The Dangers of the Nuclear Age

LT.-COL. LEGGE: Like so many of our fellow-Canadians, Sir Robert Watson-Watt was born and educated in Scotland and then crossed the Atlantic to live in the midst of the exciting development of this Dominion. Our guest of honour is an erudite Scot who had a splendid academic career. At University College in Dundee, he obtained the degree of Bachelor of Science and was subsequently awarded a Bachelor of Science from London University, Doctor of Laws from St. Andrews University and Doctor of Science from the University of Toronto.

Before the Second World War Sir Robert was the Director of Communications Development at the Air Ministry, and led the team which perfected the Science of Radio location--now universally known as Radar. It was this machinery of radio detection and control which revolutionized air warfare in the Battle of Britain. It brought unerring accuracy to the heedless bravery of the few thus saving the Mother Island from destruction and the allied powers from early defeat. It was an incredible feat of science and gallantry because the R.A.F. defeated the Luftwaffe although outnumbered in first-line planes by almost four to one. In this drama Sir Robert Watson-Watt was the wizard scientist whose secret electronic equipment traced to their destruction the movements of the enemy aircraft through cathode ray tubes.

Sir Robert has from the beginning of his scientific career concerned himself with seeing or hearing better and from greater distances than ever before. His first individual research resulted in tracking meteorological balloons for wind-measurement in the upper atmosphere to much increased ranges. His second research project resulted in locating individual lightning flashes at distances up to 4,000 miles from the observing station. The equipment which he devised in 1916 for this project is in very wide daily use in the world weather networks of today. It was also employed to track the dreaded U-boats in the Second World War and has been described by an American historian as no less important to victory in the Battle of the Atlantic than was radar itself. His researches on the travel of radio waves have helped radio communication, television and navigation. In short, our speaker's talents for the miraculous devices of war were simply forerunners of the wondrous electronic creations which have startled our imagination in the new space and nuclear age.

Sir Robert's achievements as a prolific author and as an unique inventor have been internationally acclaimed. During the War he was created a Commander of the Bath and later received the accolade of Knighthood. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society and he received the highest honour that the President of the United States can bestow upon a civilian--the Medal of Merit. Sir Robert Watson-Watt's place in Britain's Hall of Honour is secure, not like Sir George for slaying the Dragon but for preventing the Dragon from slaying St. George in the Battle of Britain. Today he honours us not as a hero of the past, but as one of the world's savants who will speak to the members of The Empire Club of Canada about the future and tell us of the "Dangers of the Nuclear Age".

SIR ROBERT WATSON-WATT: I don't think that I need take time to define what I mean by the "Nuclear Age" or the closely associated "Space Age". Neither has a very suitable name: each has good and bad aspects; both were already promising infants before the outbreak of World War II; both developed their bad aspects within that war period. The bad side of the Space Age was heralded by the V2 attacks on Great Britain; the bad side of the Nuclear Age had its lurid baptism of fire in that monumentally inhuman error, the dropping of the Atomic Bomb over Hiroshima.

I count it an advantage that I have no specialist knowledge or experience in the fields of nuclear science or missile engineering. I might almost claim that in relation to both, in their bad aspects, I was an early member of His Majesty's Opposition. I had to fight to keep my radar team-mates from being carried off into atomic bomb projects, and I had to lead my team-mates into the preparation and use of radar devices to mitigate the V-2 dangers.

Whatever justification I have for talking to you on my announced subject rests on three bits of my experience outside the nuclear research field. First comes a group of treasured friendships with many of the pioneers, from Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr and the Curies onward, and some post-war contacts with workers on the enemy side.

A more substantial second is that the audacities and versatilities which my colleagues and I learned to exercise in the development of radar were very advantageous to the time-table of nuclear research and development.

The third--and probably the most important of my three props is that I am something of a practising specialist in human fallibility. You will have observed that a whole galaxy of top brass has recently made the startling if belated discovery that the pen is mightier than the sword. Well to the rear of the advancing Admirals, Generals and Air Marshals of World War II, I was learning with--and in part from--them, much of policy. Plagiarising from an earlier General, I can say of many politicians, some defence scientists and a few military leaders, "I don't know what effect they will have on the enemy but by God, they frighten me"--and all this with the best intentions in the world! In the course of my learning--through doing in the field of defence science, technology and operations, I re-learned that "Patriotism is not enough", that passive apprehension is far from enough, and that in the theatre of war there is no comfort to be drawn from that easy slogan of the theatre of peace, "It'll be all right on the night".

When, in a brief excursion beyond the Iron Curtain in the Fall of 1.953, I ventured to disagree fundamentally and explicitly with those whose spiritual home lay there, a distinguished Soviet Academician said to me„ "Since you obviously don't know what you are talking about, you'd better come on to Moscow with me to learn the truth". I'm sorry now that I didn't say "Snap", but even so I have learned, from some of his colleagues, as from some of my own, enough to assure you that I do not know some of the things 1 am talking about.

These include some of the good material aspects of the nuclear age: (1) the assured prospect of practically unlimited electrical energy for the peaceful pursuits of every people; (2) the assured prospect of greatly increased food production--to postpone the world catastrophe of world starvation; (3) the assured prospect of great advances in the biological sciences and in their application to the improvement of the human condition.

They include, too, some of the good material aspects of what f may call the "inner-space age" and of the good intellectual and spiritual aspects of the "outer-space age". I am, however, at the best reserved, and at the worst deeply sceptical, about the material value of human controls over terrestrial processes, to be achieved through space vehicles. For example, in a world where my fellow meteorologists have, at best or worst, advanced no further in "weather engineering" than to stealing the neighbour's rain, I take a dim view of the political consequences of corresponding achievements on a national scale instead of on our current parochial scale.

It isn't as easy, as you might expect to compile, from the daily newspapers, a reasonably balanced list of "Dangers of the Nuclear Age". It is much easier to measure from the papers, the dangers of death on the road than of death from the clouds. But the newspapers have not failed to record, with undue restraint, the immediate and long term dangers from nuclear tests, under the nominally peaceful conditions of today. They have noticed (1) the present certainty that we know enough about nuclear weapons to be sure that the power to ensure the destruction of civilization and the extinction of mankind is now in the hands of mankind; (2) the knowledge that defence against nuclear attack is excessively and increasingly difficult, and that unfounded faith in defensive measures may contribute to the outbreak of a nuclear war; (3) that even the destruction of all weapons of mass destruction now could postpone catastrophe by no more than a couple of years at best, since the knowledge behind them is indestructible and widely available; (4) that a small power could, by accident, or design, trigger off a major nuclear war; (5) that the cataloguing of existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons by international agreement cannot be made evasion-proof, and so on.

Despite a conspiracy of silence about the steps which every major power has taken to ensure that its potentials in relation to "biological warfare" are not neglected, the diligent reader may even have learned that the Big Bad Bomb may be surpassed in daemonic destructivity by the Poor Power's Poison. Compared with the colossal costs of delivering the nuclear bomb on target, the admitted inconvenience of distributing biological agents of destruction is largely offset by the ease and quickness of manufacture in complete secrecy, and by the unobtrusiveness and cheapness of the distribution processes available. Yet I know only one newspaper which has told its readers of the availability of a toxic substance of which a total quantity of eight ounces, appropriately distributed, could kill off every human being on our planet, and this is only one item in the biochemist's Chamber of Horrors.

For me, however, these relatively over-publicised instruments of destruction belong to the mere footnote level in the Catalogue of Dangers of the Nuclear Age. The true and terrifying dangers of the nuclear age are stored, not in the laboratory, in the arsenal or in the armoury, but in the mind of man. Yesterday they were the dangers of the Air Age; a day or two before that they determined the tragic shape of the 1812 Overture.

That exquisitely appointed, incredibly compact, superbly versatile electronic installation, the human brain, is at once a Communications Centre, a Storage Plant, an Analytical Laboratory, and a Generating Station. It would not be capable of its highest achievements were it not so equipped as to be capable also of staggering misapplications. Both extremes in its performance are conditioned by what the electronics engineer calls filter circuits. Some of these will stand in the way of converting general knowledge into particular awareness, awareness into wisdom, wisdom into effective and timely action. I often wonder which of my U.S. colleagues in the early warning game was the cynic who gave, to a now much publicized artificial military mind, the odd name of "Semi Automatic Ground Environment" so that it might have the misleading pet name "Sage" which is precisely what it cannot be! But that is an aside, though not an irrelevance. Its relevance lies in the fact that these "filter circuits of the mind" as I have called them may embody loose contacts, switching errors, and broken connections which I have swept into one gigantic and potentially explosive junk heap bearing the label "Human Fallibility".

In other places I have shown how human fallibility in the radar world prevented the wide use of adequate radar data, obtained by low-level reliable observers. Human fallibility, higher up, denied us the mitigation of the disaster at Pearl Harbour and of our humiliation by the safe passage of the German battle-cruisers under the very muzzles of the big guns at Dover. I have, in detail, outlined ways in which major defects in military organization at highest levels, due to human fallibility near the top of the uniformed branches, were corrected by civilian statesmen who were, primarily and by predilection, philosophers rather than politicians. And I have already today mentioned the anxiety of some generals and some politicians to show how large a fraction of the human fallibility which delayed or diluted victory was lodged in minds other than then own.

In nuclear warfare, if, God forbid, we bring it on ourselves, and in the periods when all human wisdom has to be mobilised to avert nuclear warfare, the chains of responsibility in planning and in execution--preventive or implementing--have vastly more links in each line and many more cross-links to parallel and alternate chains, than in "conventional" warfare. Even so, the increased opportunities for human error at executive levels are still not the ones which I most fear. Examples of such possibilities will present themselves as we discuss the higher policy, weaknesses.

The price of brinkmanship weighs heavily upon my mind. The ground rules of this game have been outlined by John Foster Dulles. I regard these as resting on at least one basic and stupendous mis-assumption. This assumption is that a sufficient approximation to practical infallibility can be maintained by the Head Brinksman. This assumption is in itself so clearly and unmistakably evidence of human fallibility that it must invalidate the consequent assumptions embodied in the rules. And even while the brinksman maintains his precarious balance on the uncharted and crumbling rim of an unfathomable abyss, his fellow-citizens see their treasures sinking into at least four engulfing craters, each much more capacious than Fort Knox. The most readily visible of these drains is not necessarily the most deadly. It is the economic drain, but the technological, the intellectual and the moral drains are deeper and more lethal.

Even the most obvious, however, is tolerated with pathetic and dangerous fortitude by the victims. If I may switch my simile without (I hope) mixing my metaphor, I want to speak of a national insurance policy and the related insurance premium.

In the frugal Scotland of my boyhood, the average householder had a mental budget showing those fractions of the household income which should go respectively to payment of rent, food, clothing and so on. Insurance premiums were not forgotten; I should be surprised if they were set above 10% of gross income; I should be still more surprised if every word of the policy, however small the type or large the alleged benefits, were not scrutinized with a care that surpassed scepticism and approached cynicism. The national household which sleeps uneasily of nights below the undefended frontier is not sufficiently Scottish for my taste. It allows the heid o' the hoose to spend more than half the household's dollar budget as annual premium on a policy of insurance that cannot possibly be an assurance of national survival through the planned horrors of the nuclear age. In his "State of the Nation" address he put the premium at 60%. Even this is not the full measure--not even the most significant measure--of the burden of mis-assurance.

If the Statue of Liberty were today to play the role of the Roman matron who said "These are my jewels" her hands would certainly be laid on the heads of her favourite sons, the technologists. Yet they are, in large measure, the expendables of our uneasy truce. They are withdrawn from their essential role, as major breadwinners in the modern national family, to devise hardware which even the head of the household believes to be most valuable while it lies idle. For them is "that one talent which is death to lose lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent to serve there with my Maker, and present a true account" . . . For them, for the harvesters of the material crop which grows from the seeds sown by the scientists, and for those cowers themselves, as for all our moralists and our intellectuals generally, our governments are culpably prodigal fathers, in their diversion of talents.

This spendthrift housekeeping is, as is everything spendthrift, the consequence of illusions. On the grand scale appropriate to great nations, it is based on at least two grand illusions, which it is my particular mission to examine. These are, in order of senescence, the Illusion, of National Sovereignty and the Illusion of The Great Deterrent.

