A Pinch of SALT II
In 1972, the USSR and the United States signed the first strategic arms limit agreement (SALT I — the initials stand for Strategic Arms Limitation Talks). SALT I was an arms control agreement widely hailed at the time of its signing (particularly by the Nixon administration) as a great step forward for world peace and detente (a word you don't hear anymore since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan).
We now know that the Soviets cheated on SALT I during the 1970s (though detente-minded Ford and Carter state departments chose to, in the words of Aviation Week, "cover up" the violations). The Soviets tested a mobile antimissile system, tested to upgrade an antiaircraft system to an antimissile system, concealed missile submarine sites from U.S. verification satellites, concealed the production of the mobile SS-16 and SS-20 missiles, and encrypted missile test data — all in violation of their promises in SALT I to limit their deployment of antimissile missiles and allow for satellite verification of strategic forces.
The ultimate irony is that during the time the SALT I disarmament treaty was in effect the world moved closer to nuclear war!
The Soviets used the time to build the monster SS-18 missile, capable of knocking out American land-based missiles because of its extreme accuracy — within a quarter of a mile of its target. The Soviets also used the time to build up antiaircraft defenses to ward off any retaliatory strike from American bombers.
While the United States developed the Trident submarine and Trident missile, it held back for the most part on upgrading its forces in hopes of yet another SALT treaty, SALT II. When the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in early 1980 made passage of SALT II in the United States Senate impossible, the United States was left with the possibility that in a matter of years the Soviets theoretically were going to be able to pull off a disarming first strike — at least against U.S. land-based missiles — and ward off attacks from an aging U.S. bomber fleet.
"The Paper It's Written On"
While it may be true that, as Winston Churchill said, "to jaw, jaw is better than to war, war," treaties and negotiations cannot of themselves make the world safer.
Hans Morgenthau, in his classic text on international relations — Politics Among Nations — writes: "The modern philosophy of disarmament proceeds from the assumption that men fight because they have arms." Rather, "men do not fight because they have arms. They fight because they deem it necessary to fight."
We are face to face with an unpleasant fact about human nature. Human political leaders cannot be counted on not to take advantage of weakness. Human nature will get away with what it can get away with — the only ultimate bound on it is force. Since Cain and Abel, human beings have tried to dominate each other and have in return tried to resist. This may seem like a rather dim view of human nature, but it accords with everything we know about man from history or from God's written word, the Bible.
"The [human] heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked . . ." (Jer. 17:9).
Note the words of one arms analyst, Bruce Douglas Clayton, writing in the generally dovish Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:
"Given the history of human behavior with regard to weapons, nationalism, territoriality, militarism, disputes, armed confrontations, and war-making in general, is it reasonable to expect the nuclear powers to disarm themselves? Will total brotherhood be achieved within the next few years? It has never been achieved before."
Mr. Morgenthau writes that "all politically active nations are by definition engaged in a competition for power of which armaments are an indispensable element."
The lust for power is as old as the devil's challenge to God (see Isaiah 14:12-15). And it is part of a certain spirit that has existed in human beings since Adam took from the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden: there is a certain hostility — and pride — which nations can be relied on to reflect. The desire to dominate others for its own sake was the key element of the devil's challenge to God and an attitude that human beings have always, as a matter of simple historical fact, exemplified.
"From whence come wars and fightings among you?" asked the apostle James (Jas. 4:1). ”Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?"
It is a painful fact and not easily acknowledged.
There is a story of a nuclear strategist, the late Bernard Brodie, who once dismissed the idea of a surprise nuclear attack by the Soviet Union against the United States as not "worth spending much money on." Why? he was asked. His answer: "Human beings don't act that way."
Of course, human beings do act that way. Conquest has been one of history's constant themes.
"Remember the Hivites"
Lawrence W. Beilenson, author of Treaty Trap, points out that man's tendency to break treaties goes back a long, long time. Consider, he notes, the disarmament agreement made between the sons of the biblical patriarch Jacob and the Hivites in Genesis, chapter 34.
