COMMUNIST INTENTIONS
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attitude, especially on the point that there
is
nothing particularly
disastrous about nuclear war, by quotations from the Chinese Press.
For example
Red Flag
(Peking, April 19th, 1960) is quoted:
. . . were the imperialists to insist on imposing such sacrifices on the
nations, we are convinced that those sacrifices would soon be redeemed, as
the experience of the Russian and the Chinese revolutions has shown. On
the nUns of dead imperialism the victorious peoples will soon build up a
civilization a thousand times higher in level than the capitalist system, and
a future for themselves which would be really glorious.
Moreover we now have a good deal of evidence, of varying
degrees of reliability it
is
true, but which in sum establishes pretty
conclusively that the Chinese attitude to war is approximately this.
H so, it
is
approximately what the Russian attitude was a quarter of
a century ago. Since then the Russians, but not the Chinese, have
appreciated the character of nuclear war. They are aware, for both
Mr. Khruschev and General Talensky have told them so, that a third
world war, since it would almost certainly be nuclear, would cause
damage to their part of the world which, far from being quickly
reparable, would be likely to set back human civilization, of whatever
sort-bourgeois, proletarian, socialist, imperialist alike-for an in–
definite period.
When will the Russians or anyone else succeed in telling the
Chinese about all this? Probably the Russians have been endeavoring
to do so for some time now. What success they have had in making
the Chinese listen-never an easy task-is unknown. But no task
could, surely, be more urgent than to educate Chinese ruling opinion
on the realities of nuclear war: on what might perhaps be called
"the facts of death." For whether they know it or not, the facts of
nuclear death now apply just as much to China as to the rest of us.
Indeed it might have been supposed that a country possessing neither
means of nuclear retaliation nor remotely effective means of stopping
the nuclear weapons of its potential opponents would show some
signs of a consciousness of the consequences for it of nuclear war.
It
is
often said that the Chinese leaders do not fear nuclear
attack because of the large size of their country and because it
contains over six hundred million inhabitants. Even if, they are re–
ported as arguing, a hundred million Chinese were killed, that would
still leave five hundred million to carry on. But what, we may inquire,