The essence of National Sovereignty is, in my view, the ability of a nation to assure to its citizens, within its frontiers, the undisturbed enjoyment of the privilege of living their individual and communal lives within the bounds of a code of national laws which they have themselves accepted and thus approved, and which they can amend by constitutional process. Beyond this most carefully limited concept has grown up a group of formally recognized external rights, to protect the lives, and the legitimate means of livelihood, of its nationals beyond their national frontiers. That this wider conception could not be held intact by peaceful means affecting only two or three nations became manifest within the nineteenth century at the latest. That it could not soon be restored to full effectiveness by wider international mechanism was made manifest by a decision of the United States after World War I (the refusal to join the League of Nations) and by the shackles rivetted of the United Nations Organization after World War II (the Soviet insistence on a stultifying minority veto). I am almost convinced that the U.N. Organization was deliberately put in a glass house so that it might be discouraged from throwing some very salutary stones. I am quite convinced that we have not now advanced so far beyond the creditable level of the Pax Britannica as some of our near neighbours think.

However that may be, it is unescapably certain that none of us can any longer delude ourselves into believing that even the essence of National Sovereignty rests within our own control, or that it has passed into safe keeping on the West bank of the East River. A large fraction of our policy is made in Moscow and Peiping.

I wish I could even convince myself that "The West" whatever that may be--was now ready to see the obvious, and to join in a programme of revision of the U.N. Charter which would take account of the obvious. In this particular case, the obvious, as it appears to me, is this: Firstly that the maintenance of national armies would be neither necessary nor desirable if there existed an effective U.N. policy and police organization; secondly that the sacrifice of that illusion of a national sovereignty which is used to excuse the maintenance of national armies is no sacrifice at all, save a sacrifice of false face in exchange for a potentially sure shield. Don't tell me that this project will take a lot of selling--I know it will, but it's worth the work involved.

Another Grand Illusion is that of the Great Deterrent. This monument of wishful thinking belongs to the more dangerous species of illusion, the kind of illusion that would cease to be illusory if only we could put enough money, effort and wisdom into giving it dependable substance. It is the more dangerous because we can so easily make ourselves believe that we have put into it enough of "what it takes". But this involves a Nelsonian blind eye for human fallibility.

The widely accepted belief about the Great Deterrent is this. Two sufficiently great Great Powers A. and B. can each build up a nuclear armament system capable of completely disabling the other Great Power by striking the first blow, with fission-fusion bombs probably carried by Inter-Continental Missiles. But of course, Great Power A. is too noble to strike the first blow. So will wait until it has been hit and until it has what it believes to be adequate evidence that it is in fact B. who has initiated the striking of the first blow. The Great Deterrent would then be seen not to have sufficiently deterred. True, this discovery would be uncomfortably late. However, now convinced that B. has struck the first, A. would then strike the second blow. The retaliatory power of this second blow is such--and so well known to B.--that B. will refrain from striking the first. I am not quite clear whether or not B. will be invited to inspect A.'s system in such detail as to satisfy himself that he should refrain, but I get the impression that this is not part of the project.

Anyway, there are other difficulties about deterrence. First, there is quite a sharp difference between the ability to make an effective first strike and the ability to reply with an effective second strike. It is dangerous to think that the plan for one is adequate for the other, save after drastic changes. I haven't had any wide body of expressed support for my view that there is in fact no deterrent for dictators; Adolf Hitler may of course have been a less representative dictator than I am sure he was! Fortunately his scientists hadn't given him the means of pulling the shroud over his continent. Lunacy, temporary or permanent, is not the monopoly of any one power, and it may break out at an inconvenient moment. Since, by definition, we can plan only for the allegedly rational, we cannot fully provide against lunatic acts--but we should not forget them in our planning. This is particularly important when we are guesstimating the point of origin of the first thing to hit us, whether it was meant to hit us--and the reasoning behind the hit.

It would unduly strain your kindly tolerance were I to examine in detail the reasons for distrusting "the Great Deterrent"; some of them have recently been set down, under the illuminating title "The Delicate Balance of Terror" by a member of the Rand Corporation. For the reasons that he gives (from a much deeper study than I could achieve) as well as for the reasons which I find rooted in military history, I transfer the Great Deterrent to the category of the Great Illusions. Of these I have already discussed the one which could most beneficially be destroyed. That destruction would automatically cancel the dangers of the "Deterrent" which is unlikely sufficiently to deter.

