230
JOHN STRACHEY
makes the Chinese leaders suppose that only a hundred million
Chinese would be likely to be killed in a full scale nuclear attack
upon China?
If
they do in fact suppose anything of this sort, they
are horribly misinformed. They must be still thinking in terms of
fission weapons of the order of magnitude of the bombs which fell
upon Japan nearly twenty years ago. For it is true that such weapons
as these, of which the main effects were by fire and blast, would
be
relatively ineffective against a vast peasant population scattered over
millions of square miles. But none of this is true of the thermo-nuclear
weapons in the megaton range of the 1960's. For one of the main
effects of these is, as we have noted, their lethal "fall out" which,
though local in the sense that it does not spread throughout the world,
covers areas of millions of square miles down wind from the point of
explosion. Peasant populations living in insubstantial houses of brick,
mud or straw might be appallingly vulnerable to such a fall out.
It is, surely, exceedingly important that the Chinese Communist
leaders should come to realize the dreadful facts of the nuclear age.
It is important that they should realize all this, not in order that they
should be menaced nor attacked (and this they may rely on, for after
all they have Russian retaliatory power behind them so long as they
maintain their alliance), but in order that a realization of their own
fearful vulnerability should restrain them from pressing down upon
their neighbors, as they have actually done in the case of India. For
the present they seem to both act and speak out of a mood of wholly
illusory serenity, which they suppose the size and character of their
population to give them.
If
and when the Chinese leaders come to
realize the extreme jeopardy in which they, like all the rest of us,
stand today, may they not revise at least this one of their dogmas?
However the Sino-Russian controversy is a much deeper one
than a dispute as to the consequences of nuclear war. It involves the
whole question of the attitude of communists to war and aggression
in general. In this wider field the controversy is largely carried on
by means of swopping quotations from Marx, Engels and Lenin. In
this form of warfare it is not certain that the Chinese would, on the
whole, be worsted in the exchanges. Mr. Kardelj is able to produce
some fairly effective remarks by Lenin: but an equally erudite
Chinese Leninist might be able to show that the main weight of
Lenin's thought was on his side.
It
is not till Mr. Kardelj widens
