Roger Walsh, M.D., Ph.D., in a chapter titled Human Survival: A Psycho-Evolutionary Analysis appearing in the book, Human Survival & Consciousness Evolution, writes:
"The great experiment in consciousness, human evolution, now stands at a precipice of its own making.
The same consciousness which struggled for millions of years to ensure human survival is now on the verge of depleting its planet’s resources, rendering its environment uninhabitable, and fashioning the instruments of its own self-annihilation.
Can this consciousness (we) develop the wisdom not to do these things?
Can we foster sufficient self-understanding to reduce our destructiveness, and mature rapidly enough to carry us through this evolutionary crisis?
These are surely the most crucial questions of our time, or of any time.
Today we face a global threat of malnutrition, overpopulation, lack of resources, pollution, a disturbed ecology, and nuclear weapons.
At the present time, from fifteen to twenty million of us die each year of malnutrition and related causes; another six hundred million are chronically hungry and billions live in poverty without adequate shelter, education, or medical care
(Brandt, 1980; Presidential Commission on World Hunger, 1979).
The situation is exacerbated by an exploding population that adds another billion people every thirteen years, depletes natural resources at an ever-accelerating rate, affects "virtually every aspect of the Earth’s ecosystem (including) perhaps the most serious environmental development ... an accelerating deterioration and loss of the resources essential for agriculture" (Council on Environmental Quality, 1979)
Desertification
pollution
acid rain
and greenhouse warming are among the more obvious effects.
Overshadowing all this hangs the nuclear threat, the equivalent of some twenty billion tons of TNT (enough to fill a freight train four million miles long), controlled by hair-trigger warning systems, and creating highly radioactive wastes for which no permanent storage sites exist, consuming over $660 billion each year in military expenditure, and threatening global suicide
The Presidential Commission on World Hunger (1979) estimated that $6 billion per year, or some four days’ worth of military expenditures could eradicate world starvation.
While not denying the role of:
political
economic
military
forces in our society, the crucial fact about these global crises is that all of them have psychological origins.
Our own behavior has created these threats, and, thus, psychological approaches may be essential to understanding and reversing them.
And to the extent that these threats are determined by psychological forces within us and between us, they are actually symptoms - symptoms for our individual and collective state of mind.
These global symptoms reflect and express the:
faulty beliefs and perceptions
fears and fantasies
defenses and denials
that shape and mis-shape our individual and collective behavior.
The state of the world reflects our state of mind; our collective crises mirror our collective consciousness."
In the book entitled Population - Opposing Viewpoints is a chapter written by Jacques-Yves Cousteau which first appeared in the Nov. 1992 edition of Populi.
Cousteau in 1972
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View full-sizeDownload Jacques-Yves Cousteau, AC (/kuːˈstoʊ/, also UK: /ˈkuːstoʊ/, French: [ʒak iv kusto]; 11 June 1910 – 25 June 1997) was a French naval officer, oceanographer, filmmaker and author. He co-invented the first successful open-circuit self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA), called the Aqua-Lung, which assisted him in producing some of the first underwater documentaries.
In this article, Cousteau writes:
MALTHUS’S PREDICTION HAS COME TRUE
"What is happening now is a consequence of the exponential nature of population growth while available resources obey a linear progression and are ultimately limited, as the
British economist Thomas Robert Malthus prophesied almost 200 years ago.
The warnings were repeated by the Club of Rome after World War II, and substantiated by Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution; in his acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, addressed to the leaders of the world, he insisted that they had only 30 years to harness the demographic threat.
"Twenty years have passed since, Borlaug told me, and not only have the leaders taken no action whatsoever, they have even avoided discussing the subject. Since then, the situation has worsened."
Again, Cousteau:
SOLUTIONS MUST BE FOUND TO CURB POPULATION GROWTH
If we want our precarious endeavor to succeed, we must convince all human beings to participate in our adventure, and we must urgently find solutions to curb the population explosion that has a direct influence on the impoverishment of the less-favored communities.
Otherwise, generalized resentment will beget hatred, and the ugliest genocide imaginable, involving billions of people, will become unavoidable.
We must have the courage to face the situation: either the leaders of the world, having participated in the Rio Conference, understand that what is at stake is literally to save the human species, and accept the need to take drastic, unconventional, unpopular decisions, or the impending disaster dreaded by the British and American scientific academies will precipitate"
Cousteau concludes with:
"Uncontrolled population growth and poverty must not be fought from inside, from Europe, from North America or any nation or group of nations; it must be attacked from the outside - by international agencies helped in the formidable job by competent and totally independent non-governmental organizations.
"A world policy inspired by eco-biology and eco-sociology is the only one capable of steering our perilous course towards a golden age, and protecting cultural and biological diversity while proudly hoisting the colors of humankind."
CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE
In the 1982 book, Higher Form of Killing - The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare [Hill and Wang Publishers, 19 Union Square West, New York 10003 - to order, call 800-788-6262], which is a research masterpiece, Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman write:
"In no future war will the military be able to ignore poison gas.
It is a higher form of killing."
[Professor Fritz Haber, pioneer of gas warfare, on receiving the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1919.]
"The world’s oldest chemical warfare installation occupies 7,000 gently rolling acres of countryside on the southern edge of Salisbury Plain, known as Porton Down [England].
Over 700 men and women work there in labs and offices scattered through 200 buildings.
There are police and fire stations:
a hospital
a library
a branch of Lloyds Bank
a detailed archive with thousands of reports and photographs; there is even a cinema to screen the miles of film taken during experiments.
They are the residue of more than six decades of research, generally at the forefront of contemporary scientific knowledge.
Though there have been many political storms, and several attempts to close it down, Porton has survived them all - proof of the military’s enduring fascination with poison gases, even in a country which now officially has no chemical weapons.
"It was in January 1916 that the War Office compulsorily purchased an initial 3,000 acres of downland between the tiny villages of Porton and Idmiston, and began to clear a site for what was then known as the War Department Experimental Ground."
Later in the chapter:
"This was a crucial admission.
No matter how loudly the British, or any other nation, renounced gas warfare in public, in secret they felt bound to give their scientists a free hand to go on devising the deadliest weapons they could, on the grounds that they had first to be invented, before countermeasures could be prepared.
"Porton Down made use of this logic between 1919 and 1939 to carry out a mass of offensive research, developing gas grenades and hand contamination bombs; a toxic air smoke bomb charged with a new arsenic code-named "DM" was tested; anti-tank weapons were produced; and Porton developed an aircraft spray tank capable of dispersing mustard gas from a height of 15,000 feet.
At the same time the weapons of the First World War - the Livens projector, the mortar, the chemical shell and even the cylinder - were all modified and improved."
Several paragraphs later:
"Mustard gas, ’the King of Gases’, employed the most human volunteers.
Just one experiment in 1924 involved forty men."
And, In October 1929:
"Two subjects received copious applications of crude Mustard which practically covered the inner aspect of the forearm.
After wiping the liquid mustard off roughly with a small tuft of grass the ointment (seven weeks old) was lightly rubbed with the fingers over the area ..."
This is just a random selection of the sort of work which was done in Britain.
Similar research was being carried out throughout the world. Italy established a Servizio Chimico Militare in 1923 with an extensive proving ground in the north of the country.
The main French chemical warfare installation was the Atelier de Pyrotechnic du Bouchet near Paris.
The Japanese Navy began work on chemical weapons in 1923, and the Army followed suit in 1925.
In Germany, despite the fact that Haber’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute had been closed down in 1919, limited defensive work continued, later to form the basis of Germany’s offensive effort.
And in 1924, the Military-Chemical Administration of the Red Army was established, and Russian chemical troops were stationed at each provincial army headquarters.
Chemical weapons were not merely researched and developed - they were used.
At the beginning of 1919 the British employed the "M"device (which produced clouds of arsenic smoke) at Archangel when they intervened in the Russian Civil War, dropping the canisters from airplanes into the dense forests.
The anti-Bolshevik White Army was equipped with British gas shells, and the Red army was also alleged to have used chemicals.
Later in 1919, Foulkes was dispatched to India, and in August urged the War Office to use chemicals against the Afghans and rebellious tribesmen on the North-West Frontier:
"Ignorance, lack of instruction and discipline and the absence of protection on the part of Afghans and tribesmen will undoubtedly enhance the casualty producing value of mustard gas in frontier fighting."
Again, later in the chapter:
"Finally, in May 1925, under the auspices of the League of Nations, a conference on the international arms trade was convened in Geneva. Led by the United States, the delegates agreed to try and tackle the problem of poison gas, "with", as the Americans put it, "the hope of reducing the barbarity of modern warfare."
After a month of wrangling in legal and military committees - during which the Polish delegation farsightedly suggested that they also ban the use of germ weapons, then little more than a theory - the delegates came together on 17th June to sign what remains to this day the strongest legal constraint on chemical and biological warfare:
The undersigned Plenipotentiaries, in the name of their respective Governments:
Whereas the use of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world Whereas the prohibition of such use has been declared in Treaties to which the majority of Powers of the world are Parties To the end that this prohibition shall be universally accepted as a part of International Law, binding alike the conscience and practice of nations Declare:
That the High Contracting Parties, so far as they are not already Parties to Treaties prohibiting such use, accept this prohibition, agree to extend this prohibition to the use of bacteriological methods of warfare and agree to be bound as between themselves according to the terms of this declaration..."
Thirty-eight powers signed the Geneva Protocol, among them:
the United States
the British Empire
France
Germany
Italy
Japan
and Canada; the fledgling USSR did not attend.
"The signing of the Geneva Protocol of 1925" as one expert has put it, "was the high-water mark of the hostility of public opinion towards chemical warfare."
Unfortunately, the anti-gas lobby had underestimated the strength of the interests ranged against them.
Merely signing the Protocol was not enough to make it binding - individual governments had to ratify it.
In many cases this meant a time lag of at least a year, and it was in this period that the supporters of chemical weapons struck back.
The United States Chemical Warfare Service [CWS] launched a highly effective lobby.
They enlisted the support of veterans’ associations and of the American Chemical Society - whose Executive declared that"
"The prohibition of chemical warfare meant the abandonment of humane methods for the old horrors of battle."
As has often happened since, the fight for chemical weapons was represented as a fight for general military preparedness.
Senators joined the CWS campaign, among them the Chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs who opened his attack on ratification in the Senate debate with a reference to the 1922 Washington Treaty:
"I think it is fair to say that in 1922 there was much of hysteria and much of misinformation concerning chemical warfare."
Other Senators rose to speak approvingly of resolutions which they had received attacking the Geneva Protocol - from:
the Association of Military Surgeons
the American Legion
the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States
the Reserve Officers Association of the United States and the Military Order of the World War.
Under such heavy fire, the State Department saw no alternative but to withdraw the Protocol and reintroduce it at a more favorable moment.
It was not to be until 1970, forty-five years after the Geneva conference, that the Protocol was again submitted to the Senate for ratification; it took another five years for this to be achieved.
Japan followed America’s example and refused to ratify (they finally did so in May 1970).
In Europe, the various countries eyed one another cautiously.
France ratified first, in 1926.
Two years later in 1928, Italy followed suit and a fortnight after her, the Soviet Union declared that she, too, considered herself bound by the Protocol.
Only after Germany ratified in 1929 did Britain feel able at last to accept the Protocol:
on 9 April 1930, five years after the Conference, Britain at last fell into line.
Many of the states which ratified the Protocol - including:
France
Great Britain
the USSR
did so only after adding two significant reservations:
That the agreement would not be considered binding unless the country they were fighting had also ratified the Protocol.
That if any other country attacked them using chemical or biological weapons, they reserved the right to reply in kind.
Later in the chapter:
This "defensive" work included:
"improvements to many First World War weapons, including gas shells, mortar bombs, the Livens Projector and toxic smoke generators"
and the development of
"Apparatus for mustard gas spray from aircraft, bombs of many types, airburst mustard gas shells, gas grenades and weapons for attacking tanks."
The various inventions were tested in north Wales, Scotland, and in installations scattered throughout the Empire, notably:
The commitment by most of the world’s governments never to initiate the use of poison gas did not stop research:
it simply made the whole subject that much more sensitive, and thus more secret.
In 1928, the Germans began to collaborate with the Russians in a series of top-secret tests called "Project Tomka" at a site in the Soviet Union about twenty kilometers west of Volsk.
For the next five years, around thirty German experts lived and worked alongside
"A rather larger number of Soviet staff,"
mainly engaged in testing mustard gas.
The security measures surrounding Project Tomka
"Were such that any of its participants who spoke about it to outsiders risked capital punishment."
In Japan, experimental production of mustard gas was begun in 1928 at the Tandanoumi Arsenal.
Six years later the Japanese were manufacturing a ton of Lewisite a week; by 1937 output had risen to two tons per day.
