The title is a question, and the book's last page answers it: "The ideal of socialism has been and remains a world without arms." Between the two sits a serious, oddly literate, heavily footnoted history of the disarmament idea from Erasmus to Andropov — the best-argued of the five Progress volumes on militarism that this series has now examined, and the one that states most explicitly why its own argument may not be applied to the state that commissioned it.
Start with the date, because for once it can be fixed almost to the month, and because the months in question are the sharpest in the decade.
The spine says 1984. The Soviet publishing code on the copyright page ends in 83. The internal terminus is tighter than either: the latest dated event anywhere in the text is Yuri Andropov's reply to questions "put in May 1983 by representatives of several Finnish public organisations", with a Warsaw Pact proposal of 17 February 1983 behind it. Andropov is quoted ten times and is alive throughout; he is "General Secretary of the CC CPSU" in the present tense. Chernenko does not appear. Gorbachev does not appear. The manuscript closes around the middle of 1983 and reached English readers a year later.
What that means is best said as a list of things the book cannot know. It does not know that a Korean airliner would be shot down over Sakhalin on 1 September 1983. It does not know that the first Pershing IIs would arrive in West Germany in November, or that the Soviet delegation would walk out of the Geneva intermediate-range talks on 23 November and out of the strategic talks in December. It does not know that Andropov would be dead in February 1984, or that the USSR would boycott the Los Angeles Olympics in May. None of those absences is a finding; they are chronology, and the honest thing is to say so rather than bank them.
One case is genuinely borderline and I decline to bank it either. Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative on 23 March 1983, roughly two months inside the book's window. Neither "Strategic Defense Initiative" nor "Star Wars" occurs here. But space weapons are not absent: the book records the Soviet call for "the demilitarisation of outer space" and the UN's support for measures "to prevent the spreading of the arms race to outer space". A speech given eight weeks before a manuscript closed, in a book that took a year to translate, is a plausible near-miss rather than a suppression. I record the nil and refuse to argue from it.
The volume tells the reader almost nothing about its author. There is no institutional affiliation, no preface, no jacket note in the scan — only a name, which the digitisation renders as "Usacfiev" and which is Igor Usachev, the ch having collapsed into a ligature. I can establish no post for him and will assert none. Nor does the reply corpus help: across all 763 issues of Intercontinental Press from 1968 to 1986, the name does not occur once. That is a fact about our holdings, not about him.
This has to be said at length, because the criticism that follows is worth nothing otherwise.
A World Without Arms? is built out of Western sources to a degree that would embarrass most of its companions. Of fifty-three footnote blocks, the great majority send the reader to books published in London, New York and Paris. Merze Tate's The Disarmament Illusion (Macmillan, 1942) is cited six times and is the spine of the pre-1914 chapters. There is Headlam-Morley's Studies in Diplomatic History; Oppenheim's International Law; Schwarzenberger's Power Politics; three separate works of Philip Noel-Baker's, from 1926, 1958 and after; C. Wright Mills twice, The Power Elite and The Causes of World War Three; Adam Yarmolinsky's The Military Establishment; John M. Swomley's book of the same title; Richard Barnet; J. A. Hobson's Democracy After the War; Theodore Dreiser's Tragic America; Stuart Chase's The Tyranny of Words; the collection edited by Carroll Pursell; Strausz-Hupé, Kintner and Possony's A Forward Strategy for America, read in order to be answered. There are two citations to the Foreign Relations of the United States series for 1950, volume I, and one to the 1920s volumes. Colin Gray's The Soviet-American Arms Race — a hawk's book — is used twice, once against the American "gaps". Soviet secondary literature appears perhaps four times in the whole apparatus.
Set beside this the fact that the book's one polemical attack on a named political current, the paragraph on Trotskyism, carries no footnote of any kind. That is the pattern this series keeps finding, and it is starker here than usual precisely because the rest of the apparatus is so full.
The historical chapters have a register Progress rarely permitted. Erasmus, William Penn, John Bellers, Kant on standing armies, Montesquieu, Mazzini at Geneva, Maupassant's Sur l'eau, Heinrich Mann on Hitler, Stefan Zweig. Usachev treats disarmament as a four-hundred-year idea with a real intellectual history rather than as a Soviet policy with decorative ancestors, and the effect is that his account of the Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907, of the Washington naval conference of 1921–22, and of the League's Preparatory Commission is a genuine piece of diplomatic history rather than an indictment with dates attached.