The undeterring deterrent may illustrate a form of human fallibility to which I attach great importance in the present phase of the nuclear age. I apologize for saying again, here, things which I have already written elsewhere. But they deal with one of the greatest dangers of our age. Every great change in the level, efficiency and durability of what we call civilization has resulted from a great advance in science, with its consequent application through technology. Many, perhaps most, of these changes have had a bad as well as a good aspect; the Industrial Revolution resulting from the work of James Watt did both good and harm; "the American Way of Life" is not all good; the Soviet way of life is not all bad; all these depended in substantial measure on the evaluation of technological advances which were in turn based on advances in science. With the unprecedented acceleration of scientific advance in our own century, the accuracy, the adequacy and the freedom from ambiguity of communications between scientist and statesman becomes a decisive factor in inflating or deflating illusions. This interchange is complicated by the great difference between the ways of thought of scientist and politician respectively, and between the nature of the problems to which each is accustomed. The scientist is by profession an acute observer, an analyst of sharply definable phenomena which are individually relatively simple. I trust that I shall be understood to be sympathising with the politician rather than denigrating him when I say that he is a less acute observer and analyst of phenomena which are far less definable individually and far more completely interrelated than are the building bricks of physics. The professional climates in which they live, move and have their being are almost wholly incompatible, without being so recognised by the sufferers. Harm is

done when the scientist counts himself fully busy, or is in fact too lazy, to explain himself fully to the politician; still greater harm is done when he becomes, and talks as, an amateur politician without clearly "declaring his interest" and his change of garment. There are already enough important examples of this miscommunication in the literature of the nuclear age to make me place it high on my danger list.

At the very summit of that list, I place the mental attitude expressed by a Minister of Education in the U.K. Cabinet, who was subsequently to rise very near to the summit in that Cabinet. Speaking to a University audience in which students of scientific subjects were in the majority, he said something like this. "For myself, I have little use for mathematics or science. The classics must remain the basis of our education because they teach us how man has always behaved and how he will always behave". Here is the key to the problem of how the greatest triumph of the human mind has been made the path towards the extinction of the human race. If I believed him, I could resign myself to that extinction. I don't.

It is precisely because education has, throughout the centuries, tacitly, assumed that man would always attach special importance to armed conflict, that we are in our present phase of involuntary brinksmanship. The individual citizen learns in his school days that differences of opinion between him and other individual citizens are not settled by mutual blood-letting. But in these same school days he is indoctrinated in the tradition that differences of opinion between nations are normally settled by that crude recourse to the traditions of the brute creation. The present U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland, who is an economic historian, has written something important to the teaching of history: "The invention of the steam engine does not appear in news accounts which met the eyes of the world distracted by the Napoleonic Wars. Adam Smith wrote 'The Wealth of Nations' while Watt was experimenting with the steam engine; he referred to it in his writings as a 'fire engine' and dismissed it as such. Yet Watt's invention alone was a thousand times more important to the human race than Napoleon or the Napoleonic Wars, and, as a matter of fact, the simultaneous invention of the steam engine saved the world from much of the pauperism created by these disorders". Can it be that the dissolution of the partnership of B. & K. (Bulganin and Khrushchev), and the topical partnership of K. & M. (Khruschev and Mikoyan), is due to a re-evaluation of history in the same sense as this reversal of N. & W.? If it be so--and I am serious in posing the question--then an unagonizing reappraisal as between destroyer and creator might usefully be undertaken in North America also. It's no use crying over spilt blood, but do let's try to be our mental age.

It could scarcely be later than I think, but we must not yield to that other human fallibility of folding our hands in resignation before they are folded for us. Nor must we yield to the other fallibility, that of the sinful pride which reserves all the whitewash for our side and all the tar for what we believe to be the opposite side. By all means let us put tremendous effort into getting round the obstacles to full and free interchange of information from modest citizen to modest citizen through the curtain; let us proclaim that the great enemy of all the people is the man who puts obstacles in the way of communicating ascertainable facts and reasoned opinions from "man to man the world over". But first let us look again at national histories. Those who are soon to emerge from school to take over responsibility for the world which we have so crudely messed up over the centuries should be given a fair chance to re-examine the relative importance of reforming by killing and re-forming by knowing. Let them know that the technologist can make the world a fit place to live in, but that he cannot make life worth living. That can only be done by the engineering of the intangibles. We are wasting much of our opportunity to do that kind of engineering because we haven't discovered that to guard our intellectual workshops we need not soldiers but policemen, not politicians but statesmen. We need majority rule, but jealously guarded freedom for the heretic minority to convince the majority by force of spirit and not by force of muscle. We have to rediscover that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword.

THANKS OF THE MEETING were expressed by Dr. C. C. Goldring.