On Growth

36. Alva Myrdal

Mrs. Alva Myrdal, the wife of Professor Gunnar Myrdