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War and Nationalism
opinion. In all sincerity, I tell you that we are growing increasingly resentful of the present situation. Asians are the chief victims of the West’s failures and moral bankruptcy.

We in Asia do not see you as saviours of civilization or as forerunners of the future; we see you as agents of death—our death …

We utterly deny the right of the West to continue imperilling us and our future … It is past time for the West, Communist and anti-Communist alike, to draw back from the edge of complete moral bankruptcy. It is explicitly your task to utilize the skill and technique of your science for peaceful purposes. One tenth of the treasure and skill used in making your hydrogen weapons could transform my country …

There can be no question now of the West giving moral leadership to Asia. Your moral leadership has, for us, meant first colonialism and now the philosophical, moral, political and social bankruptcy of a nuclear arms-race …

You in the West are causing more gaps between humanity; you are also losing the battle for the hearts and minds of men.

I think it is very valuable for us to see ourselves as others see us, and to realize that this is what the leaders of the unfortunate two-thirds of the world think of us and what they expect of us.

I cannot go into the details of the kind of policy which should be pursued. Such a policy has been set out, lucidly and extremely well, in a very valuable book by Professor Wright Mills of Columbia University, The Causes of World War Three, which I heartily recommend to everybody. He sets out what he thinks an idealistically realistic policy for the West would be, and also guidelines for changes in American policy and modes of thought, which would permit pressure to be put upon what he calls the ‘power élite’, the decision-makers at the top of the social pyramid. Meanwhile, he calls upon his fellow intellectuals and educators and writers to do all they can to help prepare the moral atmosphere in which such a change could take place.

I will close these remarks by pointing out that perhaps now is a fairly propitious time to come to some kind of agreement, not because I think anybody has had a change of heart, but because the advances of technology are making the present situation exceedingly precarious, and they are making it precarious in a new way. As a recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists pointed out, it is now possible for at least twelve nations, some of them quite small, to produce the hydrogen bomb within five years or, if they carry out a crash programme, even sooner; and the last thing that any of the three great nuclear powers wants is for the hydrogen bomb to get into the hands of anybody else. Obviously the world situation would become fantastically precarious, and the power of the great powers would be very seriously compromised.

If Lichtenstein and Monaco had the bomb, they would be in a certain sense on a level with the United States and with the Soviet Union, which is obviously a situation which neither of these countries could possibly tolerate. For this reason I do think that there is a better chance for making a beginning in disarmament; this would consist in the banning of nuclear tests, which would make it very difficult or impossible for any other nation to produce a bomb. I think that such a test ban is now more likely to be negotiated than it has been recently, and it will become increasingly likely as the capacities of the small nations to reproduce the bomb at a cheap rate become greater.

I also think that if we attack this problem on all fronts at once—on the moral front, the political front, the persuasion front, the technological front—there is some considerable hope that we may get ourselves out of this dreadful situation into which we have, by our folly and also by our good intentions, alas, succeeded in putting ourselves. We can see some prospect of making the decision not to go to the edge of the precipice, but to draw back in time.

The End

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opinion. In all sincerity, I tell you that we are growing increasingly resentful of the present situation. Asians are the chief victims of the West’s failures and moral bankruptcy. We