Timetable for World Government

by THOMAS K. FINLETTER

1

THE reason for the remarkable growth of opinion in recent months in favor of world government is not that anyone likes government — world, national, or local — for its own sake. It is that many people have become convinced that unless we set up promptly an enforceable world law to control the new weapons of mass destruction, we shall find ourselves in an atomic armaments race which will eventuate in atomic war.

The choice before us, in broad lines, is between two sharply defined courses. Alternative One is to maintain the present international structure, in which the nation-state is the highest unit of government and all international arrangements are based on good will. Alternative Two is to create a world government, superior to the national states, which will have the power, under a regime of enforceable law, to prohibit war and such acts as necessarily lead to war.

I believe that Alternative Two alone offers any hope of keeping the peace. But the question of timing is as important as the policy. Is Alternative Two a long-term project, an aspiration for the future? Or is it an immediate necessity and possibility?

The scientists who know about atomic fission have been doing their best to tell us what will happen if we do not control this thing they have invented. They are so frightened that they have come out of their laboratories and have busied themselves, at considerable self-sacrifice, to explain to us what we are facing if we do not do something drastic and do it soon. But even the scientists have not brought home to us what the future holds if we fail to act. Military secrecy forbids their telling much of what they know. And they themselves cannot forecast what five, ten, or twenty-five years will bring forth in new ways of destroying matter and killing people.

We laymen therefore have to work largely in the dark in calculating the consequences of following Alternative One — the maintenance of the nationstate as the highest political unit. I suggest, however, that available scientific information shows that unless we set up an effective control of war in the immediate future, we must base our political action on the following assumptions: —

1. Plans of the United States government must be made on the premise that war may come at any time after the other nations learn how to make atomic weapons. This critical point will be reached in less than ten years. It may be reached much sooner. We must do everything we can through diplomatic channels and through the United Nations Organization to ensure the solidarity of the Great Powers so that we may have a peaceful world; but we must not count on success. These methods, based on contract and not on law, on good faith and not on compulsion, have no greater worth than the promises of the independent sovereign states on which they are based. What this worth is can be judged by the unbroken succession of wars during the 3800 years that man has tried to keep the peace by treaties, agreements, leagues, and other arrangements between sovereign states. Much as we must try to make these traditional methods work now for the first time, we must not base our national policy on the assumption that they can now be made to prevent an atomic war.

2. The United States will be on the receiving end at the beginning of the next war. Even if we have superiority in atomic and other weapons of mass destruction (bacteriological weapons and all the others which do or will exist), we will not use them first. It is not in our nature to attack other nations or to fight preventive wars for security.

The attack will probably come from an aggressor nation determined on complete conquest, and will have as its objective the destruction of the military installations, cities, and population of the United States. The purpose will be to make it impossible for the United States to retaliate atomically. Judging from the reports of the scientists, a successful overwhelming first assault of this kind is well within the possibilities. We are told that the bombs used against Japan were firecrackers compared with those that surely will exist in the immediate future.

It also seems to be accepted that we may not know where the attack was launched. We are told that atomic bombs may be sent by rockets from any place on the earth, or even be smuggled into a country in peacetime and exploded at long range. The figure of 40,000,000 American casualties in the first ten minutes of an atomic assault is accepted as a round figure to give some idea of the damage. It therefore seems necessary to assume that the first atomic bombardment of the United States may destroy our ability to retaliate, and thus open us up to easy conquests and occupation. As one distinguished scientist has put it, “The side which shoots first will win.”

3. At the moment we are safe. We shall continue to be safe until the critical point is reached — when we learn that other nations know how to make atomic weapons or other weapons as bad or worse. The reaching of the critical point— if we make the disastrous error of allowing it to arrive — will make serious changes in the situation.

Preparations for defense against these weapons will become imperative. We shall have to do what we can to put ourselves in a position not to be overwhelmed by the attack. Many people are already talking about the dispersion of American industry and city populations (50,000,000 Americans live in cities) and of going underground as the best defense. There have been discussions whether 3000 feet or 4000 feet is the correct depth. Others say that even these measures would not be enough to protect us. But suppose that they were — would the American people put up with them? Would we submit to the regulation of our economy and persons which would be necessary to withstand atomic attack? We might prefer to take a chance rather than to submit to a state dominated by the War Department.

