This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC wreath lectures.

This lecture in the series The Two-Eged Sword, given by Lawrence Martin, was originally broadcast in 1981.

As I turn now to look at arms control and disarmament, only in this my fifth lecture,

you may think I have left the horse well behind the cart.

Many people today clearly believe that a discussion of armed force should consist chiefly of vehemently advocating disarmament.

It's easy and popular to do this, especially if you pass lightly over the difficulties.

But as arms control is intended to avert some of the dangers presented by our strategic environment, it seemed reasonable to examine this before evaluating the cure as prescribed.

In a climate where everybody seems to be pushing some cheap or easy remedy, a note of caution

may not come amiss. Uncritical enthusiasm may actually obscure the very real, if limited benefits, the idea of arms control may yield,

for in a nuclear age some element of control we must certainly have.

Arms control is a vast subject, irresistible to thesis writer and pamphleteer alike.

Even the bibliographies cover whole shelves. The terms disarmament and

arms control are commonly used interchangeably, but as I pointed out in my first lecture, there are

really two fundamentally different theories. Indeed, when the United States arms control and

disarmament agency was founded in 1961,

there was a major congressional battle over which order the terms should take in the agency's title.

The simpler idea, though the more radical and elusive aim, is that of disarmament,

by which is usually meant reduction in the quantity

and perhaps even the total abolition of armaments.

This approach has most plausibility if you believe that armaments are the primary

and perhaps even the sole source of international conflict.

Then the process of reducing arms would become self-reinforcing, and the vicious circle that's widely supposed to exist in the form of an arms race would be reversed in the virtuous direction of growing mutual confidence.

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