RAIN Page 11 GIVING UP THE BOMB Giving Up The Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543 to 1879, by Noel Perrin, 1979, 123 pp., $8.95 from: David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. 306 Dartmouth Street Boston, MA 02116 The Dangers of Nuclear War, edited by Franklin Griffiths and John C. Polanyi, 1979, 197 pp., ppbk $5.95 from: University of Toronto Press 33 E. Tupper St. Buffalo, NY 14208 ~ Educating ourselves concerning the crises we face is the first step toward averting catastrophe. These two books combine to present a bleakly detached view of the nuclear destruction we are moving towards, and the response of one nation in history to an earlier unmanageable form of weapons technology. Reading Giving Up the Gun first will provide an historical context for the otherwise inconceivable leap of faith that solving the dilemma described in the second book will require. In The Dangers of Nuclear War fifteen scientists, military leaders and policy designers from around the world describe with cool objectivity the behemoth we have created, nurtured, and relied upon in the tenuous see-saw called detente. They soberly and explicitly detail the technology; the numbers of "kill," both instant and residual, the kinds of nuclear warfare (limited and general), the historical uses of nuclear deterrents, and the odds of actually resorting to nuclear weaponry in the neat future. There aren't more than perhaps fifty sentences in the whole book that you'll enjoy reading, but there is an overall positive impact contained in the conclusions each man arrives at. They call for "wisdom," for "intell,.. ·tual caution," for "imaginative and determined action," and "extraordinary creativity and political will." If these men are any example of international sentiment (and I'm compelled to hope they are) there is some fragile cause to conclude that there may be "time to summon the imagination and the will to avert nuclear war." "The significance of SALT may therefore remain essentially political in fostering a shared awareness of the common interest in survival. ..." "The common interestin survival . . ."? Now there's an idea that might catch on; world survival against the odds of our self-perpetuating race towards annihilation. With our technology we've created a deadline. We are now forced to propose and implement an alternative. "This meeting [the Pugwash Symposium where this dialogue occurred] and the spirit in which it took place, testifies to the qualities on'which our hope for the future must rest; the ability to imagine (feebly), to comprehend (dimly), and to learn (at historic moments, rapidly). The greatest peril for the future lies in a fatalistic tendency for leaders and led to deny these very qualities. To suppose that new realities cannot be understood and new patterns of international conduct accepted." It is some wild stretch of the imagfrom Giving Up The Gun ination to envision our many world bosses choosing to forget and/ or set aside the power they wield. • Which brings me to Giving Up the Gun. I can imagine a young David choosing a stone, placing it just so in the leather sling of his -weapon, arching his back to stare up at that giant enemy, and then firing off his shot wholly concentrated on holding to life. Noel Perrin slings off just such a shot with his Japanese example against the scale of a nuclear conflagration. He admits that this is "no exact analogy to the world's present dilemma about nuclear weapons," but it is a humble model of a civilization with a developed technology choosing to "give un an advanced military weapon to return to a more primitive one." Japan established a caste system, economy, and social order around combat. The honor and status implicit in the Samurai code of behavior was jeopardized by the intrusion of the gun as a replacement for the sword. "Efficient weapons tend to overshadow the men who use them." "It was a shock to everyone ... that a farmer with a gun could kill the toughest Samurai." Consequently (though not this simply) the gun or the culture as it existed had to go. A wise leader (rarest of commodities), Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu began to wean Japan of the guns it had used in warfare for nearly one hundred years. He did this by first centralizing the production and purchase of the weapons under his control, and then gradually ordering fewer of them while continuing to pay gunsmiths even if they did not manufacture or sell the weapons. For nearly three hundred years guns played a negligible part in Japan's story. Commodore Perry's "visit" to Japan in 1853 ended all that. Perry himself convinced the country to return to guns as weapons for defense, to "keep future Perrys out of Tokyo Bay." The rest of the story is pretty well known. The Tokugawa years stand almost alone in history for this example. We tend to think "you can't stop progress," or "there's no turning back now." The inevitability of progress, the crunch of technology always advancing can immobilize us. Perrin suggests,"This is to talk as if progress-however one defines that elusive concept-were something semi-divine, an inexorable force outside human control. And, of course, it isn't. It is something we can guide, and direct, and even stop." -CC
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