Unless we have been grossly misinformed about the power of atomic weapons, we cannot afford to take the chance of letting them get into the arsenals of other nations. We must set up some method of preventing their manufacture which will surely work — a method as infallible as human political organization can make it. Can we rely on Alternative One — on agreements between the nation-states backed only by the good faith of these states — as the best political method available? Clearly not, I think. There is a convincing reason why, in the long course of history, treaties and other agreements between independent nation-states have never succeeded in keeping the peace. The reason is that, in any important matter, loyalty to the nation-state will prevail over loyalty to the agreement. The overriding duty of a national government is to its people. If a government has to make a choice between breaking a promise and doing grievous harm to the people it represents, few national governments will honor the promise.

This time we have to try something new, something which gives us hope of not having to face an armed truce, to be broken by a war which will probably be fatal to the safety of our country. And, if the scientists arc right about the nearness of the critical point, the time when other nations will know how to make atomic weapons, it is plain that the timetable for action is in our hands and that time is short.

What is this something new? What is this Second Alternative? It is, I think, a limited world government. I do not say this for any theoretical reason. I say it because any analysis of the problem leads inevitably to a series of steps which in the aggregate add up, at the very minimum, to such a limited world government. In other terms, the facts show that nothing short of a rule of law enforced by the preponderant power of an authority higher than any nation-state can protect us from having atomic weapons manufactured and eventually used for aggressive war.

But, it will be asked, is there not some compromise between these extremes? Can we not stop war and the making of these weapons without setting up a law superior to our national laws? Can we not control atomic energy with an inspection system or by moderate amendments of the UNO Charter, such as the elimination of the veto power in the Security Council? Do we have to create a super-state — even one of narrowly limited powers — which will be superior within its field to our national governments? Must we allow an international authority to give orders directly to our citizens? Is there not some way in which we can stop war and the manufacture of these dreadful things, and at the same time preserve intact our national independence — our right to take no orders from anyone outside our territorial limits, our right to do what we want in this world, subject only to the power of someone else to stop us by force?

There is no such middle ground. Any analysis of the methods of controlling atomic energy and of stopping war will show that the method proposed is either (1) merely an international treaty or agreement based on good will, or (2) a regime of law under a government superior to that of the governments of the nation-states.

2

WHAT are the necessary steps to set up a control of atomic energy which will prevent its being used for destructive purposes?

1. The rules must be stated and an international body given the authority to see that they are enforced. The United Nations Organization is an appropriate body and should be used for this purpose. The rules should prohibit (a) the making of war which is of course the fundamental objective — and (b) the manufacture or possession of the weapons of mass destruction except by the UNO itself.

The purpose of the second prohibition is not only to keep these new weapons out of the hands of the nation-states (for if they have them, they will eventually use them), but also to give to the UNO preponderant military power. Unless the UNO has greater physical power than any likely combination of the nation-states, the rules of the UNO cannot be enforced. They will be mere statements of good intentions like the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, by which sixty-five nations solemnly and forever renounced war.

The rule against the possession or manufacture of the weapons of mass destruction would amount to substantially total national disarmament of all the nation-states. And precisely that has been announced as the policy of Britain, Russia, and the United States. The Moscow Agreement of the Foreign Ministers of Russia, Britain, and the United States of December 27, 1945, states that it is the policy of thengovernments to seek “ the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction.”

Let us note the significance of this part of the Moscow Agreement. This disarmament clause goes far beyond the old-fashioned conventions outlawing certain noxious weapons such as poison gas. It is a call for substantially total national disarmament, with the clear effect of making the national governments (including the government of the United States) incapable of resisting the orders of the world authority. At the minimum, “weapons of mass destruction” include atomic and bacteriological weapons, V-ls, V-2s, bombers and all bombs (especially the 50-tonners we have been told about), and all similar weapons already invented and to be invented.

