THE TABLET December 27th. 1958. VOL. 212, No. 6188

TH E T BLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER’& REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

DECEMBER 27th, 1958

NINEPENCE

Welcome to the Common Market; No Comparable Movement in the Commonwealth

Pius XII as I Knew Him : III. The Affairs of Germany. By Robert Leiber, S.J.

Puritanism and Revolution ; Privilege and Levelling. By Christopher Hollis

The English Heritage : F a th er Conrad Pepler’s Study Revieved by Desmond Schlegel, O.S.B.

Critics’ Columns : Notebook ; Book Reviews : Letters : Chess .... ......................................................................... Il l ■■

THE INTERMEDIATE ARMS

,rjpH E New Year will start with four articles agreed at

Geneva for the ending of nuclear tests. Although the Conference on surprise attack has ended in deadlock there is some progress about ending nuclear tests.

No Government should ever persist in policies in which it has ceased to believe, and we are glad to see Mr. Macmillan’s Government readjusting its views on defence, and tacitly abandoning some of the untenable propositions advanced in Mr. Sandys’ White Paper in 1957. That was the document which threatened that Britain would reply with nuclear warfare to any conventional land aggression on a major scale by Russia, and although this was soon qualified by statements that the major aggression would need to be a very major one indeed, it never rang true. No British Government which knew it could not defend its own population and cities would be the first to start a nuclear war. The argument for having H-Bombs at all is as deterrents against other H-Bombs. To have them without any intention of using them is still a protection against the diplomatic blackmail that a Power in possession of them might indulge against nations without them. It could never be right on moral grounds to employ such indiscriminate means of destruction just because it was judged too expensive to maintain conventional forces. The 1957 White Paper made provision for a small mobile force, but it was so small as to leave a serious gap in the range of action open to a British Government. At one extreme, Britain would possess weapons it could never use in any normal or foreseeable event; at the other end its resources would very soon be fully employed.

It can indeed be argued, and with much cogency, that we are still being carried along by the momentum of our past, and that, in fact, the day is now past for thinking in terms of fighting small wars in Asia or Africa. There is a very real battle going on all the time in both Continents, but it is a battle of ideas, for minds and imaginations and hearts, where force of the old-fashioned kind has the opposite effect to that intended. Only to fulfil treaty obligations to friendly States do we need small mobile forces, but we do at present need them for that. There can be little doubt that the joint American and British landings in the Lebanon and Jordan in July were the right decision, justified in the event; a steadying factor at a moment of excitement. But it became equally clear that our troops could not stay indefinitely without their presence injuring King Hussein, making him look like a man who had to rule with foreign troops because his own people were not with him.

Where the 1957 White Paper was inadequate was in not recognising the great importance of our being able to reply with the minimum of force if the Soviet Union should pretend to employ force on a small scale.

While Britain cannot match the Soviet Union, the NATO countries can, and it is the measure of their confidence that NATO will not be put to the test that they have not, in fact, fulfilled their programme. If the French view is accepted, that North Africa with its bases ought to be seen as a common responsibility of the NATO Powers, the case for more conventional forces is strengthened ; and it has to be accepted in great part, though not wholly.

When General de Gaulle demands a much bigger voice for France in the deliberations of NATO, and claims that France is doing the work of all the Western world in North Africa, he can hardly deny that the other Western countries have just as much right to be consulted and to advise on French policy. They cannot be asked merely to underwrite what the French Government chooses to do.

Here there seems a good prospect that, when General de Gaulle is elected President, he will be much freer to make and keep these arrangements than the transient ministries of the Fourth Republic were. Britain and America will know for many years just with whom they have to deal, and this should make it easier for them to accord to the French a bigger position in their counsels than they could be asked to do under the Fourth Republic, where French policy was so much at the mercy of domestic politics and even of party calculations.