Our work has been predicated on the belief that some kind of general peace may soon be negotiable.
The de facto admission of Communist China into the United Nations now appears to be only a few years away at most. It has become increasingly manifest that conflicts of American national interest with those of China and the Soviet Union are susceptible of political solution, despite the superficial contraindications of the current Vietnam war, of the threats of an attack on China, and of the necessarily hostile tenor of day-to-day foreign policy statements.
It is also obvious that differences
involving other nations can be readily resolved by the three great
powers whenever they arrive at a stable peace among themselves. It
is not necessary, for the purposes of our study, to assume that a
general detente of this sort will come about - and we make no such
argument - but only that it may.
Political,
sociological, cultural, and ecological changes would be equally
far-reaching. What has motivated our study of these contingencies
has been the growing sense of thoughtful men in and out of
government that the world is totally unprepared to meet the demands
of such a situation.
But as our investigation proceeded it became apparent that certain other questions had to be faced.
The word peace, as we have used it in the following pages, describes a permanent, or quasi-permanent, condition entirely free from the national exercise, or contemplation, of any form of the organized social violence, or threat of violence, generally known as war.
It implies total and general disarmament. It is not used to describe the more familiar condition of "cold war," "armed peace, " or other mere respite, long or short, from armed conflict. Nor is it used simply as a synonym for the political settlement of international differences.
The magnitude of modern means of mass destruction and the speed of modern communications require the unqualified working definition given above; only a generation ago such an absolute description would have seemed utopian rather than pragmatic. Today, any modification of this definition would render it almost worthless for our purpose.
By the same standard, we have used the word war to
apply interchangeably to conventional ("hot")
war, to the general
condition of war preparation or war readiness, and to the general
"war system." The sense intended is made clear in context.
The fourth, fifth, and sixth examine the nonmilitary functions of war and the problems they raise for a viable transition to peace; here will be found some indications of the true dimensions of the problem, not previously coordinated in any other study.
In the seventh section we summarize our findings, and in the eighth we set forth our recommendations for what we believe to be a practical and necessary course of action.
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