Extensive testing - including trials in tropical conditions on Formosa in 1930 - resulted in the development of a fearsome array of gas weapons:
rockets able to deliver ten liters of agent up to two miles
devices for emitting a "gas fog"
flame throwers modified to hurl jets of hydrogen cyanide
mustard spray bombs which released streams of gas while gently floating to Earth attached to parachutes
remotely controlled contamination trailers capable of laying mustard in strips seven meters wide
the "Masuka Dan", a hand-carried anti-tank weapon loaded with a kilogram of hydrogen cyanide."
And then,
"There is now little doubt that from 1937 onwards the Japanese made extensive use of poison gas in their war against the Chinese.
In October 1937 China made a formal protest to the League of Nations."
And two paragraphs later,
"The Italians made use of chemicals in their invasion of Abyssinia in much the same way.
In 1935 and 1936, 700 tons of gas were shipped out, most of it for use by the Italian air force.
First came torpedo-shaped mustard bombs."
In a later chapter from A Higher Form of Killing, comes:
"The noise of fourteen thousand aeroplanes advancing in open order.
But in the Kurfurstendamm and the Eight Arrondissement, the explosion of anthrax bombs is hardly louder than the popping of a paper bag." Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932).
The history of chemical and biological warfare has thrown up some strange stories, but few are as bizarre as those which surround a small island off the northwest coast of Scotland.
It lies in its own well-protected bay, close to the fishing village of Aultbea - an outcrop of rock, well-covered with heather, three hundred feet high, one and a half miles long and a mile wide.
"It takes about twenty minutes to reach by fishing boat from Aultbea.
As you draw closer it’s possible to make out the shapes of hundreds of sea birds nesting on its craggy shoreline.
Their calls are the only sounds which break the silence.
Once upon a time the island is said to have supported eleven families.
Today, the only sign of human habitation is the ruin of a crofter’s cottage.
"This utterly abandoned island is Gruinard.
Thanks to a series of secret wartime experiments - the full details of which are still classified - no one is allowed to live, or even land here."
Again, later in the chapter,
"Anthrax had long been considered the most practicable filling for a biological weapon.
A decade earlier, Aldous Huxley had predicted a war involving anthrax bombs.
Even before that, in 1925, Winston Churchill wrote of ’pestilences methodically prepared and deliberately launched upon man and beast...’ Blight to destroy crops, Anthrax to slay horses and cattle, Plague to poison not armies only but whole districts - such are the lines alone which military science is remorselessly advancing."
"In July 1942 the Chinese allegations were passed on to Winston Churchill.
Two days later he had them placed on the agenda of the Pacific War Council.
"The growing alarm in London and Washington that the Japanese were on the verge of initiating biological warfare gave an added urgency to the first anthrax bomb tests on Gruinard that summer.
Up to then the Allied germ warfare effort had lagged significantly behind the Japanese, but from 1942 onwards the Anglo-American biological program began to vie with the Manhattan Project for top development priority.
The British biological warfare project was born on 12 February 1934 at a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff.
For two years, a Disarmament Conference in Geneva had been discussing means of finally ridding the world of chemical weapons.
Germ warfare had also been included, and in view of this, Sir Maurice Hankey told the Service Chiefs, he "was wondering whether it might not be right to consider the possibilities and potentialities of this form of war."
From the same chapter,
"In October the CID approved, and Hankey became Chairman of the newly-created Microbiological Warfare Committee.
"In March 1937 the Committee submitted its first report, specifically on plague, anthrax and foot-and-mouth disease.
Though they concluded that ’for the time being ... the practical difficulties of introducing bacteria into this country on a large scale were such as to render an attempt unlikely’, they urged that stocks of serum be built up to meet any potential threat.
From 1937 to 1940, Britain began to stockpile vaccines, fungicides and insecticides against biological attack.
"In April 1938 the Committee produced a second report, and in June, Hanley circulated ’Proposals for an Emergency Bacteriological Service to operate in War’:
the emphasis was on defense, the tone still low-key."
Winston Churchill in a "Most Secret" minute to the Chiefs of Staff.
6 July 1944:
"... It may be several weeks or even months before I shall ask you to drench Germany with poison gas, and if we do it, let us do it one hundred percent.
In the meanwhile, I want the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people and not by the particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists which one runs across now here now there."
Again from A Higher Form Of Killing,
"At the end of the war, the British alone had manufactured 70 million gas masks, 40 million tins of anti-gas ointment and stockpiled 40,000 tons of bleach for decontamination; 10 million leaflets had been prepared for immediate distribution in the event of a chemical attack, and by a long-standing arrangement the BBC would have interrupted programs with specially prepared gas warnings.
Contingency planning ran down to the smallest details."
Later in the same chapter,
"On Christmas Eye 1949, Moscow Radio announced that twelve Japanese prisoners of war were to be charged with waging biological warfare in China.
The Russians claimed that the Japanese had been producing vast quantities of bacteria and had planned to wage biological warfare against the Allies.
The allegations became more specific the next week.
Three days later Moscow Radio claimed that Detachment 731 of the Kwantung Army had used prisoners of war for horrific biological warfare experiments, and then, the following day, that one of the prisoners had confessed to his interrogators that the unit had been established on the orders of the Emperor himself.
On 29 December Pravda came to the point.
The United States was protecting other Japanese war criminals and engaging in biological warfare research herself."
Later still,
"In the early days after the Second World War it was extremely difficult for the British or Americans to check many of the astonishing claims they came upon in the captured German files.
They concluded, however, that there was more than adequate evidence that the Soviet Union had been, and was still, engaged in some form of biological warfare research.
Although little was known of the nature of contemporary work, it was thought that the Russians maintained some six sites for biological warfare research, most of them in the Urals.
The British and Americans recognized that their intelligence was inadequate.
But the evidence was judged more than sufficient to justify continuing similar work in the West.
When they came to assess the vulnerability of the United Kingdom to a potential germ attack, they discovered that London, containing over 12 percent of the population, was only 500 miles from airbases in Soviet-occupied eastern Germany.
When the Joint Technical Warfare committee assessed how easy a retaliatory strike with biological weapons might be, they realized that the civilian targets against which bacterial devices would be most effective were dispersed across the huge expanse of the Soviet Union.
Even using British Empire airbases in Nicosia (Cyprus) and Peshawar (India), there was only one Soviet city of more than 100,000 population within 500 miles range, and only thirty-five such centers of population within 1,000 miles range.
Clearly, at the very least, there should be a major research program aimed at developing some defense.
Intelligence, it was freely admitted, was inadequate.
But no such reticence found its ways into the stories which began appearing in the press,
[a headline:]
RUSSIA REPORTED PRODUCING ’DISEASE AGENTS’ FOR WAR
In eight "military bacterial stations", one of them on a ghost ship in the Arctic Ocean, the Soviet Union is mass-producing enormous quantities of "disease agents" for aggressive use against the soldiers and civilians of the free world.
In particular, the Red Army is stockpiling two specific "biological weapons", with which it expects to strike a strategic blow and win any future war decisively, even before it gets started officially.
Jumping several paragraphs later,
"There seems little doubt that the Soviet Union did conduct extensive research into germ warfare in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
It was felt legitimate to conclude that such research was unlikely to have stopped at some arbitrary point after the Second World War.
But firm intelligence to suggest the nature of the work was notably lacking.
"For most of the post-war years military microbiologists developed ’retaliatory’ germ weapons against threats they did not know to exist, and then attempted to develop defenses not against the weapons of a potential future enemy, but against the diseases they themselves had refined."
Again, later,
Certainly, during the 1950s, the Russians were expecting chemical and biological weapons to be used against them by the West.
Zhukov in 1944
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View full-sizeDownload Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov[a] (Russian: Георгий Константинович Жуков; 1 December 1896 – 18 June 1974) was a Marshal of the Soviet Union. He also served as Chief of the General Staff, Minister of Defence, and was a member of the Presidium of the Communist Party (later Politburo). During World War II, Zhukov oversaw some of the Red Army's most decisive victories, after which he was appointed the military governor of the Soviet Occupation Zone in Germany.
In 1956 Marshal Zhukov told the Twentieth Party Congress:
"Future war, if they unleash it, will be characterized by the massive use of air-forces, various rocket weapons, and various means of mass destruction, such as atomic, thermonuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons."
Zhukov did not say that the Soviet Union planned to use these weapons herself.
By 1960 the head of US Army Research was telling a Congressional inquiry:
"We know that the Soviets are putting a high priority on the development of lethal and non-lethal weapons, and that this weapons stockpile consists of about one-sixth chemical munitions."
If it was true that one sixth of the total amount of weapons available to the Soviet Union was made up of chemical shells and bombs, it represented an alarming threat to the United States and her NATO allies.
Some years after this estimate had concluded that the United States was "highly vulnerable" to germ warfare attack.
They pointed out that since the end of the war very little new work had been done to produce a biological bomb.
It would, they believed, take,
"Approximately one year of intensive effort."
before America could wage biological warfare.
True, there was no hard evidence that any potential enemy had developed a biological weapon, but could the United States afford to take the risk of not having her own, should one later be developed elsewhere?
The argument was persuasive.
In October 1950 the Secretary for Defense accepted a proposal to build a factory to manufacture disease.
Congress secretly voted ninety million dollars, to be spent renovating a Second World War Arsenal near the small cotton town of Pine Bluff, in the mid-west state of Arkansas.
The new biological warfare plant had ten stories, three of them built underground.
It was equipped with ten fermenters for the mass production of bacteria at short notice, although the plant was never used to capacity.
Local people in the town of Pine Bluff had some idea of the purpose of the new army factory being built down the road, but in general there was, as the Pentagon put it later,
"a reluctance to publicize the program."
The first biological weapons were ready the following year, although they were designed to attack not humans but plants.
In 1950 Camp Detrick [Maryland] scientists had submitted a Top-Secret report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on work they had carried out on a "pigeon bomb".
In an attempt to discover a technique of destroying an enemy’s food supplies, the scientists had dusted the feathers of homing pigeons with cereal rust spores, a disease which attacks crops.
The researchers discovered that even after a one-hundred-mile flight, enough spores remained on the birds’ feathers to infect oats left in their cages.
Then they had experimented in dropping pigeons out of aircraft over the Virgin Islands.
Finally, they dispensed with live birds altogether and simply filled a "cluster bomb" with contaminated turkey feathers.
In each of these bizarre tests the men from Camp Detrick concluded that enough of the disease survived the journey to infect the target crop.
In 1951 the first anti-crop bombs were placed in production for the US Air Force.
The United States had established the first peace-time biological weapon production line.
[And later:]
Fort Detrick scientists discovered a Trinidadian who had been infected with yellow fever in 1954 and had later recovered.
They took serum from the Trinidadian and injected it into monkeys.
From the monkeys they removed infected plasma, into which they dropped mosquito larvae.
The infected mosquitoes were then encouraged to bite laboratory mice and pass on the disease.
This ingenious technique of public health research in reverse worked.
The mice duly contracted yellow fever.
Laboratories were built at Fort Detrick where colonies of the aedes aegypti mosquitoes were fed on a diet of syrup and blood.
They laid their eggs on moist paper towels.
The eggs would later turn into larvae, and eventually into a new generation of mosquitoes.
The Fort Detrick laboratories could produce half a million mosquitoes a month, and by the late fifties a plan had been drawn up for a plant to produce one hundred and thirty million mosquitoes a month.
Once the mosquitoes had been infected with yellow fever, the Chemical Corps planned to fire them at an enemy from "cluster bombs" dropped from aircraft and from the warhead of the "Sergeant" missile.
To test the feasibility of this extraordinary weapon, the army needed to know whether the mosquitoes could be relied upon to bite people.
During 1956 they carried out a series of tests in which uninfected female mosquitoes were released first into a residential area of Savannah, Georgia, and then dropped from an aircraft over a Florida bombing range.
"Within a day", according to a secret Chemical Corps report, "the mosquitoes had spread a distance of between one and two miles and bitten many people."
The effects of releasing infected mosquitoes can only be guessed at.
Yellow fever, as the Chemical Corps noted, is "a highly dangerous disease", at the very least causing:
high temperatures
headache
vomiting
In about a third of the recorded cases at that time, yellow fever had proved fatal.
Nor were mosquitoes the only insects conscripted into the service of the army.
In 1956 the army began investigating the feasibility of breeding fifty million fleas a week, presumably to spread plague.
By the end of the fifties the Fort Detrick laboratories were said to contain mosquitoes infected with yellow fever, malaria and dengue (an acute viral disease also known as Breakbone Fever for which there is no cure); fleas infected with plague; ticks contaminated with tularemia; and flies infected with cholera, anthrax and dysentery.
Further into the book A Higher Form of Killing, we read:
"The Vietnam War might have represented the perfect field laboratory for men like General Rothschild to test their theories about seeding clouds with anthrax.
But there was by now sufficient evidence of the way in which American and South Vietnamese troops would also be affected to rule it out.
Instead, the germ warfare laboratories concentrated their efforts on the development of incapacitating diseases which would bring an enemy down with sickness for days and weeks.
For some years the Fort Detrick laboratories had been working on enterotoxins causing food poisoning, on the military theory, as one proponent put it, that,
"A guy shitting away his stomach can’t aim a rifle at you."
By 1964, they believed a weapon based on the theory was feasible.
But by now, another disabling disease looked a better candidate."
Several paragraphs later, we read:
"The results of the continuing research could be seen in the maps of Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, part of which were marked "permanent bio-contaminated area", after anthrax experiments in the mid-sixties.
In the Pacific more tests were carried out with "hot" agents - the jargon for real biological weapons - on a number of deserted islands.
The results of the tests are still classified on the grounds that they reveal weaknesses in American defenses.
By March 1967 Fort Detrick had developed a bacteriological warhead for the Sergeant missile capable of delivering disease up to 100 miles behind enemy lines.
The Defense Department had justified the accelerating rush into biological weapons in the early sixties by saying that there was no prospect of any treaty being arrived at which would be acceptable to the United States.
Since any argument to ban biological weapons was unlikely, they argued, the United States was bound to continue her research work.
"They were wrong.
In 1968 the subject of chemical and biological warfare came up for discussion at the standing Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee in Geneva.
Previous attempts to get agreement on an international treaty to ban the weapons had floundered, because of an insistence that both chemical and biological weapons be included in the same treaty.
Since gas weapons had already been used in war, been proved effective, and were stockpiled on a large scale, they would be much more difficult to outlaw than germ weapons, which as far as could satisfactorily be proved had never been used in war.
The British proposed that the two subjects be separated, and introduced a draft Biological Weapons Convention which would commit all signatory states to renouncing the weapons for all time.
There was heavy initial opposition from the Russians and their eastern European allies, and little overt enthusiasm from Washington.
The British and Canadians, who had shared their germ warfare expertise with the Americans, nevertheless argued to President Nixon that an international treaty was now a real possibility.
Portrait, c. 1969–1974
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View full-sizeDownload Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913 – April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a representative and senator from California and as the 36th vice president from 1953 to 1961 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. His presidency saw the reduction of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, détente with the Soviet Union and China, the Apollo 11 Moon landing, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Nixon's second term ended early when he became the only U.S. president to resign from office, as a result of the Watergate scandal.
It was a brave gesture, which proved the spur for which the British had been hoping.
The laborious negotiations in the Palais des Nations, Geneva, received a considerable boost with Nixon’s announcement.
Within two years the Soviet Union had abandoned its opposition to a germ warfare convention.
On 4 April 1972 representatives of the two countries signed an undertaking that they would
"Never in any circumstances develop, produce, stockpile, or otherwise acquire or retain any biological weapons."
Over eighty other countries followed suit.
The Biological Weapons Convention was a triumph, because unlike many other arms control agreements which merely restricted the development and deployment of new weapons, it removed one category of armaments from the world arsenals altogether.
By the time agreement was finally signed, the research which had begun with a small group of biologists pondering their contribution to the war against Hitler had produced a host of diseases capable of spreading sickness throughout the world. Hitler’s Genealogy – Library of Rickandria
In addition to infections which would destroy wheat and rice:
and Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis had all been "standardized" for use against man.
Plans had been laid for their use behind enemy lines in the event of another war in Europe.
At Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas the machinery which for twenty years had been mass-producing disease was used to turn the germs into a harmless sludge, which was spread upon the ground as an army public relations officer explained what a good fertilizer it would make.
And, on a small, bleak island off the Scottish coast the warning signs were due to be repainted.
[Again:]
Despite the fact that such major powers as France and China have still (by early 1982) not signed it, largely because they consider the verification procedures to be inadequate, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention was a major achievement.
One of the provisions of the treaty committed the eighty-seven signatory countries to
"Continue negotiations on good faith"
with a view to obtaining a similar agreement to ban chemical weapons.
The United Nations General Assembly optimistically dubbed the 1970s "The Disarmament Decade".
In the field of chemical warfare, it might more properly have been named "The Distrust Decade".
[Later:]
In January 1978, a correspondent with Reuters’ news agency reported from NATO headquarters that "scientific experts" had informed him that the Russians were developing,
"Three horrific new diseases for warfare …. Lassa fever, which according to the sources, kills 35 out of every 100 people it strikes; Ebola fever, which kills 70 out of every 100; and the deadly Marburg fever (Green Monkey Disease)."
Not surprisingly, the effect of these allegations was to throw serious doubt on the value of attempting to negotiate a second treaty with the Soviet Union to ban gas warfare.
Indeed, in the summer of 1978 a story appeared suggesting that Nixon’s original decision to stop developing new chemical and biological weapons had been the result of work by Soviet spies.
"According to US intelligence officials", said the NEW YORK TIMES, "the Soviet Union attempted to influence then - President Richard Nixon in 1969 to halt chemical and biological weapons development by transmitting information through double agents working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
The paper maintained that the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, had conveyed the information to Nixon personally.
While none of Nixon’s White House staff was able to recall having been given any information about chemical or biological weapons by FBI agents, the NEW YORK TIMES report was sufficient nonetheless to add to the growing disquiet over what the Russians might be up to.
Soon there was a positive cascade of stories about Soviet preparations for germ warfare.
A Polish army officer claimed to have been told that KGB specialists in biological warfare had been posted to Cuba.
Then in October 1979 came perhaps the most sensational allegation of all.
The fledgling British news magazine Now! splashed across its front cover the headline "Exclusive. Russia’s secret germ warfare disaster".
It reported that,
"Hundreds of people are reported to have died, and thousands to have suffered serious injury as a result of an accident which took place this summer in a factory involved in the production of bacteriological weapons in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk."
The Soviet authorities had attempted to hush up the accident, said the magazine, but information had been obtained from a "traveler who was in the city at the time".
This "traveler" claimed that bodies of the dead were delivered to their relatives in sealed coffins.
Those few who had managed to glimpse the bodies had described them as being "covered in brown patches".
[And again:]
In the latter half of the 1970s there emerged a group of military theorists who believed the threat of Russian chemical warfare to be one of the great unrecognized dangers facing the West.
In increasingly strident tones they began to argue in favor of chemical rearmament within NATO.
One of the more restrained analyses of the Soviet threat was made by Professor John Erickson, an acknowledged authority on the Soviet Army.
Erickson estimated that there were eighty thousand specialist troops in the Red Army, commanded by Lieutenant General V.K. Pikalov, whose battlefield job it was to decontaminate:
men
machines
weaponry of chemicals
There were a thousand ranges where Soviet troops trained to fight on a contaminated battlefield.
Soviet tanks and armored cars were equipped with elaborate seals and pressurization systems to keep out gas.
Chemical training was taken so seriously that Soviet soldiers, he discovered, had been burned by real gas used in training.
Erickson noted that the Russians,
"constantly emphasize the likely use by the enemy - presumably NATO - of chemical weapons"
yet NATO, as Erickson remarked, had only a small number of such weapons.
Furthermore, Russian training emphasized defense not only against nerve gas, but also against blood and lung agents first developed during the First World War, and now unimportant in the NATO stockpile. Erickson decided that,
"The attraction of the chemical weapon would appear to be growing for the Soviet Command."
[And, continuing later on:]
The conviction was growing among the "hawks" in NATO that the decision to stop expanding the chemical arsenal had given a dangerous hostage to fortune.
In 1980 the British opened a purpose designed 7,000-acre chemical warfare "Battle Run" training area in the Wiltshire hills alongside Porton Down.
The US Army opened a specialist chemical training school in Alabama.
The US Chemical Corps, reduced to 2,000 in the early 1970s, was built up to nearly 6,000 by 1981.
In 1979 NATO commanders played out of their biennial war games simulating the outbreak of World War Three.
Code-named "Wintex", the exercise involved only the generals, civil servants and politicians who would make the critical decisions about how the war should be fought.
In Operations Rooms in Europe and North America they acted out how they would respond to an escalating international crisis which finally pitted NATO and Warsaw Pact against each other in open war.
As hostilities intensified, someone in NATO headquarters fed new information into the war plan being flashed to the decision makers in their concrete bunkers:
the Soviet army had launched an attack with chemical weapons.
What should be the NATO response?
The choice alarmed everyone - both the small NATO members who disliked gas but wanted to avoid nuclear war at all costs, and the NATO nuclear powers, where many felt that the appropriate response was an attack with battlefield nuclear weapons, which itself ran the danger of inviting full scale Soviet nuclear counterstrike.
The then NATO Supreme Commander, General Alexander Haig, soon to become President Reagan’s Secretary of State, told reporters in 1978 that NATO’s ability to wage war with chemicals was "very weak".
Haig c. 1970s
10.7 MB
View full-sizeDownload Alexander Meigs Haig Jr. (/heɪɡ/; December 2, 1924 – February 20, 2010) was United States secretary of state under president Ronald Reagan and White House chief of staff under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Prior to and in between these cabinet-level positions, he was a general in the U.S. Army, serving first as the vice chief of staff of the Army and then as Supreme Allied Commander Europe. In 1973, Haig became the youngest four-star general in the Army's history.
"Sometime in the near future," he said, "this will have to be reassessed".
His successor as Supreme Commander went further.
"We ought to be able to respond with chemical weapons," he said, "and they ought to know we have that capacity to respond."
Ten years after Nixon’s decision to suspend the manufacture of chemical weapons, by the end of the so-called Disarmament Decade, the advocates of chemical rearmament included some of the most senior figures in the military establishment.
There was already a weapon developed to make up for the deficiencies the generals saw all around them.
The idea was simple, and, by the 1970s, some twenty years old.
From A Higher Form of Killing, in conclusion:
Increasing cynicism about Soviet intentions had already led in the late 1970s to a more aggressive stance.
Remembering the opposition to chemical weapons which had arisen during the late 1960s and recognizing that any new generation would need to be based in Europe, the Pentagon began discussions with the British.
Although initial negotiations with the Callaghan government came to nothing, discussions on the possible basing of chemical weapons in Britain were resumed after the 1979 election brought Margaret Thatcher to power.
Studio portrait, c. 1995–96
1.89 MB
View full-sizeDownload Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, DStJ, PC, FRS, HonFRSC (née Roberts; 13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013) was a British stateswoman and Conservative politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century and the first woman to hold the position. As prime minister, she implemented economic policies known as Thatcherism. A Soviet journalist dubbed her the "Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style.
By the spring of 1980 the British Defense Secretary was publicly ruminating about the size and power of the Soviet chemical arsenal.
That summer the British held a series of meetings with their American counterparts which resulted in British support for Pentagon proposals to begin producing a new generation of gas weapons.
By December 1980 the British Defense Secretary had been finally converted to the cause of chemical rearmament.
Even before the T2 allegations, the climate had changed so much that in 1980 the Pentagon did not include proposals for a new binary gas weapon plant in its request for funds for the coming year.
There was no need.
When the budget proposal came before Congress for approval, eager politicians endorsed a suggestion to write into the budget plans to begin work on a new factory capable of turning out 20,000 rounds of 155 mm binary nerve agent shells every month.
The entire debate in both houses of Congress took less than three hours.
By the time the T2 allegations surfaced even Richard Nixon, the man who seemed to have halted the chemical arms race in 1969, believed that his efforts had been in vain and that the Russians had rearmed while the United States stood still. In the past governments have justified continuing gas and germ research by pointing to the weapons they believe the enemy to possess.
Plans for chemical rearmament in the West are already well advanced.
Unless disarmament negotiations suddenly bear fruit, the present climate of suspicion may provide the perfect culture in which to breed a new generation of weapons.
REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN
In 1967, Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace was published.
"As we have indicated, the preeminence of the concept of war as the principal organizing force in most societies has been insufficiently appreciated.
This is also true of its extensive effects throughout the many non-military activities of society.
These effects are less apparent in complex industrial societies like our own than in primitive cultures, the activities of which can be more easily and fully comprehended."
And also,
Another possible surrogate for the control of potential enemies of society is the reintroduction, in some form consistent with modern technology and political processes, of slavery.
Up to now, this has been suggested only in fiction, notably in the works of:
Wells
Huxley
Orwell
and others engaged in the imaginative anticipation of the sociology of the future.
But the fantasies projected in Brave New World and 1984 have seemed less and less implausible over the years since their publication.
The traditional association of slavery with ancient pre-industrial cultures should not blind us to its adaptability to advanced forms of social organization, nor should its equally traditional incompatibility with Western moral and economic values.
It is entirely possible that the development of a sophisticated form of slavery may be an absolute prerequisite for social control in a world at peace.
As a practical matter, conversion of the code of military discipline to a euphemized form of enslavement would entail surprisingly little revision; the logical first step would be the adoption of some form of "universal" military service.
