Translated from MSZ 3-1982

An American peace movement

World rule without Armageddon

It’s amazing what’s happening today under the name of a “peace movement” and proposing an alternative peace policy in competition with the reigning one. A potential presidential candidate in the USA has drafted a resolution called the “Freeze” along with a “forward-looking” senator from Reagan’s party and the movement here in Germany has already gotten wind of an ally in the midst of the American “establishment,” an “alternative” to Reagan who has a good chance of becoming president of the USA in 1984. Finally, peace is coming from where war was once supposed to come?

Peace policy by means of an upgrade

The resolution by Senators Kennedy (Mass., Dem.) and Hatfield (Ca., Rep.), which has now been signed by 180 Congressmen and enjoys the goodwill of former foreign policy and arms experts, is a classic disarmament model made in the USA: Based on the certainty that

“no American military leader would trade our strategic forces for those of the Soviet Union,” (this and the other quotes from: Kennedy/Hatfield, Freeze: how you can help prevent nuclear war, 1982, p. 149)

the authors of the resolution formulate a “proposal,” not so much to the Soviet Union as to their own nation, to use the position of strength in which it finds itself in a different way than Reagan, whose rearmament program they are not hesitate to denounce as a quasi un-American activity:

“The myth of Soviet superiority not only paralyzes, but it reflects fear, a fear unworthy of this most confident of nations... This myth demoralizes our friends, but, worst of all, it sets the stage for deadly and avoidable miscalculation by telling our opponents we are weak when in fact we are not.” (p. 18)

The dispute therefore revolves entirely around the assessment of America’s strength. Kennedy and Hatfield are not against nuclear weapons and certainly not against arms: They recommend that their nation undertake a controlled upgrade in the nuclear sector – concentrating on the “all-important” intercontinental ballistic missiles – and a massive rearmament in the so-called conventional sector:

“Some of the savings from a freeze can be reallocated to improve the readiness and the reliability of our conventional forces. But just as important (!) ...” (p. 133)

And their argument for both proposals is nothing but the brutal calculation with war as a political tool that one must not let be slapped from their hands by “threatening developments.”

They cite a national interest as the reason why, for example, Senator Kennedy opposes an arms concept that was developed and implemented not least by Democratic administrations (after all, the NATO strategy of “flexible response” originated with John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense McNamara):

“Every serious analysis and every military exercise has shown that the use of tactical nuclear weapons alone would have an unheard of destructive effect on civilian lives and property (!). Any use of nuclear weapons in Europe, by the Alliance or against us, brings with it the inevitable risk of escalation into a general nuclear war, which would bring destruction for all and victory for none.”

For the Senators, the conclusion from this analysis is to expand the conventional equipment of the USA and NATO in such a way that a “conventional” war in Europe can be waged victoriously and with acceptable losses of civilians and property, while at the same time relying on the certainty that America’s nuclear potential is sufficient to make the other side shy away from any nuclear “escalation”:

“At least half of the 32 U.S. submarines would be available to strike back after a first strike. Just one submarine, the Poseidon, carries 160 independently targetable warheads, each with a yield equivalent to three Hiroshima bombs. That one submarine could inflict untold losses on the Soviet Union.” (p. 104-5)

And Averell Harriman says even more clearly in the foreword:

“...we could respond with some four to five thousand nuclear weapons” (more than half of the total US potential) (p. xv).

The crazy thing about the internal American debate about arms is that both sides propose arms programs against the main enemy with the same figures, with the government talking about “inferiority” while the opposition tries to score points for its program of “disarmament” with US superiority. In their deliberations, Kennedy/Hatfield accept the standard for US military potential put forward by the Reagan team: to be able to win a war with the USSR at all points on the globe and at every level. Because they assume that the West has superiority in the nuclear field, they have come to warn their government that further arms in this area would jeopardize the US advantage. The USSR would “inevitably be forced” to follow suit, whereby the whole advantage could be lost, both in terms of quantity and “technological superiority.” When the authors of the resolution come to the conclusion about the American nuclear force: “it’s enough!” this does not mean that 8,000 warheads are too much of a good thing. They are enough for any war aim. Of course, also for a nuclear first strike. Even Reagan’s critics do not want to be deprived of this option, which is why Senator Kennedy rejects McNamara’s proposal for the USA to unilaterally renounce first use of nuclear weapons:

“...I am against abjuring any use of our nuclear potential as long as we have not conventionally achieved an approximate equilibrium with the Soviet Union in Western Europe and other areas of tension in the world.” (in: “Spiegel,” No. 18/1982)

More nuclear equipment would jeopardize the US lead; on the other hand, the resources saved by not having nuclear weapons could also be used to establish superiority in the conventional field! The Kennedy/Hatfield resolution is therefore a very constructive proposal to the government to advance its political program with more suitable military equipment.

