Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

No Armistice

No Armistice
Credit...The New York Times Archives
See the article in its original context from
November 11, 1986, Section A, Page 25Buy Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

Armistice Day is a constant reminder that we won a war and lost a peace. It is both a tribute and an indictment. A tribute to men who died that their neighbors might live without fear of aggression. An indictment of those who lived and forfeited their chance for peace.

Neither remorse nor logic can hide the fact that our armistice ended in failure. Not until the armistice myth was shattered in the blast of a Stuka bomb did we learn that the winning of wars does not in itself make peace. And not until Pearl Harbor did we learn that noninvolvement in peace means certain involvement in war.

It is no longer possible to shield ourselves with arms alone against the ordeal of attack. For modern war visits destruction on the victor and vanquished alike. The atom bomb is far more than a military weapon. It may contain the choice between the quick and the dead. The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.

No more convincing avowal of their peaceful intentions could have been made by the American people than by their offer to submit to the United Nations the secret of the atom bomb. Yet because we asked adequate guarantees and freedom of worldwide inspection by the community of nations itself, our offer was declined and the atom has been recruited into this contest of nerves. To those people who contend that secrecy and medieval sovereignty are more precious than a system of atomic control, I can only reply that it is a cheap price to pay for peace.

With the monstrous weapons man already has, humanity is in danger of being trapped in this world by its moral adolescents. Our knowledge of science has already outstripped our capacity to control it. We have many men of science, too few men of God.

Man is stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

This is our 20th century's claim to distinction and to progress.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 25 of the National edition with the headline: No Armistice. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT