FOREWORD
from
EducateYourself Website
"John Doe," as I will call him in this
book for reasons that will be made clear, is a professor at a large
university in the Middle West.
His field is one of the social
sciences, but I will not identify him beyond this. He telephoned me
one evening last winter, quite unexpectedly; we had not been in
touch for several years. He was in New York for a few days, he said,
and there was something important he wanted to discuss with me. He
wouldn't say what it was. We met for lunch the next day at a midtown
restaurant.
He was obviously disturbed. He made small talk for half an hour,
which was quite out of character, and I didn't press him. Then,
apropos of nothing, he mentioned a dispute between a writer and a
prominent political family that had been in the headlines. What, he
wanted to know, were my views on "freedom of information." How would
I qualify them? And so on. My answers were not memorable, but they
seemed to satisfy him. Then quite abruptly, he began to tell me the
following story:
Early in August of 1963, he said, he found a message on his desk
that a "Mrs. Potts" had called him from Washington. When he returned
the call, a man answered immediately, and told Doe, among other
things, that he had been selected to serve on a commission "of the
high importance." Its objective was to determine, accurately and
realistically, the nature of the problems that would confront the
United States if and when a condition "permanent peace" should
arrive, and to draft a program for dealing with this contingency.
The man described the unique procedures
that were to govern the commission's work and that were expected to
extend its scope far beyond that of any previous examination of the
problems.
Considering that the caller did not precisely identify either
himself or his agency, his persuasiveness must have been of a truly
remarkable order. Doe entertained no serious doubts of the bona
fides of the project, however, chiefly because of his previous
experience with excessive secrecy that often surrounds
quasi-governmental activities. In addition, the man at the other end
of the line demonstrated an impressively complete and surprisingly
detailed knowledge of Doe's word and personal life.
He also mentioned the names of others
who were to serve with the group; most of them were known to Doe by
reputation. Doe agreed to take the assignment --he felt he had no
real choice in the matter- -and to appear the second Saturday
following at Iron Mountain, New York. An airline ticket arrived in
his mail the next morning.
The cloak-and-dagger tone of this convocation was further enhanced
by the meeting place itself. Iron Mountain, located near the town of
Hudson, is like something out of Ian Fleming or E. Phillips
Oppenheim. It is an underground nuclear hideout for hundreds of
large American corporations. Most of them use it as am emergency
storage vault for important documents. But a number of them maintain
substitute corporate headquarters as well where essential
personnel could presumably survive and continue to work after an
attack. This latter group included such firms as Standard Oil of New
Jersey, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and Shell.
I will leave most of the story of the operations of the Special
Study Group, as the commission was formerly called, for Doe to
tell in his own words ("Background Information"). At this point it
is necessary to say only that it met and worked regularly for over
two and a half years, after which it produced a report. It was this
document, and what to do about it, that Doe wanted to talk to me
about.
The Report, he said, had been suppressed--both by the Special
Study Group itself and by the government interagency committee
to which it had been submitted. After months of agonizing, Doe had
decided that he would no longer be party to keeping it secret. What
he wanted from me was advice and assistance in having it published.
He gave me his copy to read, with the express understanding that if
for any reason I were unwilling to become involved, I would say
nothing about it to anyone else.
I read the Report that same night. I will pass over my own reactions
to it, except to say that the unwillingness of Doe's associates to
publicize their findings became readily understandable. What had
happened was that they had been so tenacious in their determination
to deal comprehensively with the many problems of transition to
peace that the original questions asked of them were never quite
answered. Instead, this is what they concluded:
Lasting peace, while not theoretically impossible, is probably
unattainable; even if it could be achieved it would almost certainly
not be in the best interests of a stable society to achieve it.
That is the gist of what they say. Behind their qualified academic
language runs this general argument: War fills certain functions
essential to the stability of our society; until other ways of
filling them are developed, the war system must be maintained--and
improved in effectiveness.
It is not surprising that the Group, in its Letter of Transmittal,
did not choose to justify its work to "the lay reader, unexposed to
the exigencies of higher political or military responsibility." Its
Report was addressed, deliberately, to unnamed government
administrators of high rank; it assumed considerable political
sophistication from this select audience. To the general reader,
therefore, the substance of the document may be even more unsettling
than its conclusions.
He may not be prepared for some of its
assumptions--for instance, that most medical advances are viewed
more as problems than as progress; or that poverty is necessary and
desirable, public posture by politicians to the contrary
notwithstanding; or that standing armies are, among other things,
social-welfare institutions in exactly the same sense as are
old-people's bones and mental hospitals. It may strike him as odd to
find the probable explanation of "flying saucer" incidents disposed
of en passant in less than a sentence.
He may be less surprised to find that
the space program and the controversial antimissile missile and
fallout shelter programs are understood to have the spending of vast
sums of money, not the advancement of science or national defense,
as their principal goals, and to learn that "military" draft
policies are only remotely concerned with defense.
He may be offended to find the organized repression of minority
groups, and even the re-establishment of slavery, seriously (and on
the whole favorably) discussed as possible aspects of a world at
peace. He is not likely to take kindly to the notion of the
deliberate intensification of air and water pollution (as part of a
program leading to peace), even when the reason for considering it
is made clear.
That a world without war will have to
turn sooner rather than later to universal test-tube procreation
will be less disturbing, if no more appealing. But few readers will
not be taken aback, at least, by a few lines in the Report's
conclusions, repeated in its for recommendations, that suggest that
the long-range planning--and "budgeting"--of the "optimum" number
lives to be destroyed annually in overt warfare is high on the
Group's list of priorities for government action.
I cite these few examples primarily to warn the general reader what
he can expect. The statesmen and strategists for whose eyes the
Report was intended obviously need no such protective admonition.
This book of course, is evidence of my response to Doe's request.
After carefully considering the problems that might confront the
publisher of the Report, we took it to The Dial Press. There, its
significance was immediately recognized, and, more important, we
were given firm assurances that no outside pressures of any sort
would be permitted to interfere with its publication.
It should be made clear that Doe does not disagree with the
substance of the Report, which represents a genuine consensus in all
important respects. He constituted a minority of one--but only on
the issue of disclosing it to the general public. A look at how the
Group dealt with this question will be illuminating.
The debate took place at the Group's last full meeting before the
report was written, late in March, 1966, and again at Iron Mountain.
Two facts must be kept in mind, by way of background. The first is
that the Special Study Croup had never been explicitly charged with
or sworn to secrecy, either when it was convened or at any time
thereafter.
The second is that the Group had
nevertheless operated as if it had been. This was assumed from the
circumstances of its inception and from the tone of its
instructions. (The Group's acknowledgment of help from "the many
persons . . . who contributed so greatly to our work" is somewhat
equivocal; these persons were not told the nature of the project for
which their special resources of information were solicited. )
Those who argued the case for keeping the Report secret were
admittedly motivated by fear of the explosive political effects that
could be expected from publicity. For evidence, they pointed to the
suppression of the far less controversial report of then- Senator
Hubert Humphrey's subcommittee on disarmament in l962. (Subcommittee
members had reportedly feared that it might be used by Communist
propagandists, as Senator Stuart Symington put it, to "back up the
Marxian theory that war production was the reason for the success of
capitalism.") Similar political precautions had been taken with the
better-known Gaither Report in 1957, and even with the so-called
Moynihan Report in 1965.
Furthermore, they insisted, a distinction must be made between
serious studies, which are normally classified unless and until
policy makers decide to release them, and conventional "showcase"
projects, organized to demonstrate a political leadership's concern
about an issue and to deflect the energy of those pressing for
action on it. (The example used, because some of the Croup had
participated in it, was a "White House Conference" on international
cooperation, disarmament, etc., which had been staged late in 1965
to offset complaints about escalation of the Vietnam war.)
Doe acknowledges this distinction, as well as the strong possibility
of public misunderstanding. But he feels that if the sponsoring
agency had wanted to mandate secrecy it could have done so at the
outset. It could also have assigned the project to one of the
government's established "think tanks," which normally work on a
classified basis.
He scoffed at fear of public reaction,
which could have no lasting effect on long-range measures that might
be taken to implement the Group's proposals, and derided the Group's
abdication of responsibility for its opinions and conclusions. So
far as he was concerned, there was such a thing as a public right to
know what was being done on its behalf; the burden of proof was on
those who would abridge it.
If my account seems to give Doe the better of the argument, despite
his failure to convince his colleagues, so be it. My participation
in this book testifies that I am not neutral. In my opinion, the
decision of the Special Study Group to censor its own
findings was not merely timid but presumptuous. But the refusal, as
of this writing, of the agencies for which the Report was prepared
to release it themselves raises broader questions of public policy.
Such questions center on the continuing use of self-serving
definitions of "security" to avoid possible political embarrassment.
It is ironic how often this practice backfires.
I should state, for the record, that I do not share the attitudes
toward war and peace, life and death, and survival of the species
manifested in the Report. Few readers will. In human terms, it is an
outrageous document. But it does represent a serious and challenging
effort to define an enormous problem. And it explains, or certainly
appears to explain, aspects of American policy otherwise
incomprehensible by the ordinary standards of common sense. What we
may think of these explanations is something else, but it seems to
me that we are entitled to know not only what they are but whose
they are.
By "whose" I don't mean merely the names of the authors of the
Report. Much more important, we have a right to know to what extent
their assumptions of social necessity are shared by the
decision-makers in our government. Which do they accept and which do
they reject. However disturbing the answers, only full and frank
discussion offers any conceivable hope of solving the problems
raised by the Special Study Croup in their Report from Iron
Mountain.
L.C.L.
New York, June 1967
Back to Contents
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
from
EducateYourself Website
[The following account of the workings of the Special Study Group is
taken verbatim from a series of tape-recorded interviews I had with
"John Doe." The transcript has been edited to minimize the intrusion
of my questions and comments, as well as for length, and the
sequence has been revised in the interest of continuity. L.C.L]
How was the Group formed?
.,, The general idea for it, for this kind of study, dates back
at least to l96l. It started with some of the new people who
came in with the Kennedy administration, mostly, I think, with
McNamara, Bundy, and Rusk. They were impatient about many
things.... One of them was that no really serious work had been
done about planning for peace--a long-range peace, that is, with
long- range planning.
Everything that had been written on the subject [before l96l]
was superficial. There was insufficient appreciation of the
scope of the problem. The main reason for this, of course, was
that the idea a of a real peace in the world, general
disarmament and so on, was looked on as utopian. Or even
crackpot. This is still true, and it's easy enough to understand
when you look at what's going on in the world today.... It was
reflected in the studies that had been made up to that time.
They were not realistic.. . .
The idea of the Special Study, the exact form it would take, was
worked out early in '63.... The settlement of the Cuban missile
affair had something to do with it, but what helped most to get
it moving were the big changes in military spending that were
being planned.... Plants being closed, relocations, and so
forth. Most of it wasn't made public until much later....
[I understand] it took a long time to select the people for the
Group. The calls didn't go out until the summer....
Who made the selection?
That's something I can't tell you. I wasn't involved with the
preliminary planning. The first I knew of it was when I was
called myself. But three of the people had been in on it, and
what the rest of us know we learned from them, about what went
on earlier. I do know that it started very informally. I don't
know what particular government agency approved' the project.
Would you care to make a guess?
All right--I think it was an ad hoc committee, at the cabinet
level, or near it. It had to be. I suppose they gave the
organizational job--making arrangements, paying the bills, and
so on--to somebody from State or Defense or the National
Security Council. Only one of us was in touch with Washington,
and I wasn't the one. But I can tell you that very, very few
people knew about us. ., . For instance, there was the Ackley
Committee. It was set up after we were. If you read their
report-- the same old tune-- economic re conversion, turning
sword plants into plowshare factories--I think you'll wonder if
even the President knew about our Group. The Ackley Committee
certainly didn't.
Is that possible, really? I mean that not even the President
knew of your commission?
Well, I don't think there's anything odd about the government
attacking a problem at two different levels. Or even about two
or three government agencies working at cross- purposes. It
happens all the time. Perhaps the President did know. And I
don't mean to denigrate the Ackley Committee1, but it was
exactly that narrowness of approach that we were supposed to get
away from. .
You have to remember-- you've read the Report-- that what they
wanted from us was a different kind thinking. It was a matter of
approach. Herman Kal calls it "Byzantine"--no agonizing over
cultural and (1) religious values. No moral posturing. It's the
kind of thinking that Rand and the Hudson Institute and I.D.A.(2)
brought into war planning.... What they asked us to do, and I
think; we did it, was to give the same kind of treatment to the
hypothetical problems of peace as they give to a hypothetical
nuclear war....We may have gone further than they expected, but
once you establish your premises and your logic you can't turn
back....
Kahn's books (3), for example, are misunderstood, at least by
laymen. They shock people. But you see, what's important about
them is not his conclusions, or his opinions. It's the method.
He has done more than anyone else I can think of to get the
general public accustomed to the style of modern military
thinking....Today it's possible for a columnist to write about
"counter force strategy" and "minimum deterrence" and "credible
first-strike capability" without having to explain every other
word. He can write about war and strategy without getting bogged
down in questions of morality....
The other big difference about our work is breadth. The Report
speaks for itself. I can't say that we took every relevant
aspect of life and society into account, but I don't think we
missed anything essential...
Why was the project given to an outside commission? Why
couldn't it have been handled directly by an appropriate
government agency?
I think that's obvious, or should be. The kind of thinking
wanted from our Group just isn't to be had in a formal
government operation. Too many constraints. Too many
inhibitions. This isn't a new problem. Why else would outfits
like Rand and Ingersol stay in business? Any assignment that's
at all sophisticated is almost always given to an outside group.
This is true even in the State Department, in the "gray"
operations, those that arc supposed to be unofficial, but are
really as official as can be. Also with the C.l.A....
For our study, even the private research centers were too
institutional.... A lot of thought went into making sure that
our thinking would be unrestricted. All kinds of little things.
The way we were called into the Group, the places we met, all
kinds of subtle devices to remind us. For instance, even our
name, the Special Study Group. You know government names.
Wouldn't you think we'd have been called "Operation Olive
Branch," or "Project Pacifica," or something like that? Nothing
like that for us--too allusive, too suggestive. And no minutes
of our--meetings--too inhibiting.... About who might be reading
them. Of course, we took notes for our own use. And among
ourselves, we usually called ourselves "The Iron Mountain Boys'
or "Our Thing," or whatever came to mind...
What can you tell me about the members of the Group ?
I'll have to stick to generalities.... There were fifteen of us.
The important thing was that we represented a very wide range of
disciplines. And not all academic. People from the natural
sciences, the social sciences, even the humanities. We had a
lawyer and a businessman. Also, a professional war planner.
Also, you should know that everyone in the Group had done work
of distinction in at least two different fields. The
interdisciplinary element was built in....
It's true that there were no women in the Group, but I don't
think that was significant.... We were all American citizens, of
course. And all, I can say, in very good health, at least when
we began.... You see, the first order of business, at the first
meeting, was the reading of dossiers. They were very detailed,
and not just professional, but also personal. They included
medical histories. I remember one very curious thing, for
whatever it's worth. Most of us, and that includes me, had a
record of abnormally high uric acid concentrations in the
blood... None of us had ever had this experience, of a public
inspection of credentials, or medical reports. It was very
disturbing....
But it was deliberate. The reason for it was to emphasize that
we were supposed to make all our own decisions on procedure,
without outside rules. This include judging each others
qualifications and making allowances for possible bias. I don't
think it affected our work directly, but it made the point it
was supposed to make...
That we should ignore absolutely nothing
that might conceivably affect our objectivity.
[At this point, I persuaded Doe that a
brief occupational description of the individual members of the
Group would serve a useful purpose for readers of the Report.
The
list which follows was worked out on paper. (It might be more
accurate to say it was negotiated.) The problem was to give as much
relevant information as possible without violating Doe's commitment
to protect his colleagues' anonymity. It turned out to be very
difficult, especially in the cases of those members who are very
well known. For this reason, secondary areas of achievement or
reputation are usually not shown,
The simple alphabetical "names" were assigned by Doe for convenient
reference; they bear no intended relation to actual names. "Able"
was the Camp's Washington contact. It was he who brought and read
the dossiers, and who most often acted as chairman. He, "Baker" and
"Cox" were the three who had been involved in the preliminary
planning
There is no other significance to the
order of listing.
-
"Arthus Able" is an
historian and political theorist, who has served in
government.
-
"Bernard Baker" is a
professor of international law and a consultant on
government operations.
-
"Charles Cox" is an
economist, social critic; and biographer.
-
"John Doe."
-
"Edward Ellis" is a
sociologist often involved in public affairs.
-
"Frank Fox" is a cultural
anthropologist
-
"George Green" is a
psychologist, educator, and developer of personnel
testing systems.
-
"Harold Hill" is a
psychiatrist, the has conducted extensive studies of the
relationship between individual and group behavior.
-
"John Jones is a scholar and
literary critic.
-
'Martin Miller" is a
physical chemist, whose work has received international
recognition at the highest level.
-
"Paul Peters" is a
biochemist, who has made important discoveries bearing
on reproductive processes.
-
"Richard Roe" is a
mathematician affiliated withan independent West Coast
research institution.
-
"Samuel Smith" is an
astronomer, physicist, and communications theorist.
-
"Thomas Taylor" is a systems
analyst and war planner, who has written extensively on
war, peace, and international relations.
-
"William White" is an
industrialist, who has under-taken many special
government assignments.]
How did the Group operate? I
mean, where and when did you meet, and so forth?
We met on the average of once a month. Usually was on weekends,
and usually for two days. We had few longer sessions, and one
that lasted only four hours... We met all over the country,
always at a different place, except for the first and last
times, which were a Iron Mountain. It was like a traveling
seminar.... Sometimes at hotels, sometimes at universities.
Twice we met at summer camps, and once at a private estate, in
Virginia. We used a usiness place in Pittsburgh, and another in
Poughkeepsie [New York].... We never met in Washington, or on
government property anywhere... Able would announce the times
and places two meetings ahead. They were never changed....
We didn't divide into subcommittees, or anything else that
formal. But we all took individual assignments between meetings.
A lot of it involved getting information from other people....
Among the fifteen of us, I don-t think there was anybody in the
academic or professional world we couldn't call on if we wanted
to, and we took advantage of it.... We were paid a very modest
per diem. All of it was called "expenses" on the vouchers. We
were told not to report it on our tax returns.... The checks
were drawn on a special account of Able's at a New York bank. He
signed them.... I don't know what the study cost. So far as our
time and travel were concerned, it couldn't have come to more
than the low tax-figure range. But the big item must have been
computer time, and I have no idea how high this ran....
You say that you don't think your work was affected by
professional bias. What about political and philosophical bias?
Is it possible to deal with questions of war and peace without
reflecting personal values?
Yes, it is. I can understand your skepticism. But if you had
been at any of our meetings you'd have had a very hard time
figuring out who were the liberals and who were the
conservatives, or who were hawks and who were doves. There is
such a thing as objectivity, and I think we had it.... I don't
say no one had any emotional reaction to what we were doing. We
all did, to some extent. As a matter of fact, two members had
heart attacks after we were
finished, and I'll be the first to admit it probably wasn't a
coincidence.
You said you made your own ground rules. What were these
ground rules?
The most important were informality and unanimity. By
informality I mean that our discussions were open ended. We went
as far afield as any one of us thought we had to. For instance,
we spent a lot of time on the relationship between military
recruitment policies and industrial employment. Before we were
finished with it, we'd one through the history of western penal
codes and any number of comparative psychiatric studies [of
draftees and volunteers]. We looked over the organization of the
Inca empire. We determined the effects of automation on
underdeveloped societies.... It was all relevant...
By unanimity, I don't mean that we kept taking votes; like a
jury. I mean that we stayed with every issue until we had what
the Quakers call a "sense of the meeting " It was
time-consuming. But in the long run it saved time. Eventually we
all got on the same wavelength, so to speak....
Of course we had differences, and big ones especially in the
beginning.... For instance, in Section 1 you might think we were
merely clarifying our instructions. Not so; it took a long time
before we all agreed to a strict interpretation....Roe and
Taylor deserve most of the credit for this.... There are many
things in the Report that look obvious now, but didn't seem so
obvious then. For instance, on the relationship of war to social
systems. The original premise was conventional, from Clausewitz.
. . That war was an "instrument" of broader political values.
Able was the only one who challenged this, at first. Fox called
his position "perverse." Yet it was Fox who furnished most of
the data that led us all to agree with Able eventually. I
mention this because I think it's good example of the way we
worked. A triumph of method over cliché.... I certainly don't
intend to go into details about who took what side about what,
and when. But I will say, to give credit where due, that only
Roe, Able, Hill, and Taylor were able to see, at the beginning,
where our method was taking us.
But you always reached agreement, eventually.
Yes. It's a unanimous report.... I don't mean that our sessions
were always harmonious. Some of them were rough. The last six
months there was a lot of quibbling about small points.... We'd
been under pressure for a long time, we'd been working together
too long. It was natural . . . that we got on each other's
nerves. For a while Able and Taylor weren't speaking to each
other. Miller threatened to quit. But this all passed. There
were no important differences....
How was the Report actually written? Who did the writing?
We all had a hand in the first draft. Jones and Able put it
together, and then mailed it around for review before working
out a final version.... The only problems were the form it
should take and whom we were writing it for. And, of course, the
question of disclosure....[Doe's comments on this point are
summarized in the introduction.]
You mentioned a "peace games" manual. What are peace games?
I wanted to say something about that. The Report barely mentions
it. "Peace games' is a method we developed during the course of
the study. It's a forecast technique, an information system. I'm
very excited about it. Even if nothing is done about our
recommendations--which is conceivable--this is something that
can't be ignored. It will revolutionize the study social
problems. It's a by-product of the study. We needed a fast,
dependable procedure to approximate the effects of disparate
social phenomena on other social phenomena. We got it. It's in a
primitive phase, but works.
How are peace games played? Are they like Rand's war games?
You don't "play" peace games, like chess or Monopoly any more
than you play war games with toy soldiers. You use computers.
Its a programming system. A compute "language," like FORTRAN, or
ALGOL, or Jovial.... Its advantage is its superior capacity to
interrelate data with no apparent common points of reference....
A simple analogy is likely to be misleading. But I can give you
some examples. For instance, supposing I asked you to figure out
what effect a moon landing by U.S. astronauts would have on an
election in, say, Sweden. Or what effect a change in the draft
law--a specific change-- would have on the value of real estate
in downtown Manhattan? Or a certain change in college entrance
requirements in the United States on the British shipping
industry?
You would probably say, first, that there would be no effect to
speak of, and second, that there would be no way of telling. But
you'd be wrong on both counts. In each case there would be an
effect, and the peace games method could tell you what it would
be, quantitatively. I didn't take these examples out of the air.
We used them working out the method.... Essentially, it's an
elaborate, high-speed trial-and-error system for determining
working algorithms. Like most sophisticated types of computer
problem-solving....
A lot of the "games" of this kind you read about are just
glorified conversational exercises. They really are games, and
nothing more. I just saw one reported in the Canadian Computer
Society Bulletin, called a "Vietnam Peace Game." They use
simulation techniques, but the programming hypotheses are
speculative....
The idea of a problem-solving system like this is not original
with us. ARPA (4) has been working on something like it. So has
General Electric, in California. There are others.... We were
successful not because we know more than they do about
programming, which we don't but because we learned how to
formulate the problem accurately. It goes back to the old saw.
You can find the answer if you know the right question....
Supposing you hadn't developed this method. Would you have
come to the same conclusions in the Report?
Certainly. But it would have taken many times longer.... But
please don't misunderstand my enthusiasm [about the peace games
method]. With all due respect to the effects of computer
technology on modern thinking, basic judgments must still be
made by human beings. The peace games technique isn't
responsible for our Report.
We are...
-
This was a "Committee on the
Economic Impact of Defense and Disarmament," headed by
Gardner Ackley, of the Council of Economic Advisers. It was
established by Presidential order in December, 1963, and
issued a report in July, 1965.
-
The Institute for Defense
Analysis
-
On Thermonuclear War, Thinking
About the Unthinkable, On Escalation
-
The Advanced Research Projects
Agency, of the Department of Defense.
Back to Contents
STATEMENT BY "JOHN DOE"
from
EducateYourself Website
CONTRARY to the decision of the Special Study Croup, of which I was
a member, I have arranged for the general release of our Report.
I
am grateful to Mr. Leonard C. Lewin for his invaluable
assistance in making this possible, and to The Dial Press for
accepting the challenge of publication. Responsibility for taking
this step, however is mine and mine alone.
I am well aware that my action may be taken as a breach of faith by
some of my former colleagues. But my view my responsibility to the
society of which am a part supersedes any self-assumed obligation on
the part of fifteen individual men. Since our Report can be
considered on its merits, it is not necessary for me to disclose
their identity to accomplish my purpose.
Yet I would gladly abandon
my own anonymity if it were possible to do so without at the same
time compromising theirs, to defend our work publicly if and when
they release me from this personal bond.
But this is secondary. What is needed now, and needed badly, is
widespread public discussion and debate about the elements of war
and the problems of peace.
I hope that publication of this Report
will serve to initiate it.
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