From the Iron Mountain report, under the heading of Ecological,
Considering the shortcomings of war as a mechanism of selective population control, it might appear that devising substitutes for this function should be comparatively simple.
Schematically this is so, but the problem of timing the transition to a new ecological balancing device makes the feasibility of substitution less certain.
It must be remembered that the limitation of war in this function is entirely eugenic.
War has not been genetically progressive.
But as a system of gross population control to preserve the species it cannot fairly be faulted.
And, as has been pointed out, the nature of war is itself in transition.
Current trends in warfare - the increasing strategic bombing of civilians and the greater military importance now attached to the destruction of sources of supply (as opposed to purely "military" bases and personnel) - strongly suggest that a truly qualitative improvement is in the making.
Assuming the war system is to continue, it is more than probable that the regressively selective quality of war will have been reversed, as its victims become more genetically representative of their societies.
There is no question but that a universal requirement that procreation be limited to the products of artificial insemination would provide a fully adequate substitute control for population levels.
Such a reproductive system would, of course, have the added advantage of being susceptible of direct eugenic management. Its predictable further development - conception and embryonic growth taking place wholly under laboratory conditions - would extend these controls to the logical conclusion.
The ecological function of war under these circumstances would not only be superseded but surpassed in effectiveness.
The indicated intermediate step - total control of conception with a variant of the ubiquitous "pill" via water supplies or certain essential foodstuffs, offset by a controlled "antidote" - is already under development.
There would appear to be no foreseeable need to revert to any of the outmoded practices referred to in the previous section (infanticide, etc.) as there might have been if the possibility of transition to peace had arisen two generations ago.
The real question here, therefore, does not concern the viability of this war substitute, but the political problems involved in bringing it about.
It cannot be established while the war system is still in effect.
The reason for this is simple:
excess population is war material.
As long as any society must contemplate even a remote possibility of war, it must maintain a maximum supportable population, even when so doing critically aggravates an economic liability.
This is paradoxical, in view of war’s role in reducing excess population, but it is readily understood.
War controls the general population level, but the ecological interest of any single society lies in maintaining its hegemony vis-a-vis other societies.
The obvious analogy can be seen in a free-enterprise economy.
Practices damaging to the society as a whole - both competitive and monopolistic - are abetted by the conflicting economic motives of individual capital interests.
The obvious precedent can be found in the seemingly irrational political difficulties which have blocked universal adoption of simple birth-control methods.
Nations desperately in need of increasing unfavorable production-consumption ratios are nevertheless unwilling to gamble their possible military requirements of twenty years hence for this purpose.
Unilateral population control, as practiced in ancient Japan and in other isolated societies, is out of the question in today’s world.
Since the eugenic solution cannot be achieved until the transition to the peace system takes place, why not wait?
One must qualify the inclination to agree.
As we noted earlier, a real possibility of an unprecedented global crisis of insufficiency exists today, which the war system may not be able to forestall.
If this should come to pass before an agreed-upon transition to peace were completed, the result might be irrevocably disastrous.
There is clearly no solution to this dilemma; it is a risk which must be taken.
But it tends to support the view that if a decision is made to eliminate the war system, it was better done sooner than later.
THE CLUB OF ROME
The 1972 document entitled The Limits to Growth - A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, says:
"The problems U Thant mentions - the arms race, environmental deterioration, the population explosion and economic stagnation - are often cited as the central, long-term problems of modern man.
Many people believe that the future course of human society, perhaps even the survival of human society, depends on the speed and effectiveness with which the world responds to these issues.
And yet only a small fraction of the world’s population is actively concerned with understanding these problems or seeking their solutions."
The report goes on,
The following conclusions have emerged from our work so far.
We are by no means the first group to have stated them.
For the past several decades, people who have looked at the world with a global, long-term perspective have reached similar conclusions.
Nevertheless, the vast majority of policymakers seems to be actively pursuing goals that are inconsistent with these results.
Our conclusions are:
If the present growth trends in:
world population
industrialization
pollution
food production
and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limit to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.
The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future.
The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on Earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.
If the world’s people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.
These conclusions are so far-reaching and raise so many questions for further study that we are quite frankly overwhelmed by the enormity of the job that must be done.
We hope that this book will serve to interest other people, in many fields of study and in many countries of the world, to raise the space and time horizons of their concerns and to join us in understanding and preparing for a period of great transition - the transition from growth to global equilibrium.
The Report concludes with,
How do we, the sponsors of this project, evaluate the report?
We cannot speak definitively for all our colleagues in The Club of Rome, for there are differences of:
interest
emphasis
judgment
among them.
But, despite the preliminary nature of the report, the limits of some of its data, and the inherent complexity of the world system it attempts to describe, we are convinced of the importance of its main conclusions.
We believe that it contains a message of much deeper significance than a mere comparison of dimensions, a message relevant to all aspects of the present human predicament.
Although we can here express only our preliminary views, recognizing that they still require a great deal of reflection and ordering, we are in agreement on the following points:
We are convinced that realization of the quantitative restraints of the world environment and of the tragic consequences of an overshoot is essential to the initiation of new forms of thinking that will lead to a fundamental revision of human behavior and, by implication, of the entire fabric of present-day society.
It is only now that, having begun to understand something of the interactions between demographic growth and economic growth, and having reached unprecedented levels in both, man is forced to take account of the limited dimensions of his planet and the ceilings to his presence and activity on it.
For the first time, it has become vital to inquire into the cost of unrestricted material growth and to consider alternatives to its continuation.
We are further convinced that demographic pressure in the world has already attained such a high level, and is moreover so unequally distributed, that this alone must compel mankind to seek a state of equilibrium on our planet.
Under-populated areas still exist; but, considering the world as a whole, the critical point in population growth is approaching, if it has not already been reached.
There is of course no unique optimum, long-term population level; rather, there are a series of balances between:
population levels
social and material standards
personal freedom
and other elements making up the quality of life.
Given the finite and diminishing stock of non-renewable resources and the finite space of our globe, the principle must be generally accepted that growing numbers of people will eventually imply a lower standard of living and a more complex problematique.
On the other hand, no fundamental human value would be endangered by a leveling off of demographic growth.
We recognize that world equilibrium can become a reality only if the lot of the so-called developing countries is substantially improved, both in absolute terms and relative to the economically developed nations, and we affirm that this improvement can be achieved only through a global strategy.
Short of a world effort, today’s already explosive gaps and inequalities will continue to grow larger.
The outcome can only be disaster, whether due to the selfishness of individual countries that continue to act purely in their own interests, or to a power struggle between the developing and developed nations.
The world system is simply not ample enough nor generous enough to accommodate much longer such egocentric and conflictive behavior by its inhabitants.
The closer we come to the material limits to the planet, the more difficult this problem will be to tackle.
We affirm that the global issue of development is, however, so closely interlinked with other global issues that an overall strategy must be evolved to attack all major problems, including in particular those of man’s relationship with his environment.
With world population doubling time a little more than 30 years, and decreasing, society will be hard put to meet the needs and expectations of so many more people in so short a period.
We are likely to try to satisfy these demands by overexploiting our natural environment and further impairing the life-supporting capacity of the Earth.
Hence, on both sides of the man-environment equation, the situation will tend to worsen dangerously.
We cannot expect technological solutions alone to get us out of this vicious circle.
The strategy for dealing with the two key issues of development and environment must be conceived as a joint one
We recognize that the complex world problematique is to a great extent composed of elements that cannot be expressed in measurable terms.
Nevertheless, we believe that the predominantly quantitative approach used in this report is an indispensable tool for understanding the operation of the problematique.
And we hope that such knowledge can lead to a mastery of its elements.
Although all major world issues are fundamentally linked, no method has yet been discovered to tackle the whole effectively.
The approach we have adopted can be extremely useful in reformulating our thinking about the entire human predicament.
It permits us to define the balances that must exist within human society, and between human society and its habitat, and to perceive the consequences that may ensue when such balances are disrupted.
We are unanimously convinced that rapid, radical redressment of the present unbalanced and dangerously deteriorating world situation is the primary task facing humanity.
Our present situation is so complex and is so much a reflection of man’s multiple activities, however, that no combination of purely technical, economic, or legal measures and devices can bring substantial improvement.
Entirely new approaches are required to redirect society toward goals of equilibrium rather than growth.
Such a reorganization will involve a supreme effort of:
understanding
imagination
political and moral resolve
We believe that the effort is feasible, and we hope that this publication will help to mobilize forces to make it possible.
This supreme effort is a challenge for our generation.
It cannot be passed on to the next.
The effort must be resolutely undertaken without delay, and significant redirection must be achieved during this decade.
Although the effort may initially focus on the implications of growth, particularly of population growth, the totality of the world problematique will soon have to be addressed.
We believe in fact that the need will quickly become evident for social innovation to match technical change, for radical reform of institutions and political processes at all levels the highest, that of world polity.
We are confident that our generation will accept this challenge if we understand the tragic consequences that inaction may bring.
We have no doubt that if mankind is to embark on a new course, concerted international measures and joint long-term planning will be necessary on a scale and scope without precedent.
Such an effort calls for joint endeavor by all peoples, whatever their:
culture
economic system
level of development
But the major responsibility must rest with the more developed nations, not because they have more vision or humanity, but because, having propagated the growth syndrome, they are still at the fountainhead of the progress that sustains it.
As greater insights into the condition and workings of the world system are developed, these nations will come to realize that, in a world that fundamentally needs stability, their high plateaus of development can be justified or tolerated only if they serve not as springboards to reach even higher, but as staging areas from which to organize more equitable distribution of wealth and income worldwide.
We unequivocally support the contention that a brake imposed on world demographic and economic growth spirals must not lead to a freezing of the status quo of economic development of the world’s nations.
If such a proposal were advanced by the rich nations, it would be taken as a final act of neocolonialism.
The achievement of a harmonious state of global economic, socio, and ecological equilibrium must be a joint venture based on joint conviction, with benefits for all.
The greatest leadership will be demanded from the economically developed countries, for the first step toward such a goal would be for them to encourage a deceleration in the growth of their own material output while, at the same time, assisting the developing nations in their efforts to advance their economics more rapidly.
We affirm finally that any deliberate attempt to reach a rational and enduring state of equilibrium by planned measures, rather than by chance or catastrophe, must ultimately be founded on a basic change of values and goals at individual, national, and world levels.
This change is perhaps already in the air, however faintly.
But our tradition, education, current activities, and interests will make the transformation embattled and slow.
Only real comprehension of the human condition at this turning point in history can provide sufficient motivation for people to accept the individual sacrifices and the changes in political and economic power structures required to reach an equilibrium state.
The question remains of course whether the world situation is in fact as serious as this book, and our comments, would indicate.
We firmly believe that the warnings this book contains are amply justified, and that the aims and actions of our present civilization can only aggravate the problems of tomorrow.
But we would be only too happy if our tentative assessments should prove too gloomy.
In any event, our posture is one of very grave concern, but not of despair.
The report describes an alternative to unchecked and disastrous growth and puts forward some thoughts on the policy changes that could produce a stable equilibrium for mankind.
The report indicates that it may be within our reach to provide reasonably large populations with a good material life plus opportunities for limitless individual and social development.
We are in substantial agreement with that view, although we are realistic enough not to be carried away by purely scientific or ethical speculations.
The concept of a society in a steady state of economic and ecological equilibrium may appear easy to grasp, although the reality is so distant from our experience as to require a Copernican revolution of the mind.
Translating the idea into deed, though, is a task filled with overwhelming difficulties and complexities.
We can talk seriously about where to start only when the message of The Limits to Growth, and its sense of extreme urgency, are accepted by a large body of:
scientific
political
popular
opinion in many countries.
The transition in any case is likely to be painful, and it will make extreme demands on human ingenuity and determination.
As we have mentioned, only the conviction that there is no other avenue to survival can liberate the moral, intellectual, and creative forces required to initiate this unprecedented human undertaking.
But we wish to underscore the challenge rather than the difficulty of mapping out the road to a stable state society.
We believe that an unexpectedly large number of men and women of all ages and conditions will readily respond to the challenge and will be eager to discuss not if, but we can create this new future.
The Club of Rome plans to support such activity in many ways.
The substantive research begun at MIT on world dynamics will be continued both at MIT and through studies conducted in:
Europe
Canada
Latin America
the Soviet Union
and Japan.
And, since intellectual enlightenment is without effect if it is not also political, The Club of Rome also will encourage the creation of a world forum where statesmen, policymakers, and scientists can discuss the dangers and hopes for the future global system without the constraints of formal intergovernmental negotiation.
The last thought we wish to offer is that man must explore himself - his goals and values - as much as the world he seeks to change.
The dedication to both tasks must be unending.
The crux of the matter is not only whether the human species will survive, but even more whether it can survive without falling into a state of worthless existence.
