SECTION 3:
Disarmament Scenarios
Scenarios, as they have come to be called, are hypothetical
constructions of future events. Inevitably, they are composed of
varying proportions of established fact, reasonable inference, and
more or less inspired guess-work. Those which have been suggested as
model procedures for effectuating international arms control and
eventual disarmament are necessarily imaginative, although closely
reasoned; in this respect they resemble the "war games" analyses of
the Rand Corporation, with which they share a common conceptual
origin.
All such scenarios that have been seriously put forth imply
dependence on bilateral or multilateral agreement between the great
powers. In general, they call for a progressive phasing out of gross
armaments, military forces, weapons, and weapons technology,
coordinated with elaborate matching procedures of verification,
inspection, and machinery for the settlement of international
disputes. It should be noted that even proponents of unilateral
disarmament qualify their proposals with an implied requirement of
reciprocity, very much in the manner of a scenario of graduated
response in nuclear war. The advantage of unilateral initiative lies
in its political value as an expression of good faith, as well as in
its diplomatic function as a catalyst for formal disarmament
negotiations.
The READ model for disarmament (developed by the Research Program on
Economic Adjustments to Disarmament) is typical of these scenarios.
It is a twelve-year-program, divided into three-year stages. Each
stage includes a separate phase of: reduction of armed forces;
cutbacks of weapons production, inventories, and foreign military
bases; development of international inspection procedures and
control conventions; and the building up of a sovereign
international disarmament organization. It anticipates a net
matching decline in U.S. defense expenditures of only somewhat more
than half the 1965 level, but a necessary redeployment of some
five-sixths of the defense-dependent labor force.
The economic implications assigned by their authors to various
disarmament scenarios diverge widely. The more conservative models,
like that cited above, emphasize economic as well as military
prudence in postulating elaborate fail-safe disarmament agencies,
which themselves require expenditures substantially substituting for
those of the displaced war industries. Such programs stress the
advantages of the smaller economic adjustment entailed. [11]
Others
emphasize, on the contrary, the magnitude (and the opposite
advantages) of the savings to be achieved from disarmament. One
widely read analysis [12] estimates the annual cost of the
inspection function of general disarmament throughout the world as
only between two and three percent of current military expenditures.
Both types of plan tend to deal with the anticipated problem of
economic reinvestment only in the aggregate. We have seen no
proposed disarmament sequence that correlates the phasing out of
specific kinds of military spending with specific new forms of
substitute spending.
Without examining disarmament scenarios in greater detail, we may
characterize them with these general comments:
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Given genuine agreement of intent among the great powers, the
scheduling of arms control and elimination presents no inherently
insurmountable procedural problems.
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Any of several proposed
sequences might serve as the basis for multilateral agreement or for
the first step in unilateral arms reduction.
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No major power can proceed with such a program, however, until it
has developed an economic conversion plan fully integrated with each
phase of disarmament. No such plan has yet been developed in the
United States.
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Furthermore, disarmament scenarios, like proposals for economic
conversion, make no allowance for the nonmilitary functions of war
in modern societies, and offer no surrogate for these necessary
functions.
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One partial exception is a proposal for the "unarmed
forces of the United States," which we will consider in section 6.
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