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Plotting Peace: The Owl’s Reply to Hawks and Doves by Ronald Higgins,
Brassey’s Defence, pp 227, Pounds sterling 17.95

IN SPAIN during the Inquisition, from time to time the bishops would
summon a rabbi to a ‘disputation’. They would lay some point of theology
on the table. Often the rabbi’s very survival would depend on the skill
with which he argued the case; cogently, but not so forcefully as to be
blasphemous in the eyes of the Church.

Much the same atmosphere pervades the disputations of the past 45 years
between ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ on nuclear strategy. Most readers, especially
those who are atheists, may find it easier to identify with the feelings
of the rabbi than with the hawks or doves. ‘Look, these bishops are seriously
weird. Strategic triad, I ask you. But they are very, very dangerous . .
. ‘

Many, and particularly those with a British education, will have felt
frustration at this. The prevention of holocaust is too important to be
left to hawks and doves who hardly speak each other’s language. Is there
no reasonable middle way? Ronald Higgins has at different times been viewed
as dovishly unsound by his colleagues in the Foreign Office and as fatally
compromised by his fellow campaigners in the peace movement. He proposes
that world security can be achieved only by a third bird: ‘The owl is above
all flexible and pragmatic. He (sic) is not shackled by particular visions
of the human future or governed by absolute perceptions of political virtue
or vice . . . the owl tries to see the complex interactions of many factors.’

Higgins’s call to appreciate complexity, however, owes more to the ethos
of the Foreign Office than to a modern scientific approach or to psychology.
A large part of this rather disorganised but very civilised book, ostensibly
pointing a way out of the nuclear dilemma, is devoted to explaining that
nuclear weapons are really not the largest problem facing humanity.

The owl does come up with one interestingly pragmatic political suggestion:
that Britain’s Trident submarines should be assigned to NATO command, unblocking
the ideological log jam over British nuclear weapons. Little else is new
here. Though Higgins tempers his polemical stereotyping of hawks and doves
with accounts of meeting pacific military men, he seems to have missed out
on the tough-minded and pragmatic disarmers, who have developed exactly
the owlish approach he calls for.

It is impossible to help wondering how much Plotting Peace is about
Higgins’s own dilemma of identity. He mentions a visit to the British Army
on the Rhine ‘to some Peace Movement friends . . . They were shocked. I
had forgotten that any contact with the Armed Forces was intrinsically compromising,
even polluting.’ Meanwhile, ‘my old ‘realistic’ Foreign Office colleagues
frown on morality being allowed to threaten the necessary compromises of
power politics’. In the end this is a book by an ex-Foreign Office man for
Foreign Office men, all of whom should read it.

Mike Holderness writes on science and defence issues.