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eternal conflict with Eros, the creative drive impelling human beings
to form stable affective ties with one another. Nor did he affirm the
healthiness of instinct against the deadly excesses of a sterile reason;
he thought, rather, that
both
destructiveness and creativity were
grounded in instinct and that the role of reason was to mediate
between them in coping with a primal ambivalence that was the
most fundamental trait of man's nature.
There is nothing ennobling or exalted about deterrence as a
policy.
It
is just an ancient balance of power politics under conditions
where the risk of failure is almost infinitely greater. Nor does it
imply anything about the nature and value of the society or polity
that prudentially relies on it to avoid a nuclear holocaust. Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four
imagined a world in which deterrence has
worked, proving altogether stable and reliable in preventing a major
nuclear war (though only after the ravages of an actual "atomic
war" in the 1950s). The book is remembered chiefly for its searing
account of successful totalitarian domination; however, it is often
overlooked that this is not presented as the result of world conquest
by a single malign power but involves instead three identical
superstates forming shifting deceptive alliances while fighting
recurrent limited wars in outlying frontier zones; at the same time
they preserve an armed nuclear peace when it comes to all-out. war
with each other.
Schell might have pressed Orwell into service in his case
against deterrence. No doubt he did not do so because Orwell's
future contradicts the insistence of peace crusaders that arms races
can only lead to total war. With Orwell's symbolic date only a year
away, there are some uncomfortable if superficial resemblances
between the present and the depressing future he pictured more than
thirty years ago: inordinate investment in ever more complex and
expensive weaponry for purposes of deterrence, limited peripheral
wars (Orwell even assigned Southeast Asia.to one of his embattled
frontier zones), the temptation the "China card" (Orwell's
"Eastasia") offers to the two superpowers.
Clearly, we want to avoid both Schell's end of the world and
Orwell's permanent war, which is also a kind of permanent peace.
Useful alternatives must be concerned with the level of deterrence
rather than fantasizing about a world in which the lion and the tiger
lie down together in the company of the lamb .
