One of the newly declassified U.S. documents must send shivers down the spines of even the most enthusiastic supporters of that great democracy. The document in question is a report by the chairman of the national security resources board, Mr. Symington, filed on January 11, 1951.The United States was then, it is hardly necessary to recall, involved in the Korean war and the Chinese had intervened of the side of North Korea. So Mr. Symington proposed an air and naval blockade of China coupled with open and sustained (air) attack upon lines of communications in China and Korea… and upon aggression-support industries in Manchuria.” President Truman doubtless did not accept this recommendation. Indeed, he sacked McArthur, then America’s most popular General, precisely because he was openly pressing for a similar policy. But the report is a grim reminder that a lot of Americans in key places are prone to think in apocalyptic terms and propose extreme solutions. Incidentally, this document itself provides a still more devastating piece of evidence to support this view. In the face of the well-known and indisputable fact that the Soviet Union had lost over 20 million men and suffered enormous devastations during World War II and had not had the time to recoup these losses even partially, Mr. Symington concluded, “As things are now going, by 1953 if not 1952, the Soviet aggressors will assume complete command of the world situation.” And as can easily be anticipated, he proposed that an ultimatum be given to Moscow that “any further Soviet aggression…would result in the atomic bombardment of the Soviet Union.” Such an ultimatum, he felt, would “establish moral justification for the use of the U.S. atomic bombs in retaliation against Soviet aggression.”
While it follows that the U.S. threat to use nuclear weapons first in Korea and then Indo-China, too, must have been the result of extensive discussions at the highest levels, it would be wrong to suggest that men like Mr. Symington and General McArthur are the monopoly of the United States. The Soviet Union, too,might have had leaders whose thoughts have turned to their nuclear arsenal in any serious crisis. Indeed, at the time of the border clashes with China in 1969, the Russians dropped some hints which legitimately, exposed them to the charge that they were indulging in nuclear blackmail. But the Russians at least disowned that they had any such intention and they have never again repeated such a threat against China or anyone else. On the contrary, they visibly backed down in the face of America’s nuclear alert at the time of the Arab-Israeli war in 1973 and desisted from their alleged plans to send troops to Egypt to enforce the ceasefire. Similarly, while they refused to assist China’s nuclear weapons programme after a certain stage in 1961 for a variety of complex reasons, they have not been reading lectures to others on the virtues of nuclear abstinence, a restraint which the Americans have never exercised. But is not there a connection between American self-righteousness and tendency to take an apocalyptic view of crises?