A Scenario For Survival
GWYNNE DYER PINPOINTS CANADA'S RESPONSIBILITY IN TIPPING THE SYSTEM OF WORLD AFFAIRS AWAY FROM THE EDGE OF DESTRUCTION
Interview by David Gregory
Gwynne Dyer is a syndicated journalist and military historian, best known for his two television series, War and The Defence of Canada. He was born in 1943, raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and joined the Canadian navy at the age of sixteen. While still serving in the navy, he completed a B.A. from Memorial University; and an M.A. from Rice University in Texas. After a two-year spell teaching War Studies at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto, Dyer moved to England to take a Ph.D. in military history at the University of London. This in turn led to positions teaching at the Royal Military Academy (Sandhurst) and at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. In 1973 Dyer began writing articles for leading London newspapers on the Arab-Israeli war, and soon decided to abandon academic life for a full-time career in journalism. Since the mid-1970s he has regularly contributed a syndicated column published by major newspapers in Britain, Canada, and the U.S.A. He began working in the field of radio journalism in the late 1970s, and made War first as a radio series before adapting it to television for the National Film Board of Canada. It was subsequently published in book form. "The Defence of Canada" was made for CBC television in the mid-1980s, and Dyer and his co-author Tina Viljoen are still working on the book version, which is slated for publication in the spring of 1989.
Aurora: When did you first become interested in questions of nuclear strategy?
Dyer: It started when I was with the Canadian Forces College in Toronto from 1966 to 1968. What one overlooks or forgets now is that there was no public discussion on nuclear strategy for the first fifteen years after the war. Not only was the technology secret, but if the strategies were not secret, public discussion of them was severely discouraged. Only in the mid-sixties did nuclear strategy become an issue of public importance and discussion.
So I suppose I got drawn into it as everybody else who had even the slightest interest in their world got drawn into it. Previously, I thought of nuclear weapons, as did the great-unwashed public of which I was a member. Nuclear war was tantamount to an invasion from Mars in its alienness from ordinary life. It was something you could do absolutely nothing about; so one didn’t bother one’s pretty head about it much, other than to make doom-laden pronouncements about not bringing children into this world and other fashionable sixties’ remarks.
Aurora: You became an advocate of minimum deterrence about 15 years ago. But initially you weren’t outside the orthodoxy. You started by accepting conventional ideas of nuclear strategy?
Dyer: Many people can be entranced, bewitched, fascinated by the logical intricacy of conventional logic on nuclear deterrence. This logic involves a good deal of irony, requires the suspension of disbelief, and has all of the most attractive characteristics of medieval scholastic philosophy. The frisson of danger, because they are playing with ultimate things, together with the subtlety of nuclear strategy seduces a lot of people. Some people never go any further than that. Eventually, a sense of responsibility may start to creep in if they realize it is the real world they are playing with.
Beginning around 1969 my willingness simply to play with the logic began to erode, and I began to make connections with the real world. I suddenly realized that I had become a heretic, though not as extreme a heretic as I later became. In my thinking about nuclear strategy I moved beyond the pale of acceptable discourse in the strategic community. Minimum deterrence was the litmus test.
Aurora: What was the dominant attitude towards nuclear weapons at Sandhurst?
Dyer: Sandhurst didn’t mind at all if you didn’t like nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are essentially something that air forces and, to a lesser extent, navies with missile-firing submarines have a love affair with. Armies don’t like nuclear weapons because, in the end, nuclear weapons make armies utterly irrelevant, just from a functional point of view. Soldiers tend to have a private distaste for nuclear weapons simply because they see the consequences of using weapons on people. There is a moral and sympathetic dimension to the views of many army people about nuclear weapons, quite apart from the career orientation that also regards them as spoiling the game.
Aurora: Why did you decide to opt out of academia and become a journalist?
Dyer: Simply because I was fed up to the back teeth with academe. Certain types of personalities flourish in one field and certain types in another. I just don’t feel comfortable in an ivory tower, especially one that makes very few demands. If I had been asked to work a lot harder, it might have been more interesting. But I felt that I was cruising along on idle and that another forty odd years of this stretched ahead, which isn’t tremendously interesting.
Aurora: Having served in the military and having been a war-studies professor, a military historian, and a free-lance journalist, you were particularly well suited to develop the “War” series, which was first made for radio, I think.