2. No nation which stripped itself of these weapons could survive in an atomic world unless there was a world authority, with power, to protect it by making it impossible for any other nation to possess such weapons. Therefore, if a nation (say the United States) is to give up all these weapons, it will have to be sure that the other nations do likewise. The precautions against the secret manufacture of these weapons will have to be effective. The UNO will have to have an information service authorized to do whatever the UNO may deem necessary to prevent secret manufacture. How deep this inspection system might have to go is a technical matter which only the experts can answer. The political principle is that the inspectors must have the right to pry into all activities of industry and of individuals to the extent necessary to make impossible the secret manufacture or possession of the prohibited weapons. And the right of the inspectors to inspect must be backed by the force of the UNO. Otherwise there would be a repetition of the failure of the German inspection scheme under the League of Nations. One can only guess how much interference with our private affairs an enforced inspection system might entail. But it would almost certainly be serious.

3. To make this information system work, and to give the UNO the ability to act quickly and effectively to suppress violations of its law, the UNO must be able to act directly against the individual citizen. If the inspectors are denied access to plant A in country X, or if it is learned that plant A is making prohibited weapons, the UNO must have the power to act directly against plant A. If time allows, the UNO might ask the government of X to stop the violation, but if government X fails to act, the UNO will have to be able to by-pass government X and go directly to the source of the trouble.

4. A carefully restricted taxing power, for revenue only, will be necessary. The UNO could be paralyzed if it had to rely on the good will of the nation-states to provide the necessary funds.

5. The rules will have to be kept up to date, within, of course, the clearly defined constitutional limitations of the UNO Charter. It will be necessary, for example, to add new weapons from time to time to the proscribed list, to keep the inspection provisions abreast of the changing facts of science, and to regulate the UNO forces. This will require a legislature, chosen not on the present basis of one vote per nation-state, but in some manner (such as a unicameral body giving effect to population differences and to other factors, or a bicameral structure along the lines of the United States system) which will do away with the artificial allocation of voting power to national groupings and emphasize instead the voting power of individuals.

6. If the Security Council is to be the executive of the UNO, it will have to act as any other executive. It could not function as it does now, as a political body, with the right to act or not to act as its sovereign members choose. If there is a rule, the executive must enforce it. Enforcement must not require a new political decision each time a specific case comes before the Council. Only the manner of enforcement must be open for discussion. This means a change in the present voting system of the Security Council to get rid of the veto of the Great Powers, or the setting up of a different kind of executive for the UNO.

7. Finally, if this enormous power is given to the UNO, a judicial body (presumably the Permanent Court of International Justice) will be needed to interpret the rules. Summary action by the UNO executive to stop prohibited acts in a hurry without waiting for court procedure would be permissible; but the general principle should be in accordance with our notion of due process, by which an alleged offender is not subjected to penalties without the judgment of a court.

3

THESE seven elements are the irreducible minimum. If you take away any one of them you do not have a system which has any substantial chance of stopping atomic war. Perhaps it is necessary to go further — to prohibit national military establishments, and to prohibit civil war specifically, for example. But these seven points are the necessary minimum.

This becomes clear if any one of these elements is eliminated. If the UNO does not have an enforceable inspection system, it will not know what is going on and will be impotent. If it cannot act directly against the individual malefactor, enforcement of its rules is impossible. If it cannot tax, it will be starved for lack of money. If it does not have a legislature, the rules will become sterile and easy to evade. Unless its executive is bound to enforce the rules automatically, the Powers, especially the Big Powers, will interfere with enforcement when it conflicts with their interests. If there is no court to assure due process, public opinion will not support the rules. And, finally, if the UNO does not have preponderant military power to compel any government or person to live up to the rules, the arrangement will collapse on the first attempt by the UNO to put its orders into effect.

These seven elements also add up to a world government of limited but enforceable powers, acting under law. Therefore what I am saying is that the effective prohibition of war, and the necessary means to that end, — the elimination of the weapons of mass destruction from national armaments, — can be accomplished only by a limited world government. It cannot be accomplished by an arrangement which lacks any of the elements necessary to create a regime of enforceable law.

A world government of limited powers is admittedly a serious business. But there are those who say that we must go much further; and, though I do not agree with them, their point of view must be considered. You cannot limit world law, it is said, to the specific end-products you are seeking—the elimination of war and of the manufacture of outlawed weapons. You must strike at the causes of war — the social and economic factors which create the inequalities and injustices which make men want to fight.

Therefore, this school argues, the world government must be given power to deal with these causes. Moreover, atomic power has a positive side. It has immense possibilities of doing good for mankind. These possibilities should be realized. And if they are, the degree of regulation will have to go far beyond a world government with only limited powers.

For both these reasons, it is said, the world authority must have power at least as great as that of the Federal government of the United States — that is, the right to legislate with respect to international commerce (and this means control of tariffs, among other things) and, touchiest of all, immigration. Indeed, it is argued by some, the world government must have even greater powers. If you freeze the status quo by making civil war illegal, must you not give the world government the authority to require local self-government in accordance with the wishes of the governed? It has even been suggested that the world government should have powers which our Federal government does not possess — such as the right, to enforce a bill of rights within each nation and to deal with education and local police matters.

This extreme view is sometimes put forward by those who wish to discredit world government by showing it to be impossible. But there are also those who sincerely believe it. My objection to this all-out theory is not based on the usual ground of impossibility, but rather on the belief that it is a mistake to go beyond what is proved to be necessary. I believe it is clear that only a world government, possessing the limited powers I have described, can prevent war and the rapid growth of closed authoritarian nationstates. But it is not proved that, with the sense of security which would come from the creation of a limited world government, the deep causes of war will not gradually be eliminated through the work of the Economic and Social Council of the UNO and by the growth of a sense of world community.

We founded the United States on the theory of limited powers. And although we did not consolidate the federation without a civil war, we did consolidate it. In the interest of holding government to the minimum authority shown to be necessary, we should try the same method in dealing with the world scene.

But even with a strict limitation on the powers of the world government, we shall have to face up to the question of amendments. We cannot propose a world constitution without the power of amendment. And we cannot, I think, put a Big Power veto on changes in this constitution, which means that the jurisdiction of the world government could be extended despite the negative vote of the United States. That is hard to accept. But there is no alternative. Either we must have some faith in the rest of mankind, or we must shoot it out with them.

4

I HAVE tried to make it clear that even a limited world government would seriously affect our deep tradition of national independence and would be a bitter pill. There is only one reason why we should — and I hope shall — make it our national policy to achieve world government in the immediate future: namely, that the alternative is appallingly worse.

I see no possibility that the United States can maintain any of the things we think of as making up our philosophy of living if we have to exist in a world of nation-states armed with these frightful weapons. Indeed I do not believe that many people who have thought seriously about the subject contest this proposition — as a long-term project. The dissenters usually concede that world government at some future time may be both desirable and inevitable, but they say that for one reason or another it is impossible now.

Is this attitude justified? Is world government in any sense immediate practical politics? And, if so, what are the steps to be taken to get it?

Let us understand what the practical issue is. It is whether we can achieve a control of the weapons of modern science without first going through an atomic war. That is, whether we have sufficient character and intelligence to grasp and solve this problem without first having an actual demonstration of the destructiveness of these weapons and of the consequences of not controlling them. Stated in these terms the question of practicality becomes clear. Nothing can be more practical than to stop an atomic war. The lack of realism, and the very heavy responsibility which accompanies that lack, is with those who preach that nothing can be done, and thereby increase the likelihood that the atomic war will happen.

What are the immediate steps to be taken? First, I think, is to propose specific amendments to the United Nations Charter which, if adopted, would set up a rule of law. Second, not to be discouraged during this interim phase, when the United States, Britain, and Canada alone have the bomb, by preachments that, nothing can be done except to follow traditional methods. Once the day comes when the American people know that other nations have the bomb and can let it loose on us not at some vague future date but tomorrow morning, American opinion will do a somersault, and those who now say that nothing can be done will be out in front to do it — if it is not then too late. Third, we must avoid being taken in by the idea of working into the rule of law by gradual steps. Gradualism is just another way of avoiding the issue. For the gradual steps so widely proposed now will, on examination, be found to be nothing more than variations and embellishments on the traditional technique of trying to outlaw war by international promises based only on the good faith of the nationstates.

