Defence White Paper Broke An Illusion

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28260, 24 April 1957, Page 8

Defence White Paper Broke An Illusion

[By JAMES CAMERON in LONDON. One phrase leaps from the White Paper on Defence: the blinding revelation that since the bomber will always get through, since the defences are indefensible, since there is no protection since there is no place to hide—“the overriding factor in all military planning must be to prevent war.” We are back to the clarion-calls of everybody from General MacArthur to Dr. Soper: that War Must Be Outlawed. Forgetting, perhaps that this has already been officially done seven or eight times, by treaty and statute; since 1919 we have been outlawing the hell out of war, which is why the Government could say yesterday: “The only safeguard is the threat of retaliation. To that end Britain is to test a megaton weapon.” This White Paper, only 10 short pages, is an historic ninepennyworth. It admits something never seriously acknowledged before, that all of us have been living for years under the greatest of illusions, to Wit, that there is such a thing as defence. There is not —it says so, there in the paper called Defence. It accepts that the soldiers’ day is done: no more armies, only colonial policemen. No more aircraft, in effect: retaliation-automa-tion. Even the atom-bomber planes are superannuated, paid off. (The news agency report I have has a sepulchral misprint: it calls them “V-class Tombers.”) So today we reach a uniquely interesting milestone in human development: from now on we are officially dependent for survival only on a philosophical point; on a single weapon whose only usefulness is in the fact that it is too horrible ever to be used. “Decreasing Circles”

Thus does homo sapiens move still faster in ever-decreasing circles, towards the inevitable acrobatic conclusion.

The arrival of spring is high drama: the resurrection is visible in the green periscope of the backyard bulb, audible in the lovesick pigeon on the roof. I have, heaven help me, a certain sympathy Jor Mr Macmillan, attacked simultaneously for not having nuclear warheads for his rockets and for having nuclear bombs for the Pacific.

I haven’t much for his opponents, complaining of the absence and the presence of the same thing, triumphantly proposing to postpone destiny “for a limited period.”

This is the age of the gutless men. myself included. However, when those first peace-time atombombs were touched off at Bikini I was there, and Mr Gaitskell wasn’t, nor was Mr Macmillan, nor Mr Dulles, nor Mr Gromyko, nor any of the billy-boys of the Great Deterrent. Come to think of it, there was one shipmate of that strange cruise: Commander Noble, Minister of State today—he was there: and now I remember Commander Noble is my M.P. One day J must write a letter to my M.P.— or will this do? The atom bombs were the peashooters of their kind: they are still a bad dream for me. That is where I woultf flop as an M.P. I still remember a creature called Pig 311 swimming around in the radio-active lagoon until, I suppose, his bones dissolved. Commander Noble and I survived; all that suffered was our backbones. India’s Economy The income of everyone in Britain went up 7 per cent last year, do you know that? I believe it because it is in a White Paper, otherwise it would make me laugh or cry. Oh. to be an economist now that April’s here! The other day it was in India where they were debating a budget deficit of £274 million, and the post office clerk pushed me back a two anna piececounterfeit, he said, the place was full of them. A country where anyone can bother forging a coin worth less than twopence has a strange economy, too. The Second Five-year Plan

entails public expenditure of £3600 million, but I could not get my telegrams until next day because the peon hung on to them; for each one delivered after midnight he got an anna. He would gladly stay up four hours to make a penny.. The plan aims to push the national income up £lO million—in other words the average yearly Indian income is £2O; the Golden Age will raise it to £24. When 365 million Indians can average 10s a week each, that will be prosperity. Last week they reformed the currency decimalising the unit into the naiya paisa, worth onethird of a half-penny, and maybe someone will even forgo that. India’s achievements are stupendous, her development staggering—and there are still people who think in one seventy-second part of a shilling. Don’t talk to me of economics. Maybe I am 7 per cent, richer after all.

Archbishop Makarios As the tanker, Ocean Thunder, moves over the horizon towards the Seychelles, how does Archbishop Makarios feel, I wonder? The long vacation over, release at hand—off with the beach-wear and on, with the robes and the veil and the stove-pipe hat, goodbye to Sans Souci, back to the hurly burly.

Does Makarios feel like Napoleon—or Robinson Crusoe? I know how I felt, the day I left the Seychelles. It is like leaving nowhere else on earth, a cross between holiday’s end and being paroled from the world’s nicest mental home.

Out in the bay stands the ship, usually the old British India liner —never before, I imagine, has Mr Onassis sent one of his mammoth oil-cans to such a place—for the island of Mahe has nowhere for a vessel to deck; the Archbishop will have to walk down past the statue of Queen Victoria, past the great sang-dragon trees, past the curious crowds to whom the departure of a boat is a rich event let alone an Ethnarch. And for hours after, as the ship moves away, the peaks of the Seychelles stand out over the ocean; one of the great sights of the world, because you never go back. What memories of the past year will Makarios take away—the beach at Beau-Vallon, the leperhome on Curieuse? The Valley of the Coco-de-Mer and the Black Parrots, the Pirate inn and Judge Lyon’s operatic court, rum and coconut-milk in the moonlight? Is he bringing back—as I did— A Giant Tortoise to symbolise that the slow survive, if they are hard Enough outside? Will he, to complete the irony, come back through the Suez Canal Somehow this sad, mad situation needs only that to round off Sans Souci to Suez, or the Bishop’s Move-