Dyer: Yes, first for radio. It was in the course of doing the radio series, and subsequently the television series that grew out of it, that I was forced, for the first time, to come up with some kind of synthesis of all the things I thought and knew about various aspects of military activity, military history, strategic thought, the political process, and the international system. I mean, you know lots about all of those things and think you have opinions about lots of aspects of all of those things, but unless you are compelled to sit down and do something like make a radio or television series or write a book, you are unlikely ever to take the time to sort out what you really think.
Aurora: One of the main thrusts of “War” is a demonstration that the United States nuclear strategy has been a first-strike strategy, a preparation to fight a nuclear war rather than just deter one. It seems to me that what has been happening since 1945 is that we have had various American administrations playing around with different kinds of nuclear strategy, most of which have been highly dangerous. Star Wars is particularly dangerous because it encourages the idea that a successful pre-emptive first strike might be possible. And that threatens the whole fabric of mutual assured destruction.
Dyer: Yes, but one mustn’t oversell the fabric of mutual assured destruction. The post-war assumption, on which a lot of American foreign policy still operates, is that nuclear destruction could be imposed without suffering comparable retaliation.
From about 1945 until the end of the fifties, there was nothing the Soviets could do to strike back in significant quantity against the United States in a nuclear war. The Soviets then acquired an unstoppable capability to strike North America with ICBMs, McNamara altered the doctrine to reflect the real situation, and mutual assured destruction was enshrined. But the striving in American military and defence intellectual circles for some way to return to the previous, far more pleasant situation where there was indeed a first-strike capability has never ended. So that even as mutual assured destruction is being enshrined, the Americans are going ahead with MIRVES on all of their missiles, which is not, in logical terms, going to deliver first-strike capability. This move is motivated by the belief that somehow if you could get far enough ahead in terms of warheads, you would have politically useable nuclear superiority. It is nonsense, of course. Star Wars is also an attempt to acquire a sufficient edge, if not a total ability, to prevent all retaliation, to threaten, manipulate, and cow the other side.
Aurora: I would have thought that was just what the lesson of history since 1945 had demonstrated wasn’t possible.
Dyer: It is exactly what the lesson of history since 1945 demonstrates isn’t possible. But a lot of people out there don’t know any history, or don’t want to accept the conclusions of it, and quite a few of them congregate in the nuclear establishment. There is a lot of self-deception or concealment of motive in strategic discourse, especially in the nuclear area. The United States is vulnerable, and will be vulnerable, to nuclear weapons until they are all abolished or until the end of time, whichever comes first. Star Wars, if it works, can deal with ballistic missiles. That is what it is meant to deal with. But, hell, what do you do about cruise missiles, and if it comes down to it, somebody with a suitcase? There is no way to regain invulnerability. Many Americans have an almost unconscious, but very powerful, urge to recreate that strategic invulnerability which the United States enjoyed in the early nuclear era and in most of its previous history, and that drives a lot of the strategic developments in the United States. Because they don’t admit that is exactly what they are doing, they don’t have to tell you exactly how they are going to do it. It drives them to all sorts of things that dearly head in a dangerous direction.
Aurora: What are the chances of the Americans abandoning things like SDI and MX missiles and cruise missiles and all things that aren’t necessary?
Dyer: The beauty of SDI is that as a technological construct it is so implausible, it will probably fall of its own weight. It isn’t going to work, and eventually the Americans, being a people who like technology that works, will probably bite the bullet on SDI because it won’t even stop ballistic missiles. There is no way it can. There is never going to be a time when the cost of adding more missiles is greater than the cost of coping with more missiles through further refinements of SDI. Missiles aren’t expensive. Even if you believe they can get computers with ten-million line programs that will work right first time and all the other nonsense about the technological fantasies necessary to create any kind of SDI defence, the cost/benefit ratio between more Soviet missiles and more SDI technology is always going to favour the Soviets. That is a given of this and the next century’s technology. in the end Americans are sufficiently rational not to pour their entire national wealth down that particular rat hole, I think.
What alarms the Soviets about SDI, to the extent they are still alarmed about it, is not so much the prospect that it will work as what it reveals about American assumptions and aspirations. Through the latter sixties and seventies, in the SALT talks and in a variety of other forums, we put immense effort into educating the Soviets in the realities of the nuclear age, the necessity for restraint, and the inescapability of mutual assured destruction. Finally the Soviets took the message aboard. They internalized those conclusions, and then we said, “April Fool,” which is exactly what SDI is. The level of panic about SDI which was quite high in the Soviet Union a few years ago, was mostly engendered at first by this almost mystical Soviet belief that American technology is so good that the Americans can do anything they want. And so, the remaining concern about SDI has a lot more to do with what it implies about American intentions and aspirations than with the fear that one day they will be faced with a working system.
