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SPEAKER: We have begun this new year not without a sense of dark foreboding and of crisis, we are rather painfully aware what one might call the disintegration of peace that is politically, economically, socially, ethically. We have lived through difficult times. And I think we see more of them ahead of us. The tenuous peace in Indochina has all but broken down. And how long the mid-Eastern ceasefire will hold is a matter for speculation.

The disintegration of peace has many aspects and many facets. Some of them are internal, and some of them are external. And they all interlink in one comprehensive problematic, as the Club of Rome calls it. Now, another and less usual way of looking at the same complex phenomenon is to start from the assumption of the disintegration of war as a logical complement to the disintegration of peace. And the thesis that I want to explore with you today is that war, far from being a part of human nature, is in fact a social institution with its beginnings, with its heyday, with its decline, with its degeneration, and with its disintegration.

Now, with this thesis, I am not really placing myself unconditionally on the side of the idealists and optimists, those who hold that nature's law and nature's lesson is peace and harmony, people like Erasmus from Rotterdam and others of that kind, and that furthermore that man is rational and that reason will eradicate war. I agree with Dr. Kusch that we must be realistic. Although I should like to permit that idealism and optimism to a certain degree are socially more constructive, more useful than cynicism or pessimism inasmuch as either of these basic attitudes tends to act in some way at least as a self-fulfilling prophecy. You see, by nature, I am also I'm a pessimist. I'm a romantic. But every morning, I force myself to be an optimist in order to be able to act, which you cannot when you are a pessimist.

Now, war has been compared in these discussions and elsewhere to a disease, which is a part of human nature and which may be controlled and may be alleviated, but it cannot be eradicated. I would rather compare war to slavery, which as an institution existed for thousands of years so much so that it was indeed considered part of human nature by philosophers ranging from Aristotle to George Washington. Men were not supposed to be born equal. So men were supposed to be born as slaves, and some men were supposed to be born as masters. And yet slavery, as an institution, was abolished when the socioeconomic structure of which it was a part disintegrated and gave rise to new technologies and to new systems of production which made slavery uneconomical.

Now, while only the most daring prophets would have anticipated only a couple of hundred years ago that slavery could be abolished, no one in his senses today would uphold that it is part of human nature. This, of course, does not imply that exploitation has been abolished, but the institutional framework of exploitation has been significantly modified.

Christianity, of course, had something to do with it. But Christianity had been around for a good long time and been found quite compatible with slavery. It was only when idealism and ideals converged with economic interests that we had a leap forward, which neither idealism alone nor realism alone could have achieved. This happened when slavery was abolished. It happened when colonialism was abolished. And I suspect that something of the sort is now happening to war. The disintegration of war has a social, political, and ideological and a technological component. And they all interact. I would like to briefly look at the technological component.

We are all aware of the fact that the nature of modern weapons has totally transformed the nature of war. We like to think that eventually it will make war impossible. But at any rate, war is certainly no longer what it used to be. It used to be-- and I indicated that before and during the discussion it used to be a tidy thing, at least through modern history that is throughout the history of the modern nation state. International law distinguished between soldier and civilian, between military targets and open cities. It provided for declarations of war and for the termination of the state of war through treaties. And war and peace, you might say were sharply delineated and circumscribed as the nation state itself.

The so-called weapon of mass destruction did away with all this. All you have to do to understand this is to look at the change in the ratio between military and civilian casualties. In WW I, the total number of killed was approximately 10 million people, and 95% of these were soldiers, and only five were civilians. In WW II, over 50 million people were killed. It's really staggering. And the percentage between soldiers and civilians was just about equal. 42% were soldiers, and 48% were civilians.

During the war in Korea, of 9 million dead, 84% were civilians, and only 16 were soldiers. And in Vietnam, the percentage-- although I don't have the final figures-- it was still higher. During the WW II, this trend was already so marked. I remember there was a story of a young man in England during the Blitz who had volunteered for the Royal Air Force and went to his boss in his London office to say goodbye and felt rather like a hero. And the boss looked at him very critically and said, you coward.

[CHUCKLES]

Well, the weapons of mass destruction have brought war back to what it was before the emergence of the nation state and before the development of international law. It's quite surprising, but the proportion between military and civilian casualties during the Thirty Years' War when Gustavus Adolphus was battling at what I might call the dawn of the nation state was approximately what it was in Vietnam at the dusk of the nation state because, you see, professional armies at that time were small, battles were limited, and the rest was done by pestilence, by rapine, by arson. These were the kind of weapons of mass destruction that did not either distinguish between war or peace, between soldiers and civilians, a kind of weapon that we are coming back to now with the threat of bacteriological warfare.

But the weapon of mass destruction is not the only factor hastening the obliteration of these distinctions between war and peace. Modern war is no longer a war between one sovereign nation against another fought by national armies. It is a struggle conducted by one nation against a part of another, usually supported by internal factions or regions within that nation. It has become an international Civil War without boundaries where regular armies fight alongside or against partisans, Viet Congs, or other non-governmental units, a war of terror against civilians, against diplomats, against businessmen, against athletes, against airline passengers.

And it is indeed likely that international terrorism is not going to disappear but that it's going to increase for the actions necessary to stop it would have to touch on the very core of our political systems. International terrorism, I feel, is an intrinsic part of the disintegration of war and the disintegration of peace or the state beyond war and peace in which we are living.

Now, this development of Guerrilla Warfare and of terrorism is quite intimately connected with the development of yet another type of readily available weaponry and that is substances or agents that can be used for peace and for war, such as atomic garbage, chemical and biological substances, laser technologies, meteorological technologies are substances that really disintegrate the concept of weapon. And that belong to what in UN parlance is called a dual purpose category of weapons.

Now, I will give you a few illustrations of these in a moment, but let me first point out why I think that this development is really so tremendously important for the future of war and peace. First, the existence and the growing importance of this type of nonweapon contributes really to erode the distinction between war and peace. Second, it also totally transforms the problem of disarmament and of arms control for if we can no longer define a weapon, and if furthermore we need the substance or the technology for peaceful purposes for development, how can be prohibited? And how can we control it?

Third, if we fail to control these technologies, these technologies, these agency substances, are as dangerous in peace as they are in war, their uncontrolled peaceful use may be as disastrous in its consequences for the environment, national and international as their use as weapons in war. And I'll come back to that later.

And fourth-- and now I'm beginning to turn a little bit optimistic-- here is something that we can do as citizens. Here's a point of attack where we can improve the condition of this world at this time because the technologies and the institutional arrangements that we are beginning to create and to use to manage resources and to protect the environment are the same that we need to control this new type of weaponry. In other words, if we take serious measures to enact environmental policies, these will have an arms control effect.

And instead of getting arms control and disarmament through arms control and disarmament treaties, which as the history of the last 100 years has shown is a hopeless approach, we may get arms control and disarmament as a byproduct of successful environmental and developmental policies. This is what has been called passive arms control. And it may be built into a series of new international institutions we may have to establish over the next quarter of a century to manage technologies and resources whose effects are transnational.

Now, this new type of organization is what I call the world community's giving to community the meaning that it has acquired in the term the European Economic Communities. If they will indeed have an arms control effect as do the European communities, then we might say that they form a peace system that Isted War in its traditional institutional form would no longer be possible. It would abolish itself as slavery did in changed socioeconomic circumstances. But just as the abolition of slavery still left exploitation, so the abolition of war will still leave in its wake other forms of violence of the type of terrorism and guerrilla that we have already noted on the scene.

Now, let me give you a few examples of what I mean by these dual purpose agents that so transform the nature of war. Chemical factories and biological laboratories, obviously, are essential to industrial and to agricultural development. But it is equally obvious that any country possessing chemical factories has some potential for chemical warfare. Biological warfare is within the reach of any country which can produce vaccines. The list of chemical and biological agents that are now available for destructive or constructive purposes for development of for war is really bloodcurdling. I think that the walls of this temple here would blush if I started to enumerate the horrors that we can do with chemical and biological weapons.

When you produce these weapons at the production stage, there may be only economic motivations for producing them. But once they are there, these agency substances can be used equally for peace or for war. All that's need is a change of intention and stockpiles of chemical agents produced for peaceful purposes become stockpiles ready for military use. To determine acceptable levels of permissible stockpiling of such chemical or biological substances is impossible. Even more impossible is their control in the traditional sense of international arms control.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute published last year a report, Chemical Disarmament, Some Problems Of Verification, which offers some rather detailed blueprints, models, of how economic data reporting and monitoring techniques could be used to verify the nonproduction of chemical warfare agents. The conclusion of the report is that a centralized national system for monitoring economic data on the production, on the distribution, and consumption of chemicals within a country could be a viable mechanism under an international chemical disarmament agreement.

That is to control or prevent the production of chemical weapons, we need three things. We need a totally new approach to resource, monitoring, and inventorying. Second, we need a new form of cooperation between science and industry and government. And third, we need a new way of interlinking national and international systems. That is, we need exactly what we need to enforce environmental policies. These are the three ingredients. Failing to create such mechanisms and organizations for resource management, that is development, environmental management, and arms control, we throw ourselves wide open not only to the use of these most ghastly weapons in what is called legitimate warfare, but to their abuse by terrorists and by guerrillas. Chemical and bacteriological weapons in fact are likely to become the weaponry of the poor nations and of outlaws.

To give you another example, nuclear weapons and resources. With the decline of fossil fuels for energy, everything, including industrial development, urbanization, agricultural development, and transport, are going to depend increasingly on alternative sources of energy. And among these atomic energy are looms largest. Investments made in the development of atomic reactors, fast breeders are in fact so huge that nothing except a major disaster, which unfortunately we may have to witness, can deflect this development during the next 10 years or so.

But atomic reactors produce a garbage, an atomic garbage, that will make a farce out of the non-proliferation treaty and will cause disposal problems for which at present simply there is no solution. The same type of national, international machinery that has to be devised for the management of chemical resources must be provided for. Another enormously striking example is meteorological weapons and technology. But I think I won't have time to go into that because I do want to say something more about the kind of institutional arrangements that we need although the meteorological things maybe we can discuss that during the discussion period.

But laser technology is another example. But I should like now to go to the discussion of the organization that is being created and whose creation indeed every one of you can help to advance. That is this new type of international organization that would deal at one and the same time. And this is the novelty. It would deal at one and the same time with rational resource management and development with environmental management and with arms control.

Now, by chance, we might say if we believed that chance could determine matters of such complexity and of such momentous importance, by a quirk of history and because the situation was ripe and because the right man via uniquely, prepared, and gifted Ambassador Arvid Pardo of the small country Island of Malta, who incidentally is half a Swede-- his mother is Swedish-- well, he was at hand to introduce this whole matter into the United Nations. Well, it so happens that the first of these organizations is being created in the oceans.

The United Nations, as you probably are aware of, has declared the '70s the first International decade of ocean exploration. And this year, the third United Nations conference on the Law of the Sea is getting underway in Caracas in Venezuela to completely revise the law of the sea and to establish new institutions for the rational management of ocean space and resources.

We all are aware of the fact that the fate of the oceans today is endangered by the proliferation of technologies, which on the one hand intensify traditional uses of ocean space and resources and introduce many new and unheard of ones. The oceans living resources whose renewal in the past was keeping pace with the artisan methods of fishing are beginning to fall behind in the race with new industrialized methods of exploitation. The maximum sustainable yield is being reached much sooner than had been anticipated only a few years ago. In fact, the last few years have registered a decline in the world's total fish catch and this at a time when really the world's population is fast-growing. And especially the poorer nations depend on the productivity of the oceans for by far the largest part of their animal protein requirements.

Well, we know that shipping has increased both in size and in the number of vessels, that freighters and tankers carrying half a million of deadweight, half a million tons or more, are crowding international waterways and straits. Collisions and groundings are on the order of the day, releasing vast quantities of pollutants into the oceans. Underwater storage tanks, floating super ports are being built to accommodate this novel form of maritime traffic. And all these new installations are prone to accidents. They are vulnerable to sabotage. And at any rate, they are designed for a certain percentage of regular loss or waste accumulating in the oceans as pollution.

Some of you may have read an article in the papers these last days about the specter of sludge of New York, the New York Coast. That is where the City of New York has through decades now accumulated literally billions of tons of the filthiest sludge which is forming a dead sea off the Coast of New York miles of it, an awful mass of goo, black and smelly and infested with bacteria and viruses of all kind, hepatitis, cholera, polio, and that this mass, this goo, is now heaving itself on the ocean floor mile by mile about a mile a year toward the Coast of New York and Long Island. And it is calculated it may reach the Coast in about in another three years and that, that may be a disaster, the like of which we have not seen yet in these parts of the world.

Well, we are at the beginning of a revolution in mineral mining in which the oceans are playing an eminent role. Offshore oil production today accounts for already about 20% of the world's total oil production. And it is estimated that, that will rise to 50% of the next two decades. The recovery of manganese nodules from the deep ocean floor of the Pacific and the industrial processing of manganese, nickel, cobalt, other metals in practically unlimited quantities is just beginning. And the ecological consequences of this have not yet been correctly assessed.

The urbanization and industrialization of the coasts discharging these huge amounts of organic and inorganic waste into the oceans through rivers and pipelines, the industrialization of agriculture generating run offs of chemical fertilizers and the discharge of DDT, which reaches the oceans through the atmosphere, the swelling of tourism and the recreational uses of ocean space, the use of the oceans for human habitats, whether underwater or on artificial islands, while all this contributes to a complete alteration of the balance between land and sea, factories are being moved out to sea. Oil refineries are placed on offshore platforms. Airports are put on artificial islands.

New energy resources and technologies, which will fuel our hydrogen economies of the future, will be ocean-based and no longer land-based. The military are moving into the oceans. Science, the ocean sciences have made such a gigantic progress during the last decades that they have really revolutionized all our view of the Earth.

Well, at present, there is no law, either national or international, to regulate these new and challenging uses of the oceans. And existing international machinery is totally inadequate. If unregulated, the intensification of old uses and the addition of so many new ones will enter into conflict and waste on a scale unknown in the past problems which affect the health of the oceans and the survival of man, problems which are truly transnational in scope and must be solved internationally.

This then is the challenging task now before this great conference that I mentioned that is to minimize conflict and pollution in the oceans, to maximize the benefit from its boundless resources for all nations, and especially for the developing ones, and to this end, to create comprehensive institutions for the rational management of ocean space and resources.

In coming to grips with this task, the conference must deal with a number of very fundamental problems which are even bigger than the oceans, problems of international relations and international organization in general, such as the relations between the developed and the developing nations, the development of a newer science policy, and the development of a new disarmament and arms control policy in the oceans, whether we want it or not. And this again, due to the fact that so many of the technologies that are essential to the monitoring and control of pollution in the oceans from underwater tracking devices, to buoy systems, to satellites, all have an arms control effect. And this for the first time does give disarmament a chance. We may get it as a byproduct of the rational management of ocean space and resources.

Now, on this we may act. This is our chance. I have mentioned only a very few of the problems, and I have mentioned them in a cursory way. But they may be sufficient to indicate that what is needed is a total new type of international organization, a type that encompasses politics, that encompasses science, that encompasses industry, and that is interlinking national and international competencies in a new way, an international organization that may well become the prototype of international organization in the 21st century.

For if indeed we succeed in solving certain basic problems with which we are faced in the oceans, we may then apply these solutions subsequently to other areas of technology with transnational effects, such as the management of outer space and satellite technology because outer space, just like the oceans, has a military and the civilian aspect. Satellite technology is a super power weapon developed by the military for military purposes. But it is increasingly becoming an instrument of development.

The role of satellites and monitoring Earth resources is just beginning to be explored and exploited. And an international organization for the management of space and satellite technology, which could fairly closely follow the pattern that we are creating with the ocean institutions, would be another powerful instrument both for development and for peace. An energy world community for the inventorying of energy resources, the coordination and the study of energy technologies, and the transfer of these technologies and the study of the economic, monetary, social, political, ecological impact of alternative energy policies on the international system, the management of energy policies themselves-- well, that would be another major step toward the development of peace and the realization of a policy with a developmental and environmental end an arms control impact.

And with the so-called energy crisis upon us, I think we may be closer to the establishment of such an energy world community than we today think. The establishment of a World Energy Institute as a first step toward the creation of a management system has been proposed by a growing number of organizations and authorities. We are working on that at the center in Santa Barbara, too. It might be well an idea whose time has come. And lastly, I think that before the century is over, we will have a world community for the management of weather control and modification.

None of these new organizations, of course, must be allowed to be dominated either by the big powers, by the superpowers, or by technocracies. I call these organizations communities in order to stress their participation aspect. They must be political, economic, scientific that is standing on one leg that is intergovernmental, rooted in the General Assembly of the United Nations, and on one leg that is non-governmental bringing in institutions of learning, institutions of producers, of consumers. It's a new type of international organization. They must be designed in such a way as to interweave the order of territorial nations-- that was our international order until now-- with the order of nonterritorial, transnational, functional realities and issues which today is shaking up a straining via order of nation states.

Now, you still may say that this is a far way off from present realities. You may still say it would require that nations give up part of their sovereignty and that there is no sign anywhere that nations are ready to do so. On the contrary, it can be documented that nationalism is on the rise all over the world. To this, I would answer first that nationalism in the 20th century is not at all what it was in the 19th. The nationalism of the new nations in Africa trying to assert their independence from their former colonial overlords and to win the battle against hunger and against underdevelopment has very little in common with the nationalism, let's say, of France and of Germany during their period of empire-building.

The nationalism of the new nations is not necessarily an obstacle to international integration. On the contrary, in a certain sense, they need international cooperation for their independence and development. And second and in connection with this, the concept of sovereignty itself, just like everything else in this age of change, is changing. It is assuming a new dimension. This new dimension is participation, participation in the making of decisions that directly affect you.

The effects of the new, big technologies, as we have seen, are transnational. Pollution does not stop at national frontiers. And if we want to control it, we have to control it jointly. If we don't control it, well, then the citizens of any country, especially of any small country, are passively exposed to the consequences of technological choices made outside beyond their control. And that is for all practical purposes they have lost their sovereignty. It is only through participating in making these choices or decisions that nations in this age of macro engineering and of macro technology can regain and reassert their sovereignty. If we have time in the discussion period, I can give you illustrations for this.

And this participation requires a network of organizations or communities of the kind that we have been talking about. You see, there are two ways of looking at international integration or the relations between the parts and the whole that today the world is the whole. There can be no doubt.

When you look at it in a mechanistic way, you come to the conclusion that the whole grows at the expense of the part which has to surrender sovereignty or at any rate reduce its own power or autonomy. Or the obverse also may happen that is that the part grows at the expense of the whole, and so the whole weakens and tends to disintegrate. But when you look at the same process in an organic way, then you realize that the part develops and grows as the whole develops and grows. And each part in fact reflects the whole at any time. This applies to the relationship between nations and the international community just as it applies to the relations between the individual and society.

Integration is a mechanical or additive process and genders opposition and conflict between the parts and between the whole. Integration is an organic or if you want to draw an analogy for mathematics, as a topological process and genders what I call co-existential growth that is the parts and the whole evolve harmonically and together.

Now, here we have a difference, it seems to me, not only between an older, let us say, 18th century mechanistic worldview and a more modern organic one, we also have a contrast between what you might call occidental and oriental. Although these are broad oversimplifications. For the occidental self-realization or development and growth, often means the development of that part of the self that is different from the others. And we think we have developed our self.

For the oriental on the other hand, self-realization means the development of that part of the self that is embedded in the trans individual. I think it's a more modern and a more useful concept. The orientals, and in particular the Chinese, also have a fundamentally different way of looking at pollution and at pollution control. They realize that pollution is waste. And they believe that the problem of pollution will be solved only when all wastes are productively utilized.

They teach us that the three evils, and quote, "of pollution, that is waste gas, waste liquids, and waste solids," can be turned into three advantages that is resources for production. This can be achieved through multi-purpose linkages of production systems. That is, factories are linked together by the wastes they produce. Plants that can use the wastes of a large enterprise are constructed nearby and thus economize on their own purchases of raw material. The Chinese say that the failure to analyze the dual nature of pollution is clearly at the root of the failure of most of the industrial world to deal with environmental quality problems effectively.

Now, what I propose to you today in conclusion is that the problem of the arms race is very similar to the problem of pollution if seen that way. The weapons it produces have a dual nature. If the three evils of pollution are waste gas, waste liquids, and waste solids, the three evils of the arms race and of the military industrial complex are the waste of manpower and ingenuity, the waste of money, and the waste of the environment. The problem will be solved only when all these wastes are productively utilized. That is when multi-purpose linkages of resource and technology management systems will turn them into the three advantages of development, of environmental enhancement, and of peace. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]