Preventive Cold War

June 30, 1958

In an all-out war between this country and Soviet Russia there would be no victor. If Communist Russia attacks us first, with nuclear missiles, we may have less than a few hours’ warning. It will be impossible to prevent appalling destruction and loss of life. It will be small consolation to know that we may have enough striking power left to devastate Russia also.

Perhaps the greatest problem mankind has ever faced is how to prevent such a war. One indispensable way is to keep even and if possible ahead in nuclear striking power. The Russian leaders must know at all times that any attempt on their part to attack us, no matter what its initial success, will be suicidal for them.

There is no substitute for this necessity. Those who like daydreams may put their faith in securing an agreement for the abolition of atomic and nuclear weapons. But there is no reason to suppose that the Russian leaders would ever keep such an agreement. Its chief result would be to give the West a false and perhaps fatal sense of security. It is easy to talk of guarantees through a “foolproof inspection system.” But the more we consider what would have to be done to assure a really airtight inspection in totalitarian areas like Russia and Red China, whose leaders are dedicated to our destruction by any wile or stratagem, the more unrealistic and unfeasible the whole proposal becomes.

CONVERT THE COMMUNISTS

Faced with this desperate dilemma, what can we do? We must seek to undermine the will of the Communists to destroy us. Massive retaliatory power would only partly achieve this goal. We must dissolve the Marxian ideology. We must do nothing less than try to convert the Communists to capitalism.

Our own ideology has already been so undermined by Communist and socialist propaganda that most of our officials will regard such a goal as fantastic. For more than 40 years Communist propaganda has been successfully converting increasing numbers in the Western world either to Communism or to the halfway house of “democratic socialism.” At best our own counterpropaganda has been sporadic, apologetic, defensive and usually inept and incompetent.

The basic reason is not organizational. The basic reason is that our officials have themselves only a feeble faith in and a confused understanding of the virtues and strength of free private enterprise. They already half suspect that the Communist and socialist systems may be more productive than our own. How else can one account for the flood of statistical and economic fallacies from such official agencies as the CIA and the State Department, warning us, not of Russian military output, but of total overall production, and calling the economic challenge “the most dangerous of all,” more dangerous even than the threat of war? How far such a belief is from the truth, how enormously comparisons of production and of living standards are in our favor, I tried to show in this space last week.

OUR WILL TO RESIST

For years Soviet Russia has been conducting a systematic cold war upon us. Its primary purpose has been to sow dissension, to undermine our faith in our own economic and political institutions, to encourage appeasement among us, to weaken our will to resist—in short, to soften us up as easy prey to a hot war or even to make any hot war unnecessary for their final victory.

And they have been incredibly successful so far. Not until a few years ago did most of us even realize that this cold war existed. Most of us still treat it as a figure of speech rather than as a reality. Yet if we hope to avoid an unlimited nuclear war we must recognize the existence of a cold war and wage it systematically, intelligently, and untiringly. The facts and the ideological weapons are on our side if we know how to use them. We must convince our own people, we must convince the democracies of the West, we must convince the socialists and neutralists of the East, and finally we must try to convince even the Communists themselves, that a free-enterprise system is infinitely superior to a socialist or Communist system for production, for social cooperation, for peace, and for freedom.