Aurora: Do you see much chance for arms control negotiations going somewhere really important? Could we get substantial reductions in numbers and types of ICBMS?
Dyer: It is going to be a long process. If we get the so-called deep cuts that are promised in the START Negotiation, it won’t mean a lot in terms of how much safer we are, because half of the existing ballistic missiles are quite enough to do us in. But it will be immensely important symbolically. You’ve got to go down to about five to ten per cent of present numbers before you substantially alter the real strategic context as opposed to the numbers game.
A START Agreement that cuts ballistic missiles, bombers, and long-range warheads of all kinds by thirty to fifty per cent is going to make a hell of a difference in terms of creating the confidence that will allow them to take other steps, such as troop cuts in Europe, a comprehensive test ban, a serious attempt to eliminate chemical weapons, and withdrawals and demilitarized zones in the middle of Europe. What you are trying to do is create a virtuous circle in which each agreement, though perhaps largely symbolic in itself, facilitates the next one and creates a momentum for movement away from the present confrontation and the present strategic structures. I can’t think of any other way to do it.
Aurora: Is the will to make the deep cuts there in the American administration and military?
Dyer: Probably. One of the things that makes it not impossible to cut nuclear weapons is that the service and industrial constituencies that are really wedded to nuclear weapons in either of the superpowers are relatively small fractions of the defence industrial complex as a whole. There is no US corporation, to be very simplistic, that stands to make a zillion dollars from building ballistic missiles anyway. They have only built in the last 15 years. Compared to a contract for F-18s, it is nothing. Although various people climb on the anti-cuts bandwagon for ideological reasons and whatnot, it would be a lot harder to take the navy’s aircraft carriers away than to make it give up half its missile-firing submarines.
Aurora: That is encouraging. Is there anything that Canada can do to help that process?
Dyer: Not really.
Aurora: It would be best left to a one-on-one Russian-American negotiation?
Dyer: I think it is. We mustn’t get too big for our boots. When Tina and I talk about Canadian nonalignment and what Canada ought to do, we do not imagine that Moscow and Washington are hanging on our every word. They are clearly not hanging on our word, but on Canada’s decisions. One must not only expect but demand of them a level of responsibility for their own decisions. But it is only they who will decide whether they are going to do it. We are critically dependent on there being a lot of sensible and responsible Soviets and Americans around, because they are at the core of the problem. Not because they are more wicked than the rest of us, but because they have got more power than the rest of us.
Aurora: Are the British and French significant obstacles to arms reduction?
Dyer: A fair amount of business must be done by the Americans and the Soviets before they have to address the problem of the British and the French. But in the end, they will have to address it. If the superpowers manage to get their nuclear forces down, then something will have to be done about the British and French forces, because proportionately they will bulk a hell of a lot bigger in that context than they do now. Alas, here you are addressing problems of national sovereignty and not just number games in the nuclear field. It is going to be a bugger when it comes up, but a fair amount of progress can be made before we have to swallow that particular camel.
Aurora: One of the things that I liked in particular about War, the book version, was the stress on the need to get beyond national sovereignty. In order to solve the wider problem of war there is no way out than some kind of world government, or perhaps I should say international law with a means of policing it.
Dyer: That’s more like it. I don’t say much about world government, because it isn’t going to happen. But if I consider it even hypothetically bigger isn’t better always. I am much more in favour of devolution within the existing massive structures than I am of creating a supermassive structure over them. There is a need for a context of co-operation and mutual responsibility between states, which is presently absent and is a source of the problem. Absolute national sovereignty, international anarchy, military force in the hands of individual states as the only means of regulating the system is a recipe for extinction. So, we have got to do something about that, but given the practical impossibility and the undesirability of world government, that is not the direction in which I look I would be careful about throwing out the baby with the bath water, though. I don’t think we need to start from scratch again. I think we would be ill advised not to use existing institutions, like the United Nations. What we need is a good deal more in the way of international law regulating the behaviour of states and, above all, a means of enforcing that law. What it requires is a level of co-operation, which has not been evident, between the more powerful states in the world.
Aurora: Surely one of the things that Canada could do is put a little bit more effort into helping the development of international law by taking its own particular disputes to the world court and abiding by international law.
Dyer: Indeed it could. And it should. Human politics works by precedent, and the setting of context is the most important task. A context in which it is expected that disputes will be resolved by negotiating or by legal means rather than by force is the most important thing. Given that there is no way of coercing the more powerful states to co-operate, they have got to get the habit of doing so. Anything that any individual country can do to reinforce the precedents, to use, as opposed to ignore the international institutions that do exist for the resolution of dispute is very important. Even though the world is a dreadful mess, the international law that does exist, the amount of respect it does command, and the degree to which it is used, is enormously larger than what was twenty years ago. So I am not utterly a pessimist about this. We are making progress. It may not be fast enough, but we are.
Aurora: Should Canada take a leadership role in trying to move the superpowers away from confrontation?
Dyer: Yes, we are not just potential victims; we are also actors. Whether or not you are a nationalist, and I am not, the fact is that Canada is a sovereign state. At the moment we are in the present system of alliances. We were one of the progenitors. We have a whole series of rationalizations and justifications for why we were part of the founding of the alliances and why we stilt need to belong. But if we don’t take responsibility for changing the system, then we are responsible for keeping it the same, and that will kill us all.
In suggesting that Canada leave the alliance system, it is not with the hope that we go isolationist and somehow ride out a disaster. Instead, Canadian neutrality is an achievement that might prevent the system from going over the edge, that might begin to move the international system away from the focus on alliances, bi-polar confrontation, and all of that which is going to deliver us to the holocaust.
Aurora: If you were Minister of Defence in, shall we say, an NDP Liberal coalition government and you had to recommend to your cabinet colleagues specific changes in Canadian defence policy, what would they be?
Dyer: I would stress the need to have the support of the country, because if you don’t, an attempt to leave the alliances would simply lead to the fall of the government. When the pressure comes, there has to be a solid block of opinion that says, "To hell with the pressure. We are doing the right thing.” That involves a good deal of public debate. It probably also involves a serious attempt first to reform the strategy of the alliances that we belong to, rather than simply a petulant announcement that we are leaving. We are not dealing with one virtuous Canadian member and fifteen wicked members of NATO. It is quite a deal more complicated than that.
So, the first thing I would do while stimulating a domestic debate on the issue would be to make a series of proposals for changing the orientation of the present NATO and NORAD alliance to get a nuclear no-first-use policy and a comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty. Given the limited influence Canada has in the world, if we could get those things as payment for not leaving the alliance, it would probably be worth doing. My guess is you wouldn’t get them. But it would demonstrate that our influence within the alliance isn’t sufficient to get these perfectly reasonable things and that we really tried to work with the alliance. That would make leaving more palatable to a Canadian public which, particularly among English Canadians, is still heavily mired in the mythology about what we are doing and what we used to do and why we have got to go on doing it.
For Canada to go neutral without suffering enormous damage in terms of economic retaliation by the United States, perhaps even attempts at destabilization, we would have to guarantee to the United States that a neutral Canada would not constitute a military threat to their security. That wouldn’t create enormous demands on the Canadian defence budget because nobody is going to march an army across Canada to invade the United States. We would simply have to have some surveillance and interception capability to guarantee to the Americans that we know what is going on in and around our airspace and our territorial waters. We would need enough other army to maintain peacekeeping commitments. And that is about it. So we could probably reassure the Americans that a neutral Canada is not a threat to them for about the present defence budget. It really is a bargaining situation—how much do the Americans think is enough being the key question.
Interestingly, both the Liberal government under Trudeau and the present Mulroney government three years ago tried to pull the troops out of Europe, though not to leave NATO. In both cases they lost their nerve when the Europeans had a fit. But it is not an unthinkable thing. You could go nonaliant, and then Canada would have to live for some considerable period of time afterwards as a nonaligned country in a still mostly aligned world. We would be an immensely powerful example for many other NATO countries to use in their own domestic debate. Nobody has left NATO since it was founded, but somebody needs to be the first one to go.
Aurora: Would we still need things like nuclear-powered submarines and highly sophisticated surveillance?
