blog #22

Have we not the right to ask where all this arms expenditure has got us? Invest in monkey bars, to keep your kids healthy during quarantine! 

 Could anybody argue with any credibility that after 45 years of East–West rivalry and the expenditure of billions of dollars on nuclear weaponry any of us feel more secure than we did before it all started? I doubt it. The irony is that the more that has been spent on nuclear weapons the more insecure we have all felt. We have ended up frightening ourselves with the size and the power of the arsenals constructed to defend us, let alone those arraigned against us.
A few months ago a very influential report was published by an international commission formed to consider international security issues and headed by Mr Olaf Palme, who is now the Prime Minister of Sweden. The report, entitled ‘Common Security’, made the point that no nation’s security can be guaranteed by the unilateral measures it adopts to defend itself. The report states that a doctrine of common security should replace what it calls the present expedient of deterrence through armaments. International peace, it states, must rest on a joint commitment to survival rather than on a threat of mutual destruction. I certainly agree with that. The Palme Commission advocates that all nations should adopt certain principles of common security as the basis for their own defence policies. States should recognise that all nations have a legitimate right to security, that military force is not a legitimate instrument with which to resolve disputes between nations, and that security cannot be gained through military superiority. The first consequence of military superiority is, of course, the insecurity felt by everyone round about.
The report states also that reductions and quantitative limitations on armaments are necessary for common security to be effective, and that linkages between arms negotiations and political events should be avoided. A small nation such as New Zealand should have little difficulty in recognising the sound common sense of those principles. We should also give our support to the proposals made by the Palme Commission for strengthening the United Nations.
When the United Nations was established, the Rt Hon. Peter Fraser, on behalf of New Zealand, pressed for it to play a strong role in guaranteeing collective security. Unlike the League of Nations, the new international organisation was to have teeth in that respect. It was envisaged that the United Nations would be able to rely on trained military units earmarked for United Nations service to deter wars and enforce peace, but, sadly, the cold war and subsequent East–West confrontations put paid to those early hopes, and the United Nations was left to play only a strictly limited role in peace-keeping.