Life Is Cheap

Every so often there is a peace scare, at which point Dr. Adenauer expresses his fear and the stock market dips. There is little, apparently, that the U.S. Government can do about Dr. Adenauer; but it can do a great deal about the tacit fear that disarmament entails economic risk.

Throughout the cold war, the Soviet Union has publicly exploited the apprehensions felt in this country, not just by the business community, but by labor as well. The recent spectre of the AFL-CIO joining thousands of Long Island families to beg the reorder of acknowledgedly obsolete bombers, hardly suggests the willingness to sacrifice or the consciousness of national interest that the President has called for.

Labor has long been fighting a defensive battle against automation, and its near-sighted leadership sees in disarmament only an immediate threat to employment. It is very hard to convince a nation suspicious of economic planning that an undertaking which will eliminate 4,500,000 jobs can create just as many. This optimistic synopsis of Professor Leontieff's input-output research was set forth in the United Nations report on the economic and social consequences of disarmament.

The U.N. report helped confirm the findings that a panel of experts led by Emile Benoit '32, Professor of International Business at Columbia, issued to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in February: the U.S. and world economies could not only cope with disarmament, but benefit from it if planning is undertaken in advance. The ten-nation U.N. panel considered the peaceful use of released resources, the impact on national production and employment, structural problems of conversion, the effect on international economic relations, and the volume of aid for economic development, as well as the social consequences of disarmament. The conclusion that disarmament would be "an unqualified blessing," (the world spends $120,000,000 annually on the arms race) was highly encouraging. But turning the U.N. outline into a working plan requires sustained efforts on the part of those countries which will be affected.

To combat the residue of fear and unwillingness in the United States, the President should publicly stress the advantages of disarmament, not only because it promises removal of the sword of Damocles, but because it would release funds, labor, and research that could vastly enhance human well-being. Mr. Kennedy would do well to expand and elevate the Benoit panel to the status of a Presidential Commission on the Economics of Disarmament. Such a body should consider the mechanics of a conversion in more technical terms, and should be responsible for bringing representatives of labor and the armaments industries into negotiation. There is no reason why full discussion of the problems that disarmament will entail shouldn't begin right now.