Even though we are striving for Utopia aptiously, we should not live in cloud-cuckoo land. Deranged minds do exist, and people with deranged minds do reach positions of military power. It is not always clear which came first, the power or the derangement, but physical aggression does happen on a grand scale. A whole nation is invaded by another. Any attempts there may have been to develop mutual respect have failed. What does one do now?

Historically, as so eloquently pointed out by E M Forster in his book "Two Cheers for Democracy", we call out the troops, the cannon fodder, to fight against similar cannon fodder from the other side. Thousands, if not millions of innocent people on both sides, die. I recall distinctly a phone-in radio programme at the time of the precision bombing of Libya by the USA attempting to dispose of Col. Gadaffi. A caller was incensed. Targeting a national leader was immoral. The USA should have sent in the Marines! He accepted that hundreds of Libyans and US marines would have then probably lost their lives, but that would have been the honourable thing to do.

I do not agree. We need to re-appraise such out-moded attitudes to warfare. We do need to target our efforts closer to the source of the problem. As far as possible we should retain our mutual respect for the citizens of the aggressor, and the survival of innocent individuals, even if they happen to be lowly members of the enemy’s armed forces.

Our basic strategy should be to eliminate the instigator of the war. In virtually all cases, there have been very few people, sometimes only one, giving an order to invade. It would be the mission of intelligence services to discover that person, or those persons. It would be the function of the armed forces to capture or kill them. Kidnap or assassination would be their primary tactics.

Warfare would become a clandestine affair, with agents infiltrated into society of potential aggressors. All national leaders would have to take seriously the threat to their own life, should they take a decision to invade another nation. The armed forces of all peaceful nations could be cut in numbers dramatically. A few thousand, even hundreds, of SAS-like trained "civilians" would be their core. There would no longer be hundreds of thousands of cannon fodder in uniform.

Matters would never be quite that simple, I know. There would also be a need for some string to the defensive bow. While your assassins are tracking down the enemy leader, parts of your country may be occupied by enemy troops. Here too, the top-down principle should apply. Local resistance movements would have been trained, much as the Territorial Army, or National Guards are today, in citizens’ spare time. Their target would be the highest ranking enemy officers in the occupying force.

Infiltration guerrilla-like would be the tactic. No enemy general or commanding officer should feel able to travel, eat, drink, or sleep, without being in fear of his life. Occupation of another country must become a nightmare for those in command.

The more global late-twentieth-century approach has been that, if all diplomacy fails, a nation needs a massive deterrent: a last-resort weapon that those attacked may unleash. Currently, for those who have it, this has been the Nuclear deterrent. In the hands of the few, this did appear to keep the peace in Europe for over 50 years. As the few become the many, however, a new rôle for an ultimate weapon, nuclear or worse, will no doubt appear.

In the long term, the only form of renewable energy that currently offers prospects of successful development is Nuclear Energy, probably nuclear fusion of some kind. I regret I must exclude tidal, geothermal, or wind energy. They will not be available when we are living in outer space. Although these, and even solar energy may be temporary palliatives, even the sun will die eventually. We should have moved long before that, if the human race or its evolutionary successor is to survive.

I realise that some people would like even our limited Nuclear Power stations to be put aside for a few centuries, until we learn how to deal with the waste disposal problem. Nevertheless, research into Nuclear Energy, or some other new renewable source, must continue eventually. It will be increasingly hard to control the knowledge of how to divert its results into weaponry. Yet a nuclear war would not help our survival strategy. While such weapons of mass destruction continue to exist, therefore, we must try to arrange world affairs so that such a cataclysmic war would not benefit any of the participants, particularly the instigator.

It may be obvious, but it is often overlooked in academic strategic discussions: the result of such a war would be the death of millions of people during or after the conflagration, whether they were directly involved or not. It is even conceivable that everyone in the world would be harmed, if not eradicated. How can we begin to guarantee that such large scale death and destruction can confer no benefit whatsoever to an aggressor?

As a start, we could try to ensure that people who believe in any form of martyrdom, leading to rewards in an afterlife, are legally unable to hold positions of military power or responsibility. We may respect them as persons, but we would be unwise to allow their ideas to affect the waging of any war. Fighting for logic and mutual respect is unattractive enough. It demonstrates a failure of communications and foreign policy. Fighting for some religious faith is just foolish, and never necessary. The religious cannot be trusted to want to preserve Mankind. Theists have a vested interest in death, some even in Armageddon.

"We live in this world. Nowhere else. You will not be graduating to a higher form of existence."
{Scott Turow}

Yet it appears that an Armageddon of sorts (World War III) has been kept at bay for these past 50 years by the Nuclear deterrent. This in no way justifies the myriad of so-called minor wars which continue to bedevil the world. You may note that most of these are caused by clashes between believers in some ideology, often religiously based, or using religion to bolster their cause. They do not confine their disrespect to the others’ ideas. They hate the people too!

So it appears nuclear weapons held by the few have been useful. When they are held by the many, what then? Consider, for example, if instead of deploying nuclear weapons offensively in deep-sea submarines, they were deployed as defensive, even suicidal weapons. If they cannot be negotiated away, they could at least be more strategically placed.... in Embassies!?

One of the origins of the Ambassadorial system is said to be a form of mutual hostage taking. The above notion is merely the other side of such a coin. If governments and leaders were effectively nuclear hostages in their own capitals it would concentrate their minds.

It should be clear by now that my almost dictatorial approach, combined with its religious intolerance (of ideas, not people) would be unnecessary if the peoples of the world were served by mutually respecting governments. Ultimately, if the world were effectively one nation, or commonwealth of nations, with mutually respecting citizens, there would be no one to fight. From the nuclear family, to the prevention of Nuclear war, the peaceful fractal commutative relationship "I’m OK, you’re OK" is the only practical way forward. Such a Utopian aptious concept will become essential soon, or it will be too late. Let us hope it is not too late already.

return to Contents

go to Taxes

View my guestbook