Strange Climate

E.B. (for Elwyn Brooks) White, 60, lives on a farm in North Brooklin, Me. and watches the change of seasons and the lives of men. For more than 30 years a contributor to The New Yorker, and now in semiretirement, White is a perceptive essayist; his topics range from the tremor of a leaf in the afternoon sun to the malaise of modern man.

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, White took a cool and healthily skeptical look at man's central problem--war or peace. His question: Will disarmament make the world safer? His answer: No.

Argues White: P: "Unfortunately, disarmament doesn't have much to do with peace . . . Total disarmament would not leave anyone free of the threat of war, it would simply leave everyone temporarily without the help of arms in the event of war . . . Every plane could be scrapped, every stockpile destroyed, every soldier mustered out, and if the original reasons for holding arms were still present, the world would not have been disarmed. Arms would simply be in a momentary state of suspension, preparatory to new and greater arms." P: "Many statesmen feel that weapons are in themselves evil, and that they should be eliminated, as you would crush a snake . . . I doubt though whether the tension created by the existence of arms is as great as the tension that would arise if there were no arms or too few arms.

President Eisenhower has said that war in this day and age would yield only a great emptiness. So, I think, would disarmament in this day and age. An arms race is a frightening thing, but eighty sovereign nations suddenly turning up without arms is truly terrifying. One may even presume that Russia came forward with the most sensational of the disarmament proposals --total disarmament in four years--just because it is terrifying. A dictator dearly loves a vacuum, and he loves to rattle people. Disarmament in this day would increase, not diminish, the danger of war. Today's weapons are too destructive to use, so they stand poised and quiet; this is our strange climate, when arms are safer than no arms. If modern arms make war unlikely, had we not better keep them until we have found the political means of making war unnecessary?"

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