The strongest single stretch is on verification, and it is strong because it is honest against interest. Usachev sets out the American position of the 1920s and quotes it from the primary record — Secretary of State Frank Kellogg's instructions to Hugh Gibson, the American representative on the Preparatory Commission:
You should make it clear that the United States would not agree to place the supervision of its armaments or the carrying out of any programme for the limitation of armaments in the hands of the League of Nations or any other international body.
And then, remarkably:
We do not condemn this attitude. On the contrary, we approach it with understanding, inasmuch as it appeals to the principle of international good faith and observance of treaties, a principle worthy of respect.
That is not what this genre normally does with an American document. Nor is what follows: he quotes Noel-Baker for the defence, against the Western powers rather than against Moscow — "a careful study of the record shows that since May 1955 the Russians have made considerable efforts to reach agreement including the acceptance, in principle, of a large measure of international inspection and control; while the Western Governments have withdrawn the reasonable 'comprehensive' proposal for a first-stage disarmament agreement which they had previously urged". The Soviet proposal of 10 May 1955 was a real concession and the Anglo-American reservation of that September was a real retreat; a reader coming to this episode cold will not be misled.
He also states the Soviet verification doctrine plainly, which is more than most Soviet writing on the subject did: "control measures must be in strict accord with the disarmament measures being implemented. So, until forms of inspection are worked out it is necessary initially to agree on specific disarmament measures." Disarm first, verify afterwards. That is a defensible negotiating position, it was the actual Soviet position, and it is also the reason a comprehensive test ban failed in 1963. Usachev does not draw the second conclusion, but he does not conceal the premise, and a reader can draw it for himself.
Then there is the argument the book exists to make, which is true. Nuclear war would have no victor; the destructive means have outrun any political object they could serve. Usachev makes this as a Clausewitzian point and makes it well — war has become "the continuation of politics" by means that can no longer serve any politics, and therefore "militarism has arrived at its dialectical negation". Around that he builds a two-part thesis of a "crisis of militarism", economic and military-technical, and the economic half is argued from the UN's own Economic and Social Consequences of the Arms Race and of Military Expenditures and from Jacques Rueff's warnings about American deficits. His demolition of the "clean" and "humanising" nuclear weapon — the neutron bomb "supposed to be effective against tank crews and harmless to civilian population" — is short and correct.
And he is capable of a maturity his companions are not. On what a disarmament agreement requires:
It would be superfluous here, and even harmful, to talk of winners and losers.
That is a diplomat's sentence and a good one. The passage that follows — that no state will accept an agreement detrimental to its security, and that none can be forced into one — is the beginning of wisdom about arms control and is truer than most of what was said on either side in 1983.
He takes the Western peace movement seriously, which Bogdanov never does and Luzin cannot. He counts it: "nearly 20 million activists took part in major peace demonstrations throughout capitalist countries in the spring of 1982, as compared to the 5 million who did so during the whole of 1981." He describes its composition accurately — "from communists, socialists, and social democrats to Christians, liberals, environmentalists, and certain groups of conservatives" — and does not pretend it is a communist front. On the record, this is the most open-eyed account of the Western movement in the Progress militarism list.
Now the finding, and it is not a silence. It is an argument, stated in the author's own voice, in the middle of the chapter called "The Social Roots of Militarism".
Usachev raises the symmetrical model of the arms race — country A arms, country B responds, and so on — names it the "action-counteraction" formula, and concedes its force: "This logic, although simplified, contains a grain of rationality and is therefore somewhat convincing." Then:
But on the whole it is an insidious political trap. This logic disregards the political character of states opposed to one another, equates, without any ground, the various motives of states, ignoring the more important things which determine the position of a state in the world arena.
And, immediately before that: it "erases the distinction between states with different social systems, between states seeking peace and those pervaded with the spirit of militarism."
This is the reflexivity test answered in advance, explicitly, as a matter of method. Bogdanov's version of this failure was to look away from the Soviet side; Tsagolov's was to deny by definition that a Soviet military-industrial complex could exist. Usachev's is more candid and more damaging: he argues that any account which would let the two sides be measured on the same scale is a trap laid by the enemy. The category cannot be turned on the speaker because turning it is itself the error.
The examples he chooses to license the asymmetry give the game away. Would it be just, he asks, to object to "neutral Switzerland's increasing of military potential during the First and Second World Wars", or to "the Angolan people's desire to have the possibility to defend themselves against aggressive attacks from South Africa"? Nobody would object to either. Neither has anything to do with a state holding tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. The asymmetry is established on cases where it is uncontested and then applied where it is the whole question.
What follows is the purest specimen in the volume. Usachev proposes a criterion — a real one, and a good one:
A state's refusal to seek military superiority, possessing only that which corresponds to its defence needs, is the main criterion to judge its peaceful intent.
And in the very next sentence he applies it:
The Soviet Union, by the way, has time and again announced at the highest level that it does not and will not seek military superiority.
The standard is met by the announcement. A test that any government could pass by saying so is not a test, and the man who wrote the sentence spends four chapters demonstrating that American declarations of peaceful intent are worthless because declarations are worthless. Error is admissible in these books; the category is not. Here even the category is offered and then discharged on the author's own side without evidence, in the space of one paragraph.
The hypothesis carried into this draft — that these volumes cannot name the SS-20 — is refuted. Usachev names it three times. He names the SS-4 and SS-5 as well. He is, on this, the most forthcoming author on the Progress militarism list: Luzin could describe the Pioner deployment only as "the updating of some Soviet tactical weapons"; Bogdanov and Tsagolov have the designation at zero.
So the interesting question is what he does with it, and the answer is that naming the missile does not restore the causal chain. Here is the first occurrence in full (the scan drops a stray running-head fragment into the sentence; I have removed it silently, as I have corrected scan damage throughout without further notice):
The decision on them was taken at the NATO Council session in December 1979 on the grounds that the USSR has allegedly gained superiority over the West by stationing what Western experts refer to as SS-20 missiles. But it is not the Soviet Union that holds the initiative in deploying medium-range missiles.
"What Western experts refer to as" — the designation is quoted rather than used, held at arm's length as a foreign coinage. The other two occurrences are both inside Soviet negotiating offers: the moratorium under which "there would be no replacement of outmoded missiles known as SS-4 and SS-5 by the newer SS-20", and the 26th Congress undertaking to reduce medium-range forces in the European part of the country "by hundreds, including the SS-20s" (the footnote to the Congress documents interrupts the sentence in the printed text). The weapon exists in this book only as something the Soviet Union is offering to give up. It is never deployed, never counted, never dated, never given a range or a payload.
That last point is the one that matters, and it replicates a finding this series has now made twice elsewhere. Usachev does count: he reproduces Brezhnev's figures from the Der Spiegel interview — "the NATO countries have 986 such weapons, the USSR—975." Those are carriers. Warheads appear four times in sixty-three thousand words, and every appearance is inside a Soviet proposal about future parity "in regard to carriers and warheads". No Soviet warhead total is given anywhere. The RSD-10 carried three warheads where the SS-4 and SS-5 it replaced carried one, which is precisely why a launcher count and a warhead count told opposite stories in 1983. The book counts on the metric that favours it and treats the other as a negotiating category.
Against a text this well documented, the following returns are all nil, and all of them were available to a man writing in Moscow in 1983.
No figure for Soviet military expenditure. Not in roubles, not as a share of national income, not as a share of the state budget. The metric itself is in the book and Usachev handles it competently — he prices American military spending as "the largest item in the American budget" from 1920, notes that Japanese defence spending is "less than 1 per cent of the GNP" and treats that as a cause of Japanese economic success, and follows the NATO 3-per-cent-real-growth undertaking of May 1978 through the West German debate. He applies the burden metric to the United States, to Japan, and to the NATO allies. He never applies it eastward. Bogdanov gave the American figure and omitted the comparison; Luzin gave no figure of any kind; Usachev gives the metric a workout across four countries and stops at the Soviet border. That is the same hole in the same place for the fourth time, which makes it a rule of the genre rather than a fault of an author.
No Soviet military-industrial complex. The phrase occurs thirty-nine times and is American in every one. The nine Soviet defence-industrial ministries, the Military-Industrial Commission of the Council of Ministers, their first claim on the country's best plant and engineers — none of it exists here, in a book whose central chapter is titled "The Social Roots of Militarism" and whose method is to find the domestic constituency behind a foreign policy.
Soviet policy has no authors. This is the absence I did not expect and it is the sharpest of them. Usachev names American officials freely and precisely: Kellogg, Gibson, Charles Hughes, Dulles, Truman, Kennedy, McNamara, Kissinger, Carter, Reagan, Weinberger, Haig, Baruch, Proxmire; he names the British minister Anthony Nutting and quotes him against his own government. On his own side the roll is: Andropov ten times, Brezhnev three, Gromyko once at the 34th UN General Assembly, Chicherin once — in an endnote about Genoa — and Zorin once, in the name of the "Zorin-McCloy Accord". Litvinov does not occur. The Soviet total-disarmament proposals to the Preparatory Commission of 15 February and 23 March 1928, which Usachev gives dates and a quotation for, are attributed to "the USSR" and "the Soviet delegation"; the man who made them is not there. Khrushchev does not occur. The proposal for general and complete disarmament of 1959, which the book calls "a landmark" and returns to four times, was put to the General Assembly by Khrushchev in person on 18 September 1959; it appears here as "the Soviet proposal" and "the proposal from the socialist countries". Stalin does not occur at all. Soviet diplomacy in this book is performed by an abstraction called "socialist diplomacy", which has initiatives but no diplomats — except the incumbent, who is quoted by name and by dated document. Every American who ever obstructed disarmament can be named and held responsible. No Soviet official who ever advanced it can be, once he has ceased to be current.
Czechoslovakia is never 1968 and Hungary is never 1956. Czechoslovakia occurs four times: as Hitler's victim in 1938, as a party to the Vienna force-reduction proposals of February 1982 and February 1983, as a co-signatory of the 1978 draft convention on neutron weapons, and in the index. Hungary occurs four times, one of them the revolution of 1919 and the rest signatory lists.
But this book, unlike its companions, does not merely leave the gap. It fills it with doctrine:
Their function is to safeguard socialist gains, not to seize the land of others, not to conduct a policy of expansion, and not to oppress the working people. Hence the profoundly defensive task of the socialist armed forces, even in the event of them having to combat anti-socialist forces within their own country—i.e., the political support for such forces ultimately lies abroad, in the imperialist camp.
Read that clause again. The armed forces of the socialist countries remain defensive even when they are fighting the population of a socialist country, because opposition inside is by definition sponsored outside. It licenses East Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956, Prague 1968 and martial law in Poland in one subordinate clause, without naming any of them. Two sentences later comes the only contemporary application: "Take, for instance, the recent events in Poland."
Afghanistan occurs twice, which puts this book between The Priorities of Soviet Foreign Policy Today — which named the intervention twenty times and defended it — and Bogdanov and Tsagolov, which have it at zero. Neither occurrence contains a Soviet soldier. The first:
Events in Afghanistan, and then in Poland, exposed the miscalculations of international and internal reaction in those countries and were latched onto as just such an excuse.
An "excuse", that is, for the Western campaign that killed SALT II ratification. The invasion is not an act with an author; it is an event that happened in a country, and its significance is what Washington did with it afterwards. The second occurrence is more remarkable still:
The Afghan counter-revolutionary bands, fighting the lawful Kabul government, were also supplied with US-made means of chemical warfare.
That is the whole of Afghanistan in a book about disarmament published in the fifth year of the occupation, with something over a hundred thousand Soviet troops in the country: a place where the Americans are accused of chemical warfare. The chemical allegations of that period ran hard in both directions and neither side's case was as good as it claimed, so I make no finding on the substance. The structural point needs none. A book whose method is to trace armaments to the interests that produce them has removed the largest armed operation its own state was conducting, and the removal is not an omission — a sentence had to be written to accomplish it.
The book's title and its last line both derive from four words of Lenin's, quoted in chapter III:
As Lenin put it, "disarmament is the ideal of socialism".
The footnote sends the reader to the Collected Works, volume 23, page 95. That is the essay "The 'Disarmament' Slogan", written in October 1916 and first published in Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata no. 2 that December — the identification is not mine; another Progress volume, USSR and Countries of Africa (1980), names the article for the same quotation.
Here is what the passage says when the sentence after it is allowed to stand. The text is Lenin's, from the transcription mirrored in this project's etol-ni corpus:
Disarmament is the ideal of socialism. There will be no wars in socialist society; consequently, disarmament will be achieved. But whoever expects that socialism will be achieved without a social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a socialist. Dictatorship is state power based directly on violence.
And, three paragraphs later, the essay's actual conclusion:
An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves.
And in face of this fact, revolutionary Social-Democrats are urged to "demand" "disarmament"! That is tantamount to complete abandonment of the class-struggle point of view, to renunciation of all thought of revolution. Our slogan must be: arming of the proletariat to defeat, expropriate and disarm the bourgeoisie.
"The 'Disarmament' Slogan" is a polemic against putting disarmament in a socialist programme. Lenin's four words are the concessive opening of an argument whose conclusion is the opposite of the one they are made to carry. The book takes its title from them, closes on them, and never reproduces the sentence that begins "But".
This is a house habit rather than a personal one, and it is worth being exact about the degree. Lenin: A Biography (Progress, 1983) and Afanasyev's Scientific Communism both quote one sentence further, through "consequently, disarmament will be achieved", and stop there. The Soviet Constitution: A Dictionary (1986) and Problems of Common Security (1984) — the companion disarmament volume from the same year — stop where Usachev does. Nobody in the catalogue prints the "But". The cut is not at a random place. It is exactly at the word that turns the sentence round.
The same operation is performed on Engels, who "had once called disarmament a 'guarantee of peace'". Usachev's footnote for that phrase is to the Werke, volume 22, page 373. That volume contains the late articles published as Can Europe Disarm? in 1893, and the book presents them as settled Marxist doctrine on the subject.
Everything this book could not say was in print, from the other side of the split, in the years it was written and shipped — and for the first time this series can quote it in the language and the season the book was closed in.
The decisive document is the editorial of Quatrième Internationale, the French theoretical review of the Fourth International, dated 1 December 1983 — three weeks after the first Pershing IIs reached West Germany and a week after the Soviet walkout from Geneva. It is signed by Ernest Mandel. It concedes to Usachev exactly what should be conceded: that the USSR is not a capitalist country driven by internal contradictions to global expansion; that the "Soviet invasion of Western Europe" is "un mythe dangereux et absurde"; that since 1945 it is always imperialism that has taken the initiative in the nuclear arms race and "Le Kremlin n'a fait que réagir à ces menaces, sans jamais les égaler ou les dépasser" — the Kremlin has only ever reacted to those threats, never matching or exceeding them. Very few of the concessions Usachev wanted from the Western left are withheld here.
And then it says why the anti-war movement will nevertheless not take his instructions. Its suspicion of Moscow is not the product of "propagande antisoviétique" but of experience:
les interventions armées qui ont réprimé la révolution hongroise de 1956 et le « Printemps de Prague » en 1968 ; les pressions militaires et politiques ouvertes contre la montée des luttes et de l'auto-organisation prolétariennes en Pologne en 1980-81 ; l'intervention militaire en Afghanistan ; la terrible répression des dissidents (non seulement pro-occidentaux, mais aussi socialistes et communistes oppositionnels) en URSS ; l'absence des libertés démocratiques élémentaires de la classe ouvrière, telles que le droit de grève
— the armed interventions that crushed the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968; the open military and political pressure against the rise of workers' struggles and self-organisation in Poland in 1980–81; the military intervention in Afghanistan; the terrible repression of dissidents, not only pro-Western but also socialist and communist oppositionists; the absence of the most elementary democratic liberties of the working class, such as the right to strike. That is the list Usachev's chapter III converts into a single clause about anti-socialist forces whose backing "lies abroad".
Mandel's conclusion is the exact negative of this book's method. The peace movement must not, he writes, turn itself into a "groupe de pression diplomatique à Genève, à Washington et à Moscou", because governments in thirty-eight years have managed only to "control" the arms race by mutual consent and never to end it. Therefore:
Le problème du désarmement nucléaire ne sera pas résolu autour des tables de conférence diplomatiques, mais dans la rue et dans les usines.
The problem of nuclear disarmament will not be solved around diplomatic conference tables, but in the street and in the factories. A World Without Arms? is, from its first page to its last, a book about the conference tables. Its heroes are delegations; its evidence is drafts, protocols, sessions and accords; its peace movement exists to create the conditions in which delegations can succeed. Mandel's charge is that this is precisely the arrangement by which nothing gets disarmed, and that the bureaucracy prefers it because a mass movement it could not control would be worse for it than the missiles.
The historical half of Usachev's book has an answer too, and it appeared while the English edition was in production. In Quatrième Internationale of July 1984, Raimund Löw published "Grève générale ou désarmement : deux pôles dans la politique de paix du mouvement ouvrier international" — general strike or disarmament, the two poles of the international labour movement's peace policy — tracing exactly Usachev's terrain from the First International through Stuttgart and Copenhagen to the Comintern. It reaches the Engels pamphlet under a heading Usachev's chapter could not print: "LE DESARMEMENT : VOEU DE VIEILLESSE D'ENGELS". Disarmament as Engels's old-age wish. Löw shows that for decades Marx and Engels had no interest in disarmament at all, that Marx opposed the International's involvement with the Ligue de la paix et de la liberté and called the whole business "tarte à la crème de la paix", and that the late articles rest on a claimed common interest of capital and labour in avoiding war — "voilà les arguments qu'il avance et qui seront repris jusqu'aujourd'hui", the arguments he advances and which will be repeated down to the present day. That is not a hostile reading; Löw sets out Engels's reasons fairly. But it establishes that the doctrine Usachev presents as the settled Marxist position on disarmament was a late, particular and contested turn — and it does so in the same year, in the same tradition Usachev dismisses in one unfootnoted sentence.
On the metric, the answer is dated to the month the manuscript closed. On 27 June 1983 Intercontinental Press printed "No to war, no to nuclear missiles!", the statement of the Bureau of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, co-signed by eleven European sections and distributed at the disarmament convention held in Berlin that May. It agrees with Usachev where he is right: the Pershing II is "to be used above all for a first-strike surprise attack against the Soviet Union"; SIPRI's 1980 figures show NATO responsible for 43 per cent of world arms spending against the Warsaw Pact's 26; "Imperialism is still the principal warmonger and the main threat to peace." Then it does the thing the whole Progress list is built not to do:
While declared American arms spending is 7 percent of the GNP and estimated USSR spending 15 percent of the GNP, the American GNP is double the Soviet GNP.
— and takes the consequence: "Soviet military expenditure is a great burden on the Soviet Union, to the point of worsening economic and food supply problems." Two documents, the same subject, the same month, one of which can put both numbers on the table.
Usachev's judgement about the peace movement was also tested, and quickly. In International Viewpoint of November 1983, François Vercammen reported the autumn mobilisations from inside them:
Neither imperialist pressure, nor the advocates of the 'lesser evil', nor the threats and promises of Yuri Andropov, have got the better of the anti-missiles movement's political determination to hold to its course of mass mobilisations around a clear, simple and understandable objective: unconditional opposition to the Nato missiles.
He describes a movement acting on "a limited unilateralism" born of "the continuing deadlock in the negotiations on disarmament between the American imperialists and the Soviet bureaucrats — both equally interested in maintaining the political and social status quo in the world". Usachev's twenty million marchers were not waiting to be mobilised behind a Soviet negotiating position, and their leaderships had reasoned their way past it.
And on the missile itself, the movement had already gone further than he had. Intercontinental Press of 2 April 1984 printed the call for that year's Danish Easter march, agreed by the three main Danish peace organisations — one of whose officers stood as a Communist Party candidate:
We unconditionally say no to Pershing 2, cruise missiles, SS-20, SS-21, SS-22, SS-23, the French and British nuclear strike forces, and all other atomic weapons. Nothing can justify nuclear weapons.
The same call records that the Soviet Union had "begun making preparations to install missiles in the GDR and Czechoslovakia". These are people doing precisely what Usachev asked of them — marching, unconditionally, against nuclear weapons — while declining the one condition he needed, which was that they should stop counting at the Elbe.
Read A World Without Arms? for its history and against its jurisprudence. On the disarmament idea before 1914, on the Hague conferences, on the Washington naval agreements, on the American refusal of international control between the wars, on the London subcommittee of 1955 and the test-ban negotiations, it is a competent and well-sourced guide, more scrupulous with Western documents than most of what Progress printed on militarism, and its central moral claim — that a nuclear war would have no victor and must not be fought — was true, was urgent, and was worth a book. Usachev was not wrong to write it. He wrote it better than his colleagues did.
Read it also for the paragraph in which a serious man explains why his own argument may not be run in reverse. Everything else in this volume follows from that paragraph: the missile that exists only as a concession, the warheads that are never counted, the burden metric applied to Japan and withheld from home, the diplomats who vanish from their own initiatives the moment they stop being current, the tanks that stay defensive when they are pointed at the citizens of a socialist state. None of it is carelessness. Usachev saw the symmetrical account of the arms race clearly enough to describe it accurately, granted that it contained "a grain of rationality", and ruled it out of order. That was the price of publication, and he paid it in the open, on the page, which is more than most of his colleagues did. It is also why the book cannot persuade anyone who has another source — and why, in the autumn between the closing of the manuscript and its appearance in English, the largest peace demonstrations Western Europe had ever seen were made up of people who agreed with every word of its moral argument and were shouting a slogan it could not print.