A frequent suggestion for the gradual approach, especially from the scientists, is to work by stages into a full inspection system. Instead of proposing now an enforceable system which would compel the nations to admit inspectors into all the factories and possibly the homes of their peoples, the gradualist theory would have the UNO ease the shock by proposing as a first step an interchange of scientific information by the experts. Then, as that became familiar, a mild inspection system of certain factories, under great restrictions, would be introduced. Then if this mild system worked satisfactorily, that is without creating friction between the inspected country and the UNO, the system would be gradually strengthened until it grew into a complete, enforced, and reliable scheme of inspection.

Similarly with the development of law. Instead of shocking nationalist sentiment by proposing a world legislative assembly in which each nation could be outvoted by peoples of different races and cultures, world law with jurisdiction over the individual citizen would be developed gradually — by treaties and other international agreements, by an extension of the principle of the Nürnberg trials applying law directly against individuals, by development of a code of international law and increase of the jurisdiction of the Permanent Court of International Justice, and by the development of a world common law based on custom and growing parallel with the development of a sense of world community.

The fallacy of the gradualist notion lies, I think, in its failure to recognize that the first step must necessarily be the final one; that no nation can give up its nationalist defenses before it is sure that it will be safe in doing so. An attempt to work into a full inspection system gradually would run into trouble from the outset because it would be to the national interest of the Powers to prevent it from working. What would be the purpose of the inspections? Not to inspect for inspection’s sake, but to find out whether an international treaty not to make or possess weapons of mass destruction was being lived up to.

But would the nations be willing to live up to such a disarmament treaty; would they be willing to strip themselves of their major weapons, and promise to stay stripped, with nothing more than a promise of the other nations to do likewise? Assuming that the nations would make this promise (and almost certainly the United States would not), the inspection system would work only as long as the nations wholly lived up to their promise to stay disarmed — that is, as long as the inspection system was not necessary. Once a nation, either for purposes of aggression or because it feared that other nations were secretly violating the disarmament agreement, determined to possess the prohibited weapons, it would necessarily sabotage the inspection system.

Nor can we work gradually into a system of law. The first step is the big one. Law cannot exist without government. World law therefore cannot come into being unless there is a world government. Preparatory measures, such as the codification of rules of international conduct or the making of new rules by treaties, may develop world opinion in the direction of law. But they will not of themselves constitute law.

5

THE gradualist approach to world law was until recently the official policy of the United States government, as set out in the Atomic Declaration of November, 1945. This declaration made two great statements of policy.

First, it called for “effective enforceable safeguards” against the use of atomic energy for destructive purposes, for national disarmament as to major weapons adaptable to mass destruction, and for the extension of the authority of the United Nations Organization in order to maintain the rule of law. If these three provisions were put into effect, they would constitute a limited world government.

Second, the Declaration assumed that Russia, Britain, and the Limited States were not ready to take such a serious step immediately, but that all three could be persuaded to take it within the reasonably near future. To this end, the gradual approach was to be used. The work, the Declaration said, was to “proceed by separate stages, the successful completion of each one of which will develop the necessary confidence of the world before the next stage is undertaken.” The Declaration then listed the first four stages — the exchange of scientific information, the control of atomic energy to the extent necessary to ensure its use only for peaceful purposes, substantially total disarmament (the elimination from national armaments of weapons of mass destruction) and an effective inspection system to protect complying states against the hazards of violations and evasions of the law.

