Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday
One contributor says I'm inconsistent when I condemn the bombing of Dresden and support British possession of nuclear weapons. It's an argument that looks compelling at first sight. But it misses the point about deterrence.
When I spent my weekend aboard HMS Repulse, I had many conversations with members of the ship's company about this problem. They were all quite adamant that they would have failed in their mission if they ever fired their Polaris missiles. They never intended to, and never expected to. This is the paradox of deterrence - that you have be realistically prepared to launch death on a terrible scale, to prevent such death from taking place. Political leaders need to know (as too few of them do) that war is likely to bring doom on their own heads. Once they realise that, they will not be so keen to start wars. Look at Mr Blair. If he'd really believed what he was claiming about Saddam's WMD, he'd never have dared attack Iraq. That was one reason why I was sure he was shamming.
Another contributor attacks me for saying that deterrence worked in the Cold War. How can I show that it was deterrence that did it? Well, didn't it? And if it didn't, then what else kept the peace in Europe, for 50 years crammed with large, well-equipped armies facing each other across a tense frontier, and divided both by belief and territorial rivalry?
I don't think any of the old Soviet leadership would deny this. Knowing that a conventional war would lead to the vaporising of Moscow, the Kremlin's strategists found that their huge conventional armed power was neutralised. Year by year, their struggle to match or trump our nuclear forces, or to divide Europe from America, were all based on this one fact. Their only successes were in the parts of the world - South-East Asia, Africa, Latin America, where nuclear deterrence didn't operate.
And the most decisive struggle of all in post- 1945 Europe was in the Greenham Common years, when Anthony Blair was a CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) member, and a gaggle of ultra-feminist twerps tried to prevent the installation of cruise missiles there and at Molesworth. When this effort failed, the USSR was finished as a global power, as the KGB and its close friend, Mikhail Gorbachev, quickly recognised. But what if it had gone the other way.
People forget now (and forgot at the time) that the cruise and Pershing-2 missile deployments were a response to the stationing of the SS-20 medium range missile in Eastern Europe. That is what we called it. We now know that the Russian name for the rocket was 'Pioneer'. This missile, accurate and able to carry a warhead big enough to destroy a city, had an entirely political purpose. It was a European weapon. It couldn't be used against the USA. But it could be used against Germany, or France, or Britain.
The theory behind it was that it would allow the Soviets to go nuclear without risking an American response. Or at least, to make a realistic threat that they would do so. Until the SS-20s were deployed, Moscow could only launch a nuclear strike against Frankfurt or Birmingham by launching an Intercontinental Missile. Simply doing this would automatically trigger an American response. So, in reality, the threat was empty. With the SS-20, the threat was real again, and vast Soviet conventional forces in central Europe were no longer neutralised. Would the Americans really risk Chicago or St Louis to defend Essen or revenge Hamburg? Unlikely, and while they hesitated over the matter, the war in Europe could be lost. The balance of power was upset. Moscow once again had the power to detach Germany form the Western alliance, the goal of its foreign policy for decades.
The SS-20, in short, was designed to make nuclear war in Europe more likely, by insulating the USA from it. It was designed to undermine deterrence. As the novelist James Buchan said in his fascinating book 'A Heart's Journey in Winter', the SS-20 was aimed directly at the heart of the German Social Democratic Party - which had until then supported nuclear defence. Now, with the possibility of conventional nuclear war on the soil of a Germany which had only just been rebuilt after the Hitler war, that policy was much harder to sustain. Cruise and Pershing-2, by giving the Americans the power to respond to a European threat at a European level, made deterrence credible again.
So Greenham Common was actually a campaign by supposed peaceniks to make war more likely - though I think what they really wanted (the ones who were intelligent enough to know) was to make the USSR the dominant power in Europe. Most of them were sentimental leftists who disliked their own country and wanted it to be run by other people. Luckily for us all, they failed, and, whoever won the Cold War, it wasn't the Soviet Communist Party or the KGB.
I remember the Greenham Common-inspired revival of CND, which had been moribund for some years, not least because in my hormone-troubled teens I had marched more than once under the CND banner. Having since grown up, I now realised how silly I had been. I still remember attending a showing of Peter Watkins's film 'the War Game' in Hampstead in the early 1980s, organised by anti-cruise campaigners.
I wish this film could be shown again on TV now, along with the much more recent American copy of the same idea 'The Day After'. 'The War Game' is a brilliant piece of propaganda, grainy, newsreel-like, with some wonderfully shocking and disturbing moments - a dispirited vicar trying to play a record of Christmas carols, without electricity, during the first postwar Christmas, sticks in the mind. So do moments where English police officers, in traditional tunics and helmets, are shown armed with rifles. This was still powerfully disturbing then, as we'd all grown up with an unarmed police force. Now people would just wonder about the quaint old uniforms.
But it only works for CND purposes if you don't think about what you are seeing. The fault of all nuclear-war scare fiction is the same. It's very difficult, in the light of what happened over Cuba, to imagine circumstances in which the great powers would actually use their bombs. The important thing about the Cuba crisis is not how close we came to war, but that there was no war. We now know that the leaders are as scared as we are, that 'Doctor Strangelove' (which some silly people still take seriously) is childishly inaccurate about how real people behave in such crises. Both 'The War Game and 'The Day After' have very sketchy, unconvincing passages on how the world gets out of control in the first place.
But there's another even bigger fault. To gain the sympathy of the viewer, the film has to depict nuclear bombs falling on his own country. So whose bombs are these going to be? Well, in both these films, it's obvious that they can only be Soviet bombs. Combine that fact with the sketchy, unconvincing narrative about how the war started, and you have a problem. For what I also recall about the long ago Hampstead film show is that, when I stood up during the discussion at the end and made these points, the anti-cruise campaigners had no answer Why, I asked, where they making such a fuss about our bombs, rather than about the ones which would -if they were right - one day fall upon their heads in London NW3 and NW6? And I think I helped to make that meeting a failure for them.
Which, later on, I was even more glad that I had done. For not long afterwards I began to travel quite a lot in the Communist world, and would sometimes bump into the sort of propaganda they reserved for home consumption there. British Communists were (mostly) very keen on CND, and much Kremlin 'peace' propaganda also seemed sympathetic to CND.
But I'll always remember visiting an East Berlin department store in the early 1980s, and finding it festooned with rather well-drawn cartoons of a fox and a hedgehog, arguing about whether the hedgehog should remove his prickles. The fox promised the hedgehog he would be safe to do so. The hedgehog replied, rather sensibly, "Perhaps so, but not until you remove your teeth." I found something similar on display, many years later, on banners strung down the main street of Kurchatovsk, the secret Soviet City near Semipalatinsk where they used to test Moscow's H-bombs.
The town bookshop had a Geiger counter on display in the window, in case any of the tests went wrong. And, in a hotel in what was then Sverdlovsk and has now returned to being Yekaterinburg, I found an elaborate mural displaying the Soviet motherland under nuclear attack from the imperialists, a hellish scene of fleeing, terrified civilians, blazing cities and mushroom clouds. Sverdlovsk was at the time one of the centres of Soviet war production, and I think I can guarantee that the effect was not intended to be pacifist. As a Western diplomat once said to me within range of KGB microphones in an embassy in Moscow "Britain's Trident missiles could devastate this country, and they know it". They also understood that the most reliable way of ensuring this never happened was that they had the power to respond.
Now, imagine what would have happened if at, in 1914 or 1939 the major powers in Europe had both possessed credible nuclear weapons. I am certain that in that case these wars would never have taken place. In my own view we could have avoided 1914 if Britain had listened to such campaigners as Lord Roberts and the wonderful short-story writer and novelist Saki, and introduced conscription in the Edwardian era. Saki's fantasy about a German-ruled Britain' When William Came' is hard to find these days, but well worth reading - not least for its bitterness towards British people who opposed military service. Of course, we ended up getting conscription anyway, when it was too late to save us.
You might say the same about Dresden. Left-wingers protested against British rearmament in the early 1930s. 'Peace' campaigners besieged the Tory MP Duff Cooper in Fulham Town Hall in October 1933, after Cooper dared to suggest that we needed to strengthen the RAF now that Hitler was in power in Germany. They were all against the barbarism of bombing. And their campaign caused the defeat of the Tory candidate in the by-election then going on Fulham. This result so frightened Stanley Baldwin, then Prime Minister, that he promised not to rearm in the General Election of 1935. I might add that the principal pro-Labour newspaper of the time, the Daily Herald (ancestor of The Sun) attacked modest proposals for rearming in a 1934 Defence White Paper as 'an insult to Germany'. Baldwin kept his word. Britain was too weak and demoralised to stand up to Germany in 1936, when Hitler could still have been stopped, too weak to stand up to him in 1938, and too weak to fight him when Blitzkrieg turned West. We ended up bombing German cities because we had no more civilised way of fighting Hitler. I would say that was a direct, traceable result of pacifist squeamishness about deterrence in 1933 and 1934.
The principle goes even further back than that. Had we listened to Field Marshal Roberts, and to Saki, we would have had a serious army before the crisis arrived in 1914, and the Germans (who memorably and wrongly regarded the small British army of the time as 'contemptible' and said they would only need to send a squad of policemen to arrest it) would not have risked the August 1914 attack on France.
We might then have been spared the whole catastrophe of the First World War. Think: No Russian revolution, no Easter Rising in Ireland, no Hitler, no Washington Naval Treaty. It almost makes me weep to think about it. And no bombing of Dresden either, because without World War One, there would have been no World War Two. Deterrence works. Being prepared to kill, and making it known that you are ready to do so, makes it far less likely that you will ever actually do any killing.
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