ARISTOTLE & THE BOMB: Red, Dead or Heroic?

RETURNING to London after two weeks at the U.N. General Assembly, including several talks with Andrei Gromyko, the British Foreign Secretary reported one overriding impression. The Russians now clearly understand, said Lord Home, that the West is fully prepared to fight a nuclear war for the freedom of Berlin. Whether or not the Russians have really only just learned this fact, the U.S. has implicitly accepted it for a long time. For many Americans, this decision may be merely emotional or instinctive. But behind the emotions and the instinct lies a carefully reasoned moral case. That case is set out with great clarity in a symposium of some leading Western intellectuals published by the monthly Commentary. The debaters do not specifically deal with Berlin but with the basic question: Can Western civilization use the horrible weapons of thermonuclear war to save itself, or would such a war destroy the very things the West stands for? It is basically the same question asked by the average citizen who builds a fallout shelter but wonders: "If I survive, will anything worthwhile be left afterward?"

The view that nothing worthwhile would be left "afterward," and that its own principles must keep the West from using nuclear weapons, is upheld by H. Stuart Hughes, professor of history at Harvard, a grandson of Charles Evans Hughes and one of the organizers of the Committee of Correspondence, a "discussion network" dedicated to opposing the use of nuclear weapons. By any measurement, Hughes's arguments do not represent a large segment of U.S. public opinion, but they do epitomize much of the moral confusion the West has suffered in contemplating The Bomb. Historian Hughes bases his case on the theological principle that a war can be considered just (among other criteria) only if the means employed are commensurate with the ends gained. Hughes believes that in this sense World War II was a just war, but does not think that the American Revolutionary War, the American Civil War or World War I were worthwhile. He also believes that the destruction caused by atomic war would not make the end--victory over Communism--worthwhile. "Which do you want to be, Red or dead? To speak very crudely, I'm on the red side of this."

Life v. the Good Life. Hughes wants the U.S. unilaterally to renounce the use of atomic weapons, but says he is not simply for surrender, nor is he a pacifist. He thinks the enemy "should be met with real force," but only "force on a human scale." By this he means conventional weapons, guerrilla warfare, militia organizations, underground activity. When it is pointed out to him that about 40 million people were killed "conventionally" in World War II, Hughes points to this fact: the casualties in World War II occurred "over a six-year period in a very widely extended territory, most of them in the countryside rather than in the cities, at least as many by starvation and hardship as by violent death," while in a nuclear war the deaths would occur in "the holocaust of a day or two." This to Hughes makes all the difference. His view is a classic example of "quantitative morality."

Far from agreeing with Hughes, Hans J. Morgenthau, a University of Chicago foreign affairs expert, nevertheless parallels his arguments to some extent. If 100 million Americans were to be killed and nine-tenths of U.S. industrial capacity to be destroyed, could the West recover? Morgenthau doubts it. "There is a breaking point for a civilization as there is a breaking point for an individual man."

But would civilization really be that fatally wounded in nuclear war? Not necessarily, argues Sidney Hook, professor of philosophy at New York University, perhaps the U.S.'s leading anti-Communist theoretician. "I challenge the accepted notion that all life necessarily must be impossible by virtue of any kind of nuclear combat independently of what we do."

To Hook, survival is not the main issue. It is the supreme issue only for Communism in whose world "nothing exists but history." By contrast "the West, buttressed in part by belief in immortality, whether as a myth or fact, has always maintained that there are certain values more important than life itself ... It was Aristotle who said that it is not life as such, or under any conditions, that is of value, but the good life. The free man is one who in certain situations refuses to accept life if it means spiritual degradation. The man who declares that survival at all costs is the end of existence is morally dead."

Thermopylae Revisited. Does Aristotle still apply in the nuclear age? No, says Morgenthau: in speaking of the value of life as against the value of the good life, Aristotle could not have contemplated mass extermination. Instead "he had in mind individual acts of heroism--Leon-idas being slain at Thermopylae and Socrates drinking the hemlock. Those are deaths which carry a meaning. The extermination of 8,000,000 New Yorkers within a fraction of a second is an entirely different type of thing. I see no meaning at all, I see no heroism at all in this."

Not so, counters Hook. Total war was not inconceivable even in Aristotle's day, and the moral issue has not changed. "Imagine that we are living in Carthage, and the Romans are at the gates. Carthage fought a total war. So did Judea. Many cities and entire settlements went down to total destruction fighting for what they thought was the good life." Hook also points out that even surrender to the Russians might not assure survival because others, possibly the Red Chinese, might still use the bomb. In that case, says Hook, "Mr. Hughes may end up both Red and dead."

If the U.S. decides that it must fight a nuclear war for its own sake, does it have the right to involve other nations? This moral problem is raised by Philip Green, a Princeton instructor in government. Hook's reply: "Behind your question I find a great deal of moral hypocrisy. Did you ask a question of that sort when we decided to go to war against Hitler? Against Japan? When we bombed occupied France? When our weapons destroyed people who did not themselves have an opportunity to make that decision? Every war has involved this morally tragic situation. Would it be different if we surrendered to Communism? Wouldn't we be deciding the fate of others too?"

The Only Faith. Hook contends that the real choice is not necessarily between surrender and nuclear holocaust. "The only faith that I have in the Russians is the faith that they want to survive. I believe that if they know they cannot survive a nuclear attack against the West, there will be none ... If we surrender, Communism, with all its evils, will take over the world. But if we are prepared to fight, then we may not have to fight, and if the enemy is foolish enough to attack us, then, if we are prepared, the losses may not be as great as some anticipate."

While agreeing with Hook that it would be better to fight a nuclear war than to surrender, Morgenthau still believes that such a war would be suicidal and "absurd." Hook: "If I understand you, then, Mr. Morgenthau, you're prepared to be heroic even if foolish. I maintain that if we're prepared to be heroic, we will not have to be foolish."

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