The Atomic Declaration was taken to Moscow at the December, 1945, meeting of the Foreign Ministers of Britain, Russia, and the United States, and a shortened version of it was included in the Agreement issued at the end of the Conference. The reference to enforceable safeguards and to the rule of law was left out; and it is not clear whether the omission of these significant terms was intended to eliminate the concept of world law and its necessary element of enforceability, or whether it was felt that the rest of the Moscow Agreement necessarily implied the existence of world law, since the statement of the four stages of gradualism originally contained in the Atomic Declaration was left in the Moscow Agreement,

On the return of Secretary Byrnes from Moscow, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee brought forth a clarification of the Moscow Agreement which is significant. They struck at the heart of the problem. Did the stage-by-stage method prescribed by the Atomic Declaration and the Moscow Agreement mean, they asked, that the United States would tell the United Nations how to make the bomb (something it might take them three, five, or ten years to learn), or agree to have its industry inspected, or, even worse, agree to substantially total national disarmament, before completely effective safeguards against war and the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction were established? Obviously not. As one of their fellow Senators put it, the bomb goes off all at once, and you cannot control it gradually. What then did the Declaration and the Agreement mean?

The matter was immediately clarified. After a visit to the White House, Senator Vandenberg said that he would not have been able to agree that the problem could be handled by separate and unrelated stages; that he shared the general Congressional opinion that any disclosures regarding the atomic bomb should be part of a complete plan for adequate world-wide inspection and control; and that he had now been advised by the State Department that while the Moscow Agreement listed four separate objectives, with inspection and control listed last, it was not intended that these objectives should be taken in the order indicated, but that the four should be read together .and that each should be “accompanied by full security requirements” — all being finally subject to Congressional approval. Secretary of State Byrnes confirmed this interpretation two days later in his radio address on the Moscow Conference and later at the meeting of the General Assembly of the UNO in January of this year.

The effect of this plan is to do away officially with the gradualist approach. We will not tell the United Nations about the bomb, or agree to disarm substantially, before an effective security system is set up. What will this security system be? Shall we be willing to tell about the bomb and strip ourselves of our national armaments in reliance on the promises of other nations to do likewise, backed by a further promise of those nations to permit themselves to be inspected?

I doubt it. I do not think that we shall take the chances involved in substantially total national disarmament unless there is something much more reliable than an international agreement to assure us that we are safe in giving up our armaments. The choice then is between doing nothing effective about the bomb and the other objectives of the Atomic Declaration and the Moscow Agreement, and establishing a limited world government. We will either go the whole way across the Rubicon or stay on this side with all the horrible consequences that such a course will entail.

6

IF THE gradual approach is not feasible, what chances are there that the United Nations will agree to the big step? What will the UNO commission that was set up to consider this subject recommend? Will the Powers accept its recommendations?

Britain’s attitude has been stated. Mr. Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, reporting to the House of Commons on the Atomic Declaration, said that he wanted a world legislative assembly and a world law, with a world judiciary to interpret it and a world police force to enforce it. Such a statement by a Foreign Secretary, even though not put forward as a formal Cabinet policy, shows what Britain would do if the matter came up for decision — especially since Mr. Anthony Eden, of the Opposition, supported Mr. Bevin’s views by saying in the same debate that he wanted a relationship between the nations like that which exists between England, Scotland, and Wales.

But what about Russia? Is there any possibility that she will agree to join a world government of this kind?

There is considerable opinion in the United States that the nature of the government of the Soviet Union makes it impossible to set up a common political unit in which Russia and the Western democracies would participate. Mr. Sumner Welles, for example, has expressed this view in the Atlantic for January. In attacking a proposal by Professor Albert Einstein in a previous issue of the Atlantic that the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain establish a world government and that the Soviet present the first draft of its constitution, Mr. Welles said that the only constitution of this kind which the Soviet would accept would be one which would provide for a World Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with its capital at Moscow.

This is a fundamental issue. Most of those who say that world government is impossible rely on this argument. Russia will never agree; there can be no world government without Russia; why talk about something which is not real? Why will Russia not agree? Because, it is said, an authoritarian government cannot afford to allow the interference with its internal affairs which a world government would require. Being based on force from above rather than on the free consent of the governed, an authoritarian government cannot allow any interference from without because that might interfere with the processes by which the government keeps itself in power. Above all, it cannot allow the exposure of its people to ideas from without. Therefore, it is said, the Russian regime would fall if a world government were allowed to exercise its powers. And the regime will not commit suicide.

As Mr. Welles puts it, “no world government of the character envisaged by Professor Einstein could function unless it possessed the power to exercise complete control over the armaments of each constituent state, and unless every nation was willing to open up every inch of its territory and every one of its laboratories and factories to a continuing international inspection. Nor could it function unless the government of each participating country was equally willing to submit to the scrutiny of the authorities of the world government every one of its governmental processes, including its conduct of foreign and internal affairs and of finance. It surely requires no demonstration that any such requisite as that would wholly destroy the present Soviet system.”

If history proves this argument to be correct, the cause of peace is in a bad way. But I do not believe that the possibilities of working with Russia are as hopeless as that, for these reasons: —

1. The governments of the United States and Great Britain think the contrary. The Moscow Declaration commits them to the policy of trying to work with the government of Russia for an effective control of war and the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. One of the first matters on the agenda of the UNO commission on the subject, to which Russia has agreed, is to recommend methods “for effective safeguards by way of inspection and other means to protect complying States against the hazards of violations and evasions.”

2. If the world government were to be a world state in the full sense, with authority over all foreign and internal affairs and of finance, as Mr. Welles has postulated, it can be assumed that Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and probably all the other nation-states as well, would refuse to join it. But that is not what is proposed. What is proposed is a government narrowly limited to the essential powers now demonstrable as necessary to stop war.

True, the inspection system and the enforcement of national disarmament would involve outside interference with domestic matters, and lam not trying to minimize the seriousness of such an external authority. But would the interference be so bad if the inspected nation truly did not want war and was living up wholeheartedly to its promise not to make the prohibited weapons? Would not a peacefully inclined state want to make the inspection and enforcement system as effective as possible in all countries, in order that it might feel secure in its national disarmament?

Does not the conclusion that Russia would not put up with an inspection system assume (a) that the Russian wartime policy of secrecy (we ourselves did fairly well on secrecy about the atom bomb, among other things) will necessarily continue indefinitely in the peace, and (b) that Russia is not a peaceful state? Is it not presumptuous and unfriendly to make these assumptions? Does not this conclusion prove too much? Does it not also prove that collaboration between the Western democracies and Russia, under any system, is impossible?

3. How can we properly assume that Russia will refuse to accept something we have not offered her? We have not made up our minds that we want world government. How can we expect Russia to accept in advance a policy which the executive branch of the United States government, dependent as it is on approval by Congress and the people, is not in a position to offer her? I realize that Mr. Gromyko told the first General Assembly of the UNO that suggestions that the UNO Charter be changed in any way were dangerous and might lead to serious consequences. But this speech, and the similar previous statements in Pravda and Izvestia, must be read in the light of conditions when they were made.

These statements can mean that Russia does not intend to yield to the pressure of Australia, New Zealand, and other Powers to eliminate immediately the veto in the Security Council. In this respect the Russian attitude is identical with our own. To eliminate the veto in the Security Council, and do nothing more, would satisfy neither wing of opinion in this country. It would not please those who want to preserve intact the sovereignty of the United States, for it would put us in a position where we could be outvoted by the other Powers in the Security Council. It would not satisfy those who want to set up the rule of law, for it is only one of the changes which are necessary for that purpose. It would be welcomed only by the middle and lesser Powers, who would thereby get the appearance, but not the reality, of a greater share in those decisions which in a nationstate world inevitably must be made by the Great Powers. The notion of eliminating the veto, without doing any more, is another example of ill-considered gradualism, and its most likely effect would be to weaken the UNO as an instrument for the collaboration of the Great Powers.

Mr. Gromyko’s - speech also might have meant that Russia is opposed to Mr. Bevin’s talk about world law as one more example of idealistic statements by the Western democracies which they will not follow up in practice. Russia has reason to be suspicious of the reality of the idealism of the democracies. The United States refused in 1919 to join the experiment in collective security which its President sponsored. The British did not support the Russian attempt to make the League work during the Litvinoff days.

The United States was quite as firm about having the veto in the Security Council of the UNO as Mr. Molotov. Although we have said in the Atlantic Charter that we seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other, we have made no move at this writing to subject the conquered Japanese islands to international trusteeship. And, although we made a great issue about broadening the base of the peace in countries adjacent to Russia, we have not shown the same enthusiasm for broad democratic participation in the ruling of Japan. There is justification for a “wait and see” attitude by Russia — for her carrying on the traditional nation-state maneuvering until the democracies show that they really want to do what is necessary to make a peaceful world,

Mr. Gromyko’s speech, concerned as it was with the immediate situation before the January Assembly of the UNO, cannot be regarded as a rejection for all time of any change in the UNO. If we want to know whether Russia will agree to a limited world government to control war, we must first make her an unconditional offer to set up such a government. If she refuses, we shall then know, not guess, what the Russian position is, and can face up to the next step on the basis of facts and not assumptions.

It is therefore not necessary to decide now what we should do if we offered a limited world government to Russia and she refused to join. We can, however, begin thinking on the subject, and I suggest that, should Russia hesitate, we should form the supranational government with those nations who are willing to join it. Undesirable as it might be to line up the world in two or more groups, the alternative would be worse. The alternative would be to give up a policy which we believed gave us our only hope for peace. We should rather, I think, follow our convictions, relying on our idealism of purpose and peaceful intentions, and hope that by practical demonstration we can convince the dissenting nations to join us in the course of time.

7

I HAVE left for the last the most serious argument for the gradualist approach. It is that man himself is not ready for a peaceful world. That not until man rids himself of the greed and cruelty of which we have seen so much in recent years can we hope for peace. That no mechanistic solution can do more than provide the framework within which man can slowly work to bring his political institutions up to the level of his applied science for destruction. That our technologies have outrun not only our social organization but also our moral sense. Therefore, even if we do succeed in bringing our political institutions up to date, it will do no good because we shall not have the moral and psychological bases to make them work.

And there is no hope, it is argued by some, that the necessary spiritual growth can take place in time to avert the catastrophe which applied science has prepared for us. As Mr. Raymond Fosdiek has said, “the atomic bomb requires an advance in ethical and moral standards far greater and more immediate than the human race seems at the moment capable of making.” All we can do immediately is to see to it that the trends are right — that we are headed in the right direction as man goes through the slow process of his ethical and moral development.

What do we mean by the lack of ethical and moral qualities in man? How high must the spiritual standard be before we can establish a rule of law? In the United States we have a political order which covers millions of square miles; so our ethics and morals are advanced enough for that. Russia’s rule of law covers even more territory and more people. The British Commonwealth and many other nations have established legal orders over large parts of the earth’s surface and population.

Is it accurate to say that the failure to grow politically beyond the nation-state is caused by the failure of the ethics and morals of the ordinary man and woman? Are not men and women all over the world ready, politically, morally, and ethically, to give up killing each other in organized fashion? Is not the lack rather in the failure of the leaders of opinion and of government to offer man a political structure under which he would not be conscripted every decade or so to go about fighting his fellow men? Is not the problem essentially a political one, and can we not assume that, just as applied science is far ahead of political institutions, so the decency of the ordinary man and his desire to live in peace are far ahead of the forms of political organization which the groups in power in the various nation-states have so far provided?

If, however, by this supposed lack in the quality of man we mean his failure to cast up leaders who could do for the world what Madison, Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Gerry, Wilson, Mason, and the rest did for the states of 1787, the accusation may be justified. In the final analysis, man must be held accountable for the conduct of those to whom he has entrusted or allowed the right to govern him. The peoples of the world, and particularly of the United States, therefore must demand the leadership which is needed. Perhaps this civilization is not capable of producing the men who can make the revolution in political organization which the sudden and violent advance in applied science has made necessary. If so, a time worse than the Dark Ages lies ahead.

But this leadership may be forthcoming, and then many things which before the fact had seemed impossible will be accomplished. Perhaps, even, an atomic war will be averted. If man succeeds in doing that, if he proves himself capable of controlling this new discovery of the scientists, even those who now doubt will be compelled to give him full honor for the ethical and moral qualities he has shown in surmounting the greatest of all his crises.