opinion was that peace became part of its popular culture and thereby disseminated around the world, which it arguably never had before. In 1965, a consortium of antiwar and pro-peace groups issued a “Declaration of Conscience against the War in Vietnam” signed by 6000 people, in protest at the proxy wars for hot peace, part of which reads:

We hereby declare our conscientious refusal to cooperate with the U. S. government in the prosecution of the war in Vietnam. . . We shall encourage the development of other nonviolent acts, including acts which involve civil disobedience, in order to stop the flow of American soldiers and munitions to Vietnam.
⁷

Boxing champion Muhammad Ali became a conscientious objector on Islamic grounds, for which he lost his title and was banned from the sport for three years. Drach-10ndodging by leaving the country, declaring an inability to serve or objecting soon reached epidemic proportions. After testifying in Congress, a group of former soldiers returned the war medals they had received and formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War. But it was students who transformed relatively marginal anti-war, pro-peace activism into a nationwide movement, remaking universities into the peace hubs they were in Europe centuries before.

At the University of California, Berkeley, students burned their draft cards, and others across the country began doing the same. Professors and students at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, held teach-ins to
debate the war and what to do about it, a mixed model combining education and protest that also spread quickly. Within a year after many relatively small campus demonstrations, the first of several large anti-war marches took place in Washington, inspiring similar events around the country and world, including Rome, Paris and London. The largest of these occurred in Washington in 1967, where over 100,000 demonstrators marched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon, novelized by Norman Mailer in
The Armies of the Night
. The term “flower power” came into vogue after these protesters shot petal canons on the Pentagon. The
New York Review of Books
published linguist Noam Chomsky's “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” in which he critiqued their complacency, shooting him to the forefront of the anti-war movement along with historian Howard Zinn, whose
Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal
was a rallying cry. In the course of their collaborative and separate careers as academics as well as peace and social justice activists, Chomsky and Zinn have distinguished between non-violent resistance aimed at stopping violent policies or regimes, and peace-oriented dissent aimed at exposing them as such, having admirably practiced both.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many mass protests were held near the Haight Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, which became a center of the “hippie” youth movement, today's “baby boomers.” Combining anti-war protests with displays of free love (sex without marriage), drug use, drinking and music (mostly folk, rock and jazz), they confirmed that the cause of peace is part of America's purpose, chanting the well-known slogans “make love not war,” “draft beer not boys,” and “fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.” Bob Dylan's “Blowin' in the Wind” (1963), John Lennon's “Give Peace a Chance” (1969) and “Imagine” (1971), Black Sabbath's “War Pigs” (1970), and Cat Stevens' “Peace Train” (1971) became peace anthems. At concerts and while marching, hippies often held up their middle finger and index in a “V,” the sign for Allied victory in the Second World War and now one of peace worldwide. However, hippies' radical stances and demonstrations on several issues at once tended to dilute their anti-war and pro-peace messages and alienate those who did not share their other views. Generations since have yet to make such a concerted call to action, maybe because they have seen their parents back-step, maybe because their governments have stopped giving reasons for hope.

After the end of the Korean War and before Vietnam, the superpowers entered into what is known as a
détente
, from the French for “relaxation,” of Cold War political tensions. USSR Premier Nikita Khrushchev and US President John F. Kennedy improved relations, encouraged disarmament and promoted peace initiatives, turning the ongoing arms race into a short race for peace. In 1959, Khrushchev gave a speech at the UN
suggesting peace through disarmament, and the next day a Declaration of the Soviet Government on General and Complete Disarmament was filed, which opened the way to an agreement on the use and testing of nuclear weapons in Antarctica. A Disarmament Administration was created within the US Department of State and, with its Soviet counterpart, presented a Joint Statement of Agreed Principles for Disarmament Negotiations, in which they agreed to “multilateral negotiations on disarmament and to call upon other States to cooperate in reaching early agreement on general and complete disarmament in a peaceful world.”
⁸
Kennedy then gave a speech at the UN in which he famously pronounced “Mankind must put an end to war – or war will put an end to mankind.”
⁹
On his suggestion, negotiations resulting in the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests began, broken by both sides within years of it taking effect. In 1962, the USSR put forth a plan for UN consideration calling for complete disarmament, and a month later the US presented a rival plan. Close to reaching a final agreement, negotiations were derailed by the Cuban Missile Crisis, ending the détente and halting concerted political efforts towards disarmament.

During these races for and against war, a “space race” was taking place with implications for the history of peace literally beyond this world. The USSR wowed the world with Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite, in 1957. Stunned, the US revamped its space exploration program, and the next year launched the satellite Explorer. When the Soviets sent the first human into orbit (1961), the US pledged to send one to the moon by the decade's end. Several dozen satellites and moon probes later, the Outer Space Treaty (1967) was signed by the US, USSR and other states, prohibiting all weapons in Earth's orbit, their installation on the moon, any other celestial body and in outer space while exclusively limiting the use of outer space for peaceful purposes. In this light, Neil Armstrong's statement as he became the first human to walk on the moon takes on new meaning: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
¹⁰
Humanity thus established extraterrestrial peace before peace on earth, although it did not last long. Inextricable from the military enterprises of both superpowers, notably in espionage and long-range missiles, competitive space exploration was also a peaceful alternative to the arms race with powerful propaganda value. When tactical nuclear weapons and interception capabilities emerged in the 1970s, the deterrence equation changed. “Acceptable losses” and nuclear weapons falling into the hands of “rogues states” became concerns, inciting President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (1983) from space, popularly known as Star Wars. New initiatives for extraterrestrial peace such as the International Space Station have since emerged, but the Orwellian motto of the US Strategic Air Command remained “Peace is Our Profession.
”