It goes without saying that the assessment of the Soviet Union is shared by both sides and that Kennedy/Hatfield do not want to be accused of lacking decisiveness towards the main enemy of the free world:

“We won’t enter a nuclear freeze agreement because we like the Soviets or they like us, but because both of us choose existence over extinction. We can respond to Soviet oppression in Poland and elsewhere, and at the same time work to reduce the danger of nuclear war. Both of us supported strong sanctions against the Soviet action in Poland, and then sponsored the nuclear freeze resolution.” (p. 155)

Kennedy/Hatfield do not want to be blamed for creating all the existing reasons for war and those still to be produced. What they have in mind is a different deployment plan and arming for different war priorities or the confrontation with pre-military means.

So from the detailed description of the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons – illustrated with the impressions of a young lieutenant Mark O. Hatfield in Hiroshima – they by no means draw the conclusion to demand that the USA’s entire nuclear potential be scrapped. The evocation of horrific consequences that a criticized government program could have is a typical opposition position in which they promise to continue the existing policy more effectively and more “pleasingly” for the citizens – if they let them. As an argument, the depiction of the apocalypse serves exclusively to rely on the old “conventional” war and to use the drastic example of the consequences of a first strike on the US city of Detroit to prove that the Russians must be at least as afraid for Vladivostok and therefore the existing US potential is sufficient for any conceivable blackmail of the other side with it.

The meticulously painted scenario of the thermonuclear “Holocaust” for the USA also very directly reveals its interested intention when, in light of a sea of corpses, the now true barbarity is brought to the attention of US readers:

“We must not, regardless of politics, continue to imagine that we can protect or save an economic system, by accepting the possibility of nuclear war. In the ashes, communism and capitalism, let it be said again, will be indistinguishable.” (p.75)

If nuclear war seems “inexpedient” in view of the impossibility of saving capitalism with a few hundred million dead, then one must shudder all the more that the few survivors would not even be able to bring together a democracy, which would make the “Holocaust” in any event “pointless”:

“Life in both America and Russia would likely descend into anarchy.” (p.71)

No more state! – The most terrible of all possible horror scenarios...

An election campaign...

When Kennedy and Hatfield talk about freeing up money by restricting nuclear armaments – and they do not hide the fact that most of the dollars should go to “conventional” weapons – they flank their defense policy attack on the Reagan administration with an economic policy alternative. Kennedy is not in favor of more social programs so that the Americans in the ghettos who have been declared superfluous and the Americans made redundant by the rationalization of work have more to eat. He wants to free up money for an economic policy that promises, on the one hand, to make the employment of more useful Americans profitable and, on the other hand, to entrust the management of “human waste” more to welfare than exclusively to the police and the National Guard. The growing number of people directly affected by “Reaganomics” gives him hope that the huge support for Reagan’s “make America great again” program will soften and that the traditional “Democratic coalition” of labor, minorities, and liberal intellectuals can be restored, which broke down during the Carter administration because this Democratic president introduced the main features of the Reagan program without being able to present it as “America’s departure for new shores” as electorally effectively as the then opposition candidate Reagan.