Dyer: I cannot believe we need nuclear-powered submarines. Frankly, the nuclear submarines are something that the Canadian navy repeatedly considered and dismissed. Sure, they would have liked them, but they wanted and needed other things more. We have a defence minister who has major political ambitions. Because the defence ministry is not traditionally a high-profile political post in the Canadian cabinet, he needed something splashy to make an impression. Nuclear submarines were the high-profile item in his defence white paper that got him noticed. He found one admiral in Ottawa who was willing to push this, and that was all he needed. You know, the submarine lobby in the navy was never big enough to get those submarines. It required a defence minister who wanted something splashy.
Aurora: I would like to pursue one thing about your strategy for leaving NATO and NORAD. I can understand the rationale for leaving NATO and pulling Canadian troops out of Europe and saving money that way and I can even see the United States accepting that. What I find more difficult to believe is that the United States would let us leave NORAD. I would have thought that we were too much a vital part of the northern early warning system.
Dyer: That is why almost all that I was talking about in terms of what we would have to do as a nonaligned country had to do with reassuring the United States. The Europeans aren’t a problem. But I think it is quite important to leave NORAD; otherwise all we are talking about here is a money-saving gesture. The European situation certainly wouldn’t be altered by it. To get out of the entire military alliance context is a deliberate political act so there is not much point in leaving NATO if you don’t leave NORAD, too.
In terms of having to reassure the United States, the major concerns the Americans would have would be Canadian airspace and, to a lesser extent, Canadian coastal waters. They don’t really need the North Warning Line, the old DEW line, to be in their own hands, provided somebody knows what is going on up there. Nor would we even need to feed them on a regular basis detailed information about what is going on up there, so long as they trusted us to tell them if there was a problem. So long as we are able to deny anybody else access to our airspace without permission and to provide a warning if one is needed of some sort of mass attack, that is all that they legitimately can require of us. So our territory is not vital for their defence installations. It is vital to their interest that somebody be in charge of it, but it can just as well be us.
Aurora: I take it that even if we did get out of NATO and NORAD and provided this moral example, the Pentagon would still remain committed to policies such as limited nuclear war, flexible response, counter-force capability...
Dyer: It is a long game, you know. And you have only got so many cards in your own hand and the point is to play them to best effect. You cannot move the world from Canada, but you can’t move it from any single place. The point is to do what you can with the resources and the influence you have in order to influence the movement of general events in a direction that will be safer.
Aurora: Where would you say that the Canadian peace movement should direct its efforts?
Dyer: My own preference would be for a focus on getting out of the alliances, simply because it is the one thing Canada could do that would have any influence on the larger questions that will decide our fate and everybody else’s. If you want to demonstrate against testing cruise missiles, by all means do so, but it is something that you should be doing within a wider context of mobilizing support on broader questions. The key question is our complicity in the maintenance of the affiance system as opposed to an attempt to change it.
Aurora: Can you recommend a couple of books that our readers might like to pursue? Perhaps one on the history and theory of nuclear strategy and perhaps one on Canadian defence policy.
Dyer: Well, on the history and theory of nuclear strategy there is one very good book, The Wizards of Armageddon by Fred Kaplan. Another one that is quite useful on nuclear strategy and the manipulation of opinion to create the mythology that supports the present defence structure in the United States, is Tom Gervasi’s book, The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy. On Canadian defence policy, you will have to wait for ours.
War. New York: Crown, 1985.
Dr. Gregory first became interested in the problem of how to avoid World War III as a teenager in Britain in the late ‘50s. At present he co-ordinates History 367, a telecourse on World War II, and History 264: The Era of World Wars, 1900-1950. He is also involved in developing a course on the history of nuclear weapons and the Cold War. He is a member of the local peace group, Athabascans for Social Responsibility, which has links with various national peace organisations, such as Operation Dismantle and Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
Originally published Winter 1988
Dyer's first television series, the 7-part documentary War, was aired in 45 countries in the mid-80s. One episode, "The Profession of Arms", was nominated for an Academy Award. The accompanying book, War, won the Columbia University School of Journalism award in 1986. He has also produced a television documentary on peacekeepers in Bosnia, and radio documentaries about the changes to eastern Europe and global culture.
Gwynne Dyer's website: www.gwynnedyer.com/
See Gwynne Dyer's biography posted at Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.
Updated April 2002
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Citation Format
Gregory, David (2001). A Scenario For Survival: Gwynne Dyer Pinpoints Canada's Responsibility In Tipping The System Of World Affairs Away From The Edge Of Destruction..Aurora Online: