CONGRESSIONAL RECORD -- SENATE

April 25, 1969

Page 10357

ADDRESS BY SENATOR MUSKIE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY

Mr. HART. Mr. President, I commend to Senators and the public at large the penetrating remarks by the able junior Senator from Maine (Mr. MUSKIE) at Brown University, Providence, R.I., on April 10, 1969.

As we debate the ABM question and indeed the whole philosophy of piling of military might on military might, we would all do well to consider this thoughtful message from our respected colleague.

I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the RECORD.

There being no objection, the address was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:

REMARKS BY SENATOR EDMUND S. MUSKIE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY, PROVIDENCE, R.I., APRIL 10, 1969

For the last several years we have become frustrated by the despair in our cities and the neglect of urban problems. But we have reassured ourselves constantly that new programs would be initiated and more funds would be available as soon as the Vietnam War was over.

Several months ago I first said that I thought this assumption was unjustified. Already, the pressure from the military has mounted, and the President has recommended the deployment of the anti-ballistic missile system.

At the end of the Vietnam War defense spending will not decrease automatically. Our national priorities will not be adjusted automatically.

And the domestic needs that demand a massive commitment of funds and energy will not be met automatically.

The decisions that the Administration, the Congress, and the people make in the next several months are not merely decisions for 1969, they are decisions for the seventies.

These are not merely decisions about the best kind of weapons for us to have, they are decisions about the kind of society we want to have.

And these are not merely decisions which will determine the strength of our deterrence to nuclear attack, these are decisions which will determine the strength of the world's resistance to nuclear destruction.

These decisions will not wait until the end of the Vietnam War. They are being made now.

And if they are going to reflect any commitment to peace, to a sane defense policy, and to a just life for all Americans, they must be made on the basis of new thinking and new priorities.

Since achieving the role of a major power early in this century, our burdens of leadership have grown. For our own security and the security of the world, this country can never withdraw from its central responsibility for the preservation of peace.

However, this is a responsibility which we derive not from our military strength alone, or from a desire to exert undue influence on the lives of other nations, but from our superior size and our economic and technological strength.

It is not a responsibility we can avoid, but it is one which we can abuse.

Because this responsibility is so easily abused, yet so unavoidable, the ways in which we choose to meet it must be carefully attuned to our national goals.

Our goal is not military domination, but peace for ourselves and the rest of the world. Our goal is not to equip each nation with the capacity to annihilate its neighbors, but to enable the peoples of all nations to exist in a world free of hunger, poverty, and ignorance.

Our goal must not be to take risks in pursuit of war, but to take them in pursuit of peace.

We must never forget that our options are limited by our responsibilities. Our every action is examined and re-examined, interpreted and re-interpreted. The more doubtful or less clear our intentions, the more risky our actions.

And we must not fool ourselves. Regardless of our motives, the Vietnam War has not enhanced our reputation as a nation of peace in a world sensitive to the dangers of war. We cannot afford to let our intentions be open to question.

Our resources also limit our options. They are not unlimited. As we face enormous demands on our economic strength in meeting world needs and our global commitments, our domestic society is undergoing the most severe test the nation has known.

We are in the midst of an urban crisis. And the nature of that crisis is that we have not yet decided whether we are at all prepared to make a commitment.

We have not concentrated enough resources in any one place at any one time to demonstrate what can be done to make the system work better for all of us. Our whole approach to the problems of urban and rural poverty has suffered from fiscal and institutional malnutrition. In too many cases we have whetted appetites without providing bread.

Under the circumstances, the decisions we make concerning our national security in the seventies are more critical than any we have made in the past.

The ABM is only the first of these decisions, but the precedent set by this decision will have a great deal to do with the directions to which we will become committed.

The Administration's ABM proposal represents a major commitment of resources, away from other, vitally important national objectives -- with a price tag made suspect by all our experience in weapons-building and by the system's own built-in momentum towards a new arms and cost spiral.

The ABM also represents an immediate commitment to apocalyptic diplomacy -- bargaining that raises the ante without calling the bet. It represents another onset of quantum changes in the weaponry on which the precarious balance of mutual deterrence rests. It makes the balance of terror that much more terrible.

With one bold stroke, and the explicit threat it represents, the Administration has put the Soviet Union on the spot, forcing us both to continue to play the game which no one can win.

And no one seems very sure where the rules of this game will take us. We do not know what is proposed to be done within the so-called Safeguard program. The intimations to date have been confusing, contradictory, and ambiguous. The President has stressed his options to restrict the system, but the Undersecretary of Defense has justified the program in terms of full deployment and redeployment. This is terribly expensive uncertainty.

But these are only the short-range implications of this decision. What are its meanings in terms of long-range hopes for world peace and domestic justice?

When I cast my vote in the Senate in favor of the ratification of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, I did not do so lightly. It was a prudent treaty which bought us precious time to gain control over our nuclear destiny.

The treaty established a working precedent of international inspection, and the signatories pledged themselves to pursue with urgency arms limitation agreements.

That treaty was the latest step in a long, agonizingly slow movement toward arms control and disarmament -- a process that began with the test-ban treaty earlier in this decade.

We have reached a critical point in these efforts. We have recognized some of the limits and we have put up some stop signs. But stop signs are not enough; you only pause before you proceed to the next. We need some U-turns.

We have reached a point where we must decide whether we shall institutionalize the arms race and preserve it for our children, or whether we shall honestly try to turn back.

For the first time we are considering deployment of weapons whose dependability is questionable. We cannot know whether they will work.

And since the results of initiating serious arms control discussions are also in doubt, we are at the middle of an unusually balanced equation. On one side, risks in the direction of war; on the other, risks in the direction of peace.

Finally, the deterrent capacity of the ABM is so questionable and so slim, that we must wonder whether our view of national security has become so distorted that it is limited to weapons systems and overkill.

The illusion of national security offered by the ABM offers no sanctuary against hunger, poverty, and ignorance.

National defense is not an end in itself. An arms system or a deterrent force may protect us against armed attack, but they are useless against human neglect.

A broader definition of our national security is in order. Armed defense is no more the whole answer to problems of national security, than law and order is the whole answer to crime.

The American people make an investment in their national goals, and they rightfully expect that decisions concerning that investment will not be made from a narrow range of choices.

But as long as the military is responsible for all the choices in the field of national security, the range will continue to be narrow. Consider how many future Vietnams could be avoided by spending half as much money on aid to underdeveloped countries as we may spend on an ABM system.

Food and education are alternatives to weapons systems. They are more meaningful to a struggling nation than a missile, but our national security has never been defined that way.

As our concern over world poverty has grown, so has our military budget. But not our economic assistance. We will always have a military budget, but we must not allow it a life of its own.

We must control its objectives. But in 1969 we can see a pattern of defense spending developing which is similar to our experience after Korea. Within a few years of the end of that fighting, the defense budgets were larger than they had been during the war.

Around the world, the credibility of our initiatives toward peace holds more promise than the size of our military budget.

Effective diplomacy is a more constructive force than sophisticated weapons systems. But as long as decisions concerning our defense budget are made in the vacuum of the Defense Department, are accepted at face value by the Administration, and are ratified without pause by the Congress, we will continue to run the risk that alternatives to military spending in the interests of national security will never be considered adequately. And we will forever be forced to modify our foreign and domestic policies to fit our military commitments.

The choices we face for the seventies are emerging. We cannot have both guns and butter in the manner which we have always thought possible. We simply cannot afford both.

This is not a new situation. We have not been able to afford the mixture for several years, but we have tried to manage bothwithout success at either.

And because of the budget pressure of Vietnam, many people have had to tighten their belts -- belts that were too tight to begin with.

As long as these belts are tight -- as long as we tolerate hunger and poverty in an affluent world, peace is threatened. And as long as peace is threatened, military spending will remain high.

Somehow we must find ways to break out of this vicious circle. As I see it, there is only one way to start, one option to exercise. We must examine every request for military spending with a new skepticism, asking not whether there is a less expensive military substitute, but whether there is a more effective, non-military substitute.

We should not look to those who are skilled in war for the decisions which lead to peace. It is naive to expect the military to design the new directions we seek.

It is irresponsible for the public and the Congress to abandon its prerogatives of control. Yet these traditions are clearly threatened.

The ABM, chemical-biological weapons, and nuclear weapons are not the keys to peace.

Professor George Wald, a Nobel Laureate at Harvard, stated this very bluntly last month when he said: "There is nothing worth having that can be obtained by nuclear war; nothing material or ideological, no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating. Atom bombs represent unuseable weapons. The only use for an atom bomb is to keep somebody else from using it. It can give us no protection, but only the doubtful satisfaction of retaliation."

We cannot eliminate risk from this world, but we can control its directions. We can make up our minds that the time has come when risks in the pursuit of peace hold more promise than risks in the pursuit of war.

But changing the direction of our efforts and the reactions of other nations will not be easy.

Congress is beginning to question the basis of our military posture and our foreign priorities. Our leaders are beginning to realize that our options are limited only by our willingness to broaden our perspectives. We think–

That trying to communicate with China will be more fruitful than isolating her;

That arms control is a more direct route to peace than arms development; and,

That hunger and poverty are more dangerous than Communism.

This progress and this skepticism will continue -- if it is maintained by the support of an interested and concerned public. Public pressure has made halting the deployment of the ABM possible, and public pressure can make it possible to rearrange our priorities and to pursue peace more vigorously and resolutely.

But this pressure will be no more automatic than reductions in military spending. And its success is far from assured.

The employment of 10 percent of our workforce depends on the defense budget. Almost 1000 cities and towns and millions of American citizens are caught in the military-industrial combine.

This is the other side of the nuclear deterrent. We have become intimidated by the economic strength of our military as we have intimidated others by the might of its weapons.

We are afraid–

That we can no longer say "no" to the budget requests of $80 billion and more;

That our economy might not produce housing as profitably as it manufactures weapons;

That we cannot find political solutions to political problems; and

That we are not even going to have the chance to try.

This tyranny of fear has no place in America. Instead of being one of the many nations maintaining the arms race, let us be the first nation to renounce that fear and take a first step out of the arms cycle.

But there is every chance that the public will relax with the end of the Vietnam War, believing that Gulliver's troubles are over.

But they will not be over. They will have just begun, unless we make the right decisions now.

So I plead with you, as college students who have been concerned about a war, to be equally concerned with the issues of peace.

Professor Wald put this very eloquently. He said: "Our business is with life, not death. Our challenge is to give what account we can of what becomes of life in the solar system, this corner of the universe that is our home, and, most of all, what becomes of men -- all men of all nations, colors, and creeds. It has become one world, a world for all men. It is only such a world that can offer us life and the chance to go on."

This is an awesome challenge. But it is there, and we are the only creatures who can meet it.