Can the Scientist Win the Peace?

DR. PHIMISTER: Distinguished guests and gentlemen. The national budget of the United States for 1962-63 is estimated to be 92.5 billion dollars. Out of this sum, 52.5 billions will be spent for "defence". That is to say, more than one-half of the revenue collected by the federal government in the United States will be spent to maintain men and machines in a position to destroy large numbers of other men and other machines. Other governments in the developed and civilized parts of the world devote a large proportion of their resources to the same purposes-that is, to preparations for war.

Just what it is in man's nature which requires him to spend such a large part of his resources preparing for the possible destruction of other men is one of the world's great mysteries. Our speaker today, Dr. Norman Z. Alcock, is a Canadian engineer and physicist who, following a brilliant academic career and a similarly successful business career, has set aside his personal business interests in an effort to solve this enigma of man's seeming determination to destroy himself. It is Dr. Alcock's hope that he may discover the political and social inventions needed for a warless world. After discussion with his wife and four children, Dr. Alcock left his business, devoted himself to study, and wrote a small book called The Bridge of Reason in which he puts forth his plan for peace. In brief, the plan calls for a concentrated world-wide programme of scientific research to be set up to seek means to avert the present drift towards war. All of us are aware of the problem which faces mankind; few of us seem able to do anything about it.

Our speaker has made it his personal full-time business to seek an answer. I am sure you will listen with interest as Dr. Alcock speaks to us now on the subject: "CAN THE SCIENTIST WIN THE PEACE?"

DR. ALCOCK: The fact that I can speak to this Empire Club audience about peace and war today is, in itself, an encouraging thing. There was a time not too long ago when responsible groups such as yours would not have been inclined to admit our peril by outright discussion. Today responsible, thoughtful men and women are facing the reality that the new weaponry has made war obsolete and that we must find alternative methods of settling international disputes.

In the time allocated this afternoon I would like to deal with three questions, and I hope provide convincing answers to them. The first question: "Is it generally recognized that war is now obsolete?" The second, "Can the scientists win the peace?" And the third: "Is there still time?"

Today the United States national budget amounts to approximately $921/2 billion. Of this, $521/2 billion has been allocated for defence. The figures are comparable for other major powers. These figures suggest that war's obsolescence-that there can be no defence against the new weaponry and that war can no longer be an instrument of national will-is not generally recognized.

The fact that war has become obsolete is a new condition. It is so new in human history that it is very difficult for people to accept such a concept. Surely there have been Cassandras-people who have been saying that war is obsolete-for years. Today, however, ample evidence supports the statement.

The documentation is this. In just about twenty years weapon technology advanced from the one-ton bomb at the outset of World War II to the 10-ton bomb-the block-buster then suddenly to the 20,000 ton weaponthe atomic bomb. Just 10 years ago it jumped from 20,000 ton weapons to 20 million ton weapons. The handwriting was on the wall that war was obsolete when the first atomic bomb was dropped. The H-bomb-the 20 megaton weapon-made war's obsolescence a reality.

All this has been slowly seeping into our consciousness. But it is very important that we let it seep into it much more than it has because a 20 megaton weapon can do the sort of damage that it is hard to imagine. Such a bomb can destroy-by fire-4,000 square miles.

And still the size of the weapons continues to grow fantastically. Less than a year ago when Dr. Keenleyside said "We have on the drawing board a bomb which can destroy the Province of Ontario," newspapers picked up the statement and said "Let's not have hysteria." Four months later the 100 megaton bomb was announced and some of us pointed out that here, indeed, was a weapon that could destroy at least the populous southern half of this province. A newspaper replied that this was "theoretically possible but not of practical concern". Well, four days after that statement it became of practical concern when Mr. Khrushchev had a 60 megaton bomb exploded.

Nor is the 100 megaton bomb the limit. Dr. Leo Szilard has described a cobalt bomb that could be constructed to provide the equivalent of 1000 megatons-that would literally devastate half of the continent.

The evolution of these weapons has been matched by developments in their means of delivery. Twenty years ago aircraft were 10 hours away. Today the intercontinental ballistic missile has reduced the warning time to half an hour; perhaps less. The next step is to launch a satellite with a nuclear warhead that will circle the earth constantly and which can be launched on a target country within seconds.