...with “grass roots”

In the USA, Kennedy opened the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination and for the midterm elections this autumn with his Freeze program. As he himself proudly explains, the Kennedy/Hatfield resolution is a “reaction”:

“It was clear that the various local freeze campaigns had touched a sensitive public nerve, and that the time was ripe for a national effort.” (p. 117)

The Freeze movement did not even arise from a “fear” of a nuclear “Holocaust,” but quite locally from the “intense opposition of farmers and ranchers and the Mormon Church in Utah and Nevada that blocked President Carter’s plan to dig up thousands of square miles of western land so that the Pentagon could plant a new supergeneration of ballistic missiles called MX.” (p. 114)

Reagan’s decision to halt MX silos and to instead fast-track the modernization of the strategic potential has indeed secondarily accelerated the re-election chances of his party colleagues in the aforementioned states; in the meantime, however, there is a highly respectable movement that contests the decision of the Carter administration, which Reagan made the central program point of his term of office, to enhance the qualitative and quantitative nuclear potential of the USA, out of consideration for whether this is then really beneficial – for America. The fact that this “grassroots movement” differs, for example, from the “peacenicks” in the times of the Vietnam protests in that pacifist tones (“make love, not war”) are just as alien to it as anti-patriotic actions (“Fuck the US” with burning flags) seems to completely miss the point. The new rallying movements are called “Concerned Clergy and Laity,” “Concerned Scientists,” “Parents in a Nuclear Age,” and as loyal American citizens they invoke their responsibility for what’s best for America.

The forms of protest typical of a state like the USA, whose protagonists either make the transition to feeling responsible for the state’s foreign policy as “parents” or make the implementation of a particular foreign policy such a personal matter that they turn it into their identity and sometimes crawl barefoot through the valley of death for it – again, the American “peace movement” is not a movement that could be – like in West Germany – suspected of giving grist for the mill to the nation’s enemy as as a fifth column. The US grassroots coalition is “establishmentarian,” as its first socio-political spokespeople wants to make known and Kennedy/Hatfield never tire of praising for giving it their national seal of approval. What the peace movement here now wants to achieve at all costs by purging its own ranks has already been achieved by its “counterpart” in the USA: the Kennedy/Hatfield initiative, which from the outset presented peace policy as an alternative arms policy in the interests of the nation, is a factor in domestic power politics – this will become apparent for the first time in the mid-term elections and this entitles the Democratic Party to better hopes in the presidential election of 1984.

It is part of the immanent logic of the matter – peace policy against the East – that a political rival to the government adopts certain reservations among the people against the imaginable horrors of war and promises to aim for the same political goals with the promise of a war theater in which its own nation gets away unscathed. “Ultimately,” the Kennedy/Hatfield resolution with its “freeze” on nuclear weapons and its heating up of the “conventional” NATO armada promises the Americans nothing other than “No Battlefield America” in nationalist congruence with the West German peace movement, which believes it can keep Europe free of nuclear battles by preventing the NATO double-track decision. The only funny part is that the Europeans are backing the US patriots, even though Senator Kennedy has dryly assured them that, if worst comes to worst, he too considers Europe to be a perfectly suitable theater for American nuclear strikes:

“Our friends in Europe should know: If there is ever an armed conflict in Europe and nuclear weapons are used, then the entire nuclear arsenal of the USA will come into play.” This promise is addressed, of course, to friends in the Western European governments, but in the same “Spiegel” interview, the peace activists also receive a very clear message regarding medium-range missiles, which has always been the main point of their protest:

“The fact is that both Senator Hatfield and I reject the Brezhnev proposal of a freeze in Europe. That is not what we want.”

Despite the Senator’s very open rejection of the central point of the West German peace movement’s program, the movement is unapologetically backing a “partner” in the USA. This is no doubt due to joy at being able to add a veritable Kennedy to the peace front and at the concerns of the European movement being rediscovered an issue of American domestic policy, which means that the accusation of a lack of realism no longer needs to be taken seriously. The extent to which one takes this accusation as, of all things, a problem of one’s own, however, points to the whole dreariness of the peace movement in this country: if an alternative arms policy for war is now being celebrated as support for one’s own cause, if the old slogans about the abolition of all nuclear weapons, about unilateral disarmament and about withdrawal from NATO are forgotten, then the conclusion must be drawn that this peace movement is no longer concerned with peace at any price.

Senator Kennedy sees the issue with American “pragmatism” anyway:

“SPIEGEL: Are there any plans for international cooperation between the Freeze campaign and the European peace movement...?

KENNEDY: I have no such plans. I simply intend to take a stand on the floor of the Senate, in my home state of Massachusetts and across this country.... Well, I’m all about 1982 and my re-election in Massachusetts.”