The young Hivite named Shechem, the son of Hamor, had seduced Dinah, Jacob's daughter. Afterwards, "Hamor the father of Shechem went out unto Jacob to commune with him" (verse 6). At this "conference" the Hivites offered intermarriage of the two peoples (verse 9) and the sharing of Hivite land (verse 10) in return for Jacob's allowing Dinah to wed Shechem. The sons of Jacob agreed — but wanted one more concession — all the male Hivites had to agree to be circumcised (verse 15), an operation which, of course, rendered them in no shape for combat for the next few days.
So, "on the third day, when they [the Hivites] were sore, . . . two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brethren, took each man his sword, and came upon the city boldly, and slew all the males" (verse 25).
In this case, the Hivites only had an oral agreement that the sons of Jacob would live peaceably with them (compare verses 10 and 21). And as the old joke about oral agreements goes: they're not worth the paper they're written on. The Hivites had no guarantee that the sons of Jacob would not take advantage of their temporary weakness.
A reader of the account in Genesis 34 may notice that when the sons of Jacob accepted the "disarmament agreement," they did so "deceitfully" (verse 13). Unlike a contract a private citizen might make, international treaties are unenforceable — except through war. If a treaty is made deceitfully, the other side may lose everything — as the Hivites did.
Now consider the modern context of the disarmament movement in Europe. The London Economist summarizes what would happen if Western Europe just went ahead and renounced nuclear weapons without the Soviets doing likewise:
"If Western Europe rejected nuclear weapons the Russian response would pretty certainly be a grateful, if puzzled, smile. The more honest of Western Europe's nuclear disarmers have lately started to realize this. They therefore explain that 'if the Russians did not start to match our disarmament moves in the west, we should have to reconsider.' It would be too late to reconsider."
"Too late to reconsider" — like the foolish Hivites in Genesis 34 — or Prime Minister Chamberlain in 1938 who came back from a conference with Hitler in Munich waving a piece of paper, proclaiming "peace in our time."
Mutual trust is absolutely necessary for disarmament, but it is absent among nations. The Soviet Union has never renounced its goal of communizing the world. The West can never be sure that any disarmament agreement negotiated with the Soviets isn't really a ploy to leave the West vulnerable to a surprise attack. Nor can the Soviet Union ever really renounce its goal, because the very ability of the Soviet leaders to stay in power depends on giving the Soviet people something outside themselves and their domestic system to sacrifice for.
Were the Soviets to become a status quo power, they would have to acknowledge, as Chinese communist leaders have done, their failure to provide high living standards for their citizens. That would in turn force them to change their system (as Chinese have begun to do) — and that is something Soviet leaders will not do, because it would mean admitting that the goals to which they have devoted their lives — and the sacrifices they have imposed on their people — were in vain.
Thus as a practical matter there can be no disarmament that does not in some way promote the Soviet domination of the world. Therefore, as long as the United States and other nations care about freedom and independence, there can be no disarmament.
Why There Will Be Peace Anyway
"Disarmament," declared The Plain Truth 19 years ago, "is the result of peace, not the way to it." Peace will come when Christ returns to this earth and forcibly sets up his government over all nations. It will take Christ to end the international anarchy that insures that disarmament treaties can be cheated on or broken in today's world.
The Bible reveals that the returned Christ will "rule [the nations] with a rod of iron" (Rev. 19:15), and force the nations to "beat their swords into plowshares" (Isa. 2:4). While the Bible says man doesn't know the "way of peace" (Isa. 59:8), God does, and the Gospel itself is, among other things, a message about the peace (Eph. 6:15) which God will impose from on high.
In the meantime, hope of preventing war rests with whatever fear the American nuclear arsenal can inspire in Soviet leaders, an ever more slender reed as the world enters the mid-1980s. Disarmament negotiations can seem to lessen "international tensions," at least as they are publicized in the Western media, but they cannot reach the underlying causes of war — which don't derive from weapons but from the very nature of the human heart itself. Indeed, the Bible leaves us a stern warning about putting trust in negotiations to bring peace:
"For when they shall say, Peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape" (I Thess. 5:3).