This fantastic growth in weapon technology has had one salutory effect. Because of the awesome proportions of the weapons, a very good case can be made for the contention that deliberate war is very much less likely to happen. In the last 15 years government and military leaders have undoubtedly hesitated many times to trigger developments which would lead to war. Deliberate war is extremely unlikely today. But the technological developments have opened a new dimension-that of accidental war.

C. P. Snow has warned that "within ten years one of these things is going to go off". In the last ten years years there have been in the United States alone some fifty accidents involving the carriers of nuclear weapons. The Russians are reported to have remotely exploded a runaway missile that was headed for Alaska. Safeguards did not prevent the moon from being mistaken for a Russian missile just a year or two ago. This might be something to make us smile about, of course, if civilization were not poised on the brink. Fortunately human judgment intervened in the case of the Thule moon signals and in the case of the Russian runaway rocket. But as the warning time-the time for voluntary action and reaction-is reduced from a half hour to minutes and from minutes to seconds the safeguards will no longer be able to guard against accidental war.

Many researchers today are sorely vexed with the matter of human crack-ups that can start the war we do not want. A submarine commander or a field commander in charge of widely dispersed weapons provide another dimension for accidental war. Many military people today feel that this is the greatest danger-greater than a mechanical failure, in fact. They feel that some over-wrought mind will want to press the button and will work through the safeguards that prevent him from pressing it.

The third real danger is war by escalation. Today the weapons range from those of less than a thousand tons of TNT on up through all stages to the multi-megaton bombs. They are all available and it is difficult to conceive of military commanders willfully suffering defeat at any point when a larger weapon that will forestall defeat lies in his arsenal. Here is where the. system can escalate from a clash over some incident in Berlin to wholesale nuclear annihilation. At "Pugwash" Conference of scientists held in Vienna three years ago, the danger of nuclear war by escalation was considered so extreme they declared that all warseven the smallest local war-must be avoided. As Mr. Howard Green has pointed out, as more nations acquire nuclear weapons the danger of brush fire wars growing into nuclear war increases.

This briefly then is the picture of our nuclear peril and of the hazards of accidental war. But what about defence against these weapons. Today we cling to the myth of defence because we have always had defence against military weapons. In the last war we had a defence against air attack after a fashion. It was predicated on knocking down five or ten per cent of attacking bombers in any raid. When the enemy losses became about twelve per cent, in fact, it was too expensive in terms of manpower and material for him to sustain the raids. Still 88 per cent of his bombers were getting through. If the best defensive efforts against piston-engine aircraft was only a few per cent, then, defence against missiles is nonsense. One reads of talk about anti-missile missiles, and we are spending millions of dollars every year working on such ideas. Yet the idea of producing an anti-missile missile that will be 100 per cent effective is utter nonsense. And clearly when we are dealing with 100 megaton bombs that can each destroy half a province, 100 per cent effectiveness is necessary. When we talk of anti-missile defence today we are grasping at an illusion. Any bomb getting through is sufficient to create devastation.

There is a second sad myth about defence. It is that radioactivity is suddenly stopped after two weeks when we emerge from our shelters. It must be realized that here we are concerned with something that will last years and extend over a vast area. In our lifetime, technology has changed the whole dimension of war so let us dispense with the idea that there is a defence against this very real nuclear devastation which can start accidentally and set mankind back perhaps 20,000 years.

Now let me return to my first question: "Is it generally recognized that war is obsolete?" I think not. Now and again we read what amounts to lip service to the fact of war's obsolescence but the actions of governments indicate that we have not yet recognized it. The United States, for example, is spending $7 billion-billion with a "B"-for development and research into new weapons and $2 million-million with an "M"-for the newly formed Disarmament Agency. And that $2 million is something of a triumph. In Canada where we are spending $2 billion annually on defence we are looking for $2 million for research into alternatives to war. That is a ratio of 1000 to l.

Lester Pearson has said, "We prepare for war like precocious giants and for peace like retarded pygmies." Despite all this I believe there is hope and evidence for encouragement. I believe that scientific research can find alternatives. And this brings me to the third question I posed at the outset: "Is there still time?" Have we the time to make the adjustment in our thinking?

For 800,000 years of man's life on this earth we have been used to the idea of fighting to settle our disputes. How is it possible then that we can hope to change human attitudes in the next ten years or so that men like Leo Szilard and C. P. Snow say is the time we have left for decision. Perhaps the answer is that we cannot. On the other hand there are some encouraging signs, and we must seize upon these encouraging signs.

The first encouraging thing is that we don't have to change human nature. Indeed in every other area of human conflict, short of international disputes, we no longer use force. Men once fought each other to the death; they no longer duel. Families and clans once feuded until one or the other were destroyed. We have outlawed all that. Trojans are no longer pitted against Athenians. Victoria and Vancouver don't resort to war over differences.

We no longer tolerate fights between individuals, tribes or cities. Thus we are at the last rung of the ladder. The only anarchy that remains is between nations. In the process of achieving peaceful settlements between individuals and groups within a nation we have not changed basic human nature, we have simply restrained and regulated it. This remains to be done in the field of international conflicts. It must be done, for today weapon technology has made war as obsolete as a means of settling international disputes as dueling in the street is obsolete.

The second area for encouragement-that should hearten us to believe that we can resolve the prime problem of today-is that we have the tools for making changes. These tools are the methods of science and technology.

The same scientific and technological knowledge that has made war obsolete should help us out of our present difficulties. We have learned to use human intellect-to apply reason instead of raw emotion. And we have learned to marshal this power of science and technology very recently in human history-particularly in the past fifty years. When we think about scientific development it is significant to realize that of all the scientists the world has ever known, 90 per cent of them are alive today. That is how recently science has come into our lives.

About a week ago I was in Lethbridge where I visited the experimental station. Here were seventy scientists working on diseases of wheat and livestock. Scientific method and scientific personnel are today commonplace in agriculture. We employ them in designing industrial processes; in solving the problems of industry with catalytic crackers and new types of processing plants. We are using the social sciences every day in making management more efficient. We have come to accept research as the normal thing in medicine. In our own lifetime we have eradicated diseases like malaria and typhoid and poliomyelitis because we invested enough specialized skills in finding the answers. The physical sciences have wrought vast changes in the last two or three generations. We must look now to the social sciences, in particular, for solutions to the problem of war.

Let me use an illustration. If we knew that a plague was imminent in the next ten or fifteen years-if we knew that it was spreading all over the world and that it would in all likelihood largely eliminate mankind-that it would effect non-Communist and Communist and neutral countries all alike-would we just pretend that it wasn't there? Would we go on with life as usual, doing our daily tasks, and ignore this plague? Or would we mount the most enormous crash programme-throw time and effort and money into finding out what this plague was and how it could be prevented?

The threat of thermonuclear war to mankind is such an impending plague. And such a crash programme, in a limited way, is that we are trying to launch here in Canada with the Canadian Peace Research Institute.

In the time remaining now I would like to tell you something about the Institute concept and how it will work. Briefly, the Institute will be a place where men and women can work full time in research on the problems of war. We are starting in a very small way with only about twenty-five scientists. That indeed is a very small number. But the fact is that in Canada we have not anybody working full time on peace research today.

We want to start with twenty-five here and within a year or two we hope to grow to about fifty or sixty scientists. At the same time we want to promote the establishment of similar institutes in another twenty-five or thirty countries and our aim is to have between 1000 and 5000 scientists working around the world within the next five or six years, all trying to isolate the virus of war.

The scientists to be engaged will be primarily social scientists-those with special skills in looking into human relations. There are those who suggest that the social scientists cannot work as effectively on human problems as the physical scientists have done in physical areas. Perhaps they can't. But on the other hand they have been remarkably useful in studying such human problems as alcoholism and delinquency. The psychologists-and particularly the social psychologists have made considerable headway. The economists have made much headway in understanding the delicate relationship between the trading areas of the world. The forecasters and analysts, statisticians and actuaries working together with psychologists and sociologists and economists have brought a new dimension of effectiveness to the operation of industry and commerce.

Certainly in approaching the solution of international problems by scientific research we are not starting from scratch. We are beginning with definite known skills.

The peace research institutes are to be set up in the most objective way possible, for this is essential to the scientific approach. They will be independent of government just as our universities are independent of government. But they must have, of course, the support and confidence of government. I must state at this point that we have no assurance that the government will participate. It is our intention, however, that when we have gained the support of the public and of the business community we will approach the government to contribute towards support of the Institute on a matching basis.

But people fequently ask, "Isn't 'peace' a pretty controversial field? What are you doing about the possibility of Communist subversion?" I would answer that the likelihood of subversion is the same as it would be in any of our universities or in a big company. The safeguard against subversion is in the calibre of vigilance of the directors. The Directors of the Canadian Peace Research Institute include Dr. Franc R. Joubin, Dr. Francis Winspear of Edmonton, Mr. Walter Koerner of Vancouver, the Rt. Rev. James S. Thomson, Dr. Brock Chisholm, Dr. Hugh Keenleyside and Professor Kenneth Boulding. I say to you these are not the kind of men who are likely to be pushed around.

The other half of the answer, however, is that we shall have no secrets to sell. The Institute will deal only in unclassified information. This is essential because it is basic to solving international problems that the data be as broadly distributed as possible. The data and findings of the Institutes must be exchanged to the fullest possible extent.

What sort of projects will the Institute scientists and scholars undertake? Let us consider a few examples very briefly. One project is an exploration of problems to be encountered in establishing a neutral zone to prevent a brush-fire war. The Rapacki Plan suggested by Poland a few years ago was shot down at the conference table. So was a subsequent proposal from the West. Now if a plan could be worked out by scientists in half a dozen nations before it went to the United Nations perhaps they could get a measure of agreement that would give a greater probability of United Nations approval. The fact that the Institutes had developed such a plan for a neutral zone in fair detail would not be a guarantee. There is no panacea. But certainly it would provide a better chance for mutual acceptance.

Accidental war is a second area for research by Institute scientists. Here we have the opinions of several authoritative men that we would gain more than we lost by dealing in non-classified areas.

Bilateral disarmament-if it is pursued-is going to involve hard tough bargaining and the negotiators are going to have to be very well armed with the facts and details. We will never know if such disarmament agreements are possible unless we look into this area much more closely than has been done to date. James Wadsworth, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations has publicly deplored the fact that Geneva negotiations were frequently entered with homework that had been done only the night before.

Professor Kenneth Boulding, one of the Institute directors, has outlined eleven economic areas of peace research that are in need of exploration. Already the economic studies which have been undertaken by the United Nations committee clearly indicate that we can reallocate up to ten per cent of our economy, if necessary, on an annual basis from war to peace purposes-but that we must work out the details for this conversion in advance. It is pertinent to reflect that the European Common Market was thought to be an impossible attainment twenty years ago. When they believed it was essential, they found that it was possible.

International law is another field for peace research, and it is worth noting that Professor Arthur Larson, former consultant to a U.S. President, has cited 113 specific research projects in international law that should be undertaken.

Will the scientists respond to this programme? We have been in correspondence with men in a dozen countries already who have shown keen interest in the Canadian Peace Research Institute. In fact we have even had a communication-albeit a cautiously ambiguous one-from a scientist in a Communist country expressing interest. As a result of the campaign now underway in Canada two men in England have set up a programme to work on a peace research institute campaign over there.

Canada is not a big enough country to be really significant in world affairs, but we are big enough to set the pace in this field of peace research. Canadians can indeed help start a world wide programme for peace research institutes. We are more affluent than most countries. We are a democratic country where such an idea can be brought to a state of vitality. The mass media in Canada, in fact, have already shown great enthusiasm. Scientific peace research may be the place where Canadians can take world-wide initiative.

Today we have twenty campaign committees working in twenty cities, with thousands of volunteer supporters beginning the task of acquiring the first $2,000,000 by public subscription. Can Canadians in the next few months set a pattern of leadership which the whole world will want to emulate? It remains for all of us to prove that we can.

THANKS OF THE MEETING were expressed by Lt. Col. W. H. Montague.