Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Much of the significance of this relationship can be seen in regard to Red China. This potential enemy has already exploded some kind of a nuclear device and will have a nuclear weapon in the next few years, but this offers little potential danger to us since they will have no effective long-range delivery vehicle. On the other hand, their threat with this against our allies, such as Japan or the Philippines, or their ability even now with their mass armies to threaten our interests in India, Southeast Asia, or Korea, is potentially high. Against such a threat, our nuclear missiles are relatively weak, because China is too dispersed and decentralized to offer vital targets. On the other hand, China’s vulnerability to the threat of biological warfare is very large. This explains their hysterical attacks on American “germ warfare” during the Korean War. The word puts them into a panic, and rightly so, since they are critically vulnerable to such weapons used by us. The virus for wheat rust and rice blast, in varieties especially virulent on Chinese-type plants, can be produced in large amounts relatively easily at costs well below $40 a pound. Spread on the fields at the proper time in the annual growing cycle, these would destroy up to 75 percent of these crops. And there is no effective defense. In consequence the Chinese food intake would be cut from about 2,200 calories per person a day, not much above the subsistence level, to about 1,300 calories a day. If the Chinese permitted this, they would have few people strong enough to work at the defense effort, either in the combat areas or in industrial plants. If they tried to keep the food intake of more indispensable defenders up by strict rationing, leaving nothing for many children, old people, and women, they would suffer about 50 million deaths from malnutrition within a year. The armed forces, still largely of peasant origin, would not allow a rationing system that doomed their families in the villages, and would turn against the regime, especially if an American offer to feed the Chinese on American surplus food after a Chinese surrender were broadcast to the Chinese people.

The danger of such weapons becoming common, or even becoming commonly known, among the people of the world, including the less developed nations, is very great, opening an opportunity to all kinds of political blackmail or even to merely irresponsible threats. The parallel danger from new weapons of chemical warfare are even more horrifying. One of the nerve gases now currently available in the United States is so potent that a small drop of it on an individual’s unbroken skin can cause death in a few seconds. Moreover, many of these BCW weapons are cheap to make, and easier to make than to control. Most can be made in any well-equipped kitchen or ordinary laboratory, with the chief restriction arising from the difficult safety precautions. But if the latter could be handled, and if delivery systems (which in some cases need be no more than men walking by fields or urban reservoirs) could be obtained, the deterrent effect of BCW weapons might be much greater than that of nuclear weapons now is, and would be much less predictable and forseeable, since they would not be restricted, as the nuclear threat is, to heavily industrialized nations. This might well contribute toward the decentralization of power already mentioned.

Another significant element in this complex picture is the convergence toward parallel paths of the United States and the Soviet Union. This is, of course, something that rabid partisans of either side will refuse to recognize. It arises from three directions: (1) there is an absolute convergence of interests between the two states, as will be indicated in a moment; (2) the structures of the two countries are, to some extent, changing in similar ways; and (3) as the only Superpowers able to inflict or receive instant annihilation, these two countries, to some extent, stand apart from other states and in a class together. The last point is almost obvious, since it must be clear that only these two are prepared to engage in a race to the moon or have an almost insatiable demand for mathematicians or space scientists, or are looked to by impoverished neutrals as obligated to provide economic assistance to the latters’ ambitions.

The converging of interests of the two Superpowers arises largely from the other two factors. These common interests include a wide variety of items, such as restricting the proliferation of nuclear weapons to additional states, establishing restrictions on the economic demands of neutral nations, especially by refusing to allow one Superpower to be bid against the other; the ending of nuclear testing, the slowing up of the space race, the approaching domination of the United Nations by the growing majority of small and backward countries, the increasing aggressiveness of Red China, the unification of Germany, the acceleration of the population explosion in backward areas, and many others.

Along with this convergence of interests is the growing parallelism of structure: (1) In spite of the great difference in the theories and the appearances of political life in the two countries, each is increasingly reaching its most fundamental decisions, not through party politics or by decision in a political assembly, but by the shifting pressures of great lobbying blocs acting upon each other by largely hidden contacts carried on behind the scenes. (2) These pressures are chiefly concerned with the allotment of economic resources, through fiscal and budgetary mechanisms, among three competing sectors of the economy concerned with consumption, governmental expenditures (chiefly defense), and capital investment. (3) Socially, both societies are undergoing a similar circulation of elites in which education is the chief doorway to social advancement and is crowded with applicants from the lower (but not lowest) stratum of society (equivalent to the petty bourgeoisie or lower middle classes) but is receiving relatively fewer successful applicants from the upper (but not uppermost) group whose parents are already established in the prevalent structure. (4) In both countries trained experts and technicians, as a consequence of this educational process, are replacing political figures or other social groups, especially political specialists. In both, the military leaders, although qualified for supreme influence by their possession of power, are held at secondary levels by personal manipulations. (5) In both countries there is a growing intellectual skepticism toward authority, accepted ideologies, and established slogans, replaced by a rising emphasis upon the need for satisfactory small-group, interpersonal relations.

As a result of all the complex interrelationships of weapons and politics that we have mentioned up to this point, it seems very likely that the international relations of the future will shift from the world we have known, in which war was epidemic and total, to one in which conflict is endemic and controlled. The ending of total warfare means the ending of war for unlimited aims (unconditional surrender, total victory, destruction of the opponent’s regime and social system), fought with weapons of total destruction and a total mobilization of resources, including men, to a condition of constant, flexible, controlled conflict with limited, specific, and shifting aims, sought by limited application of diverse pressures applied against any other state whose behavior we wish to influence.

Such controlled conflict would involve a number of changes in our attitudes and behavior:

1. No declarations of war and no breaking off of diplomatic relations with the adversary, but, instead, continuous communication with him, whatever level of intensity the conflict may reach.

2. Acceptance of the idea that conflict with an adversary in respect to some areas, activities, units, or weapons does not necessarily involve conflict with him in other areas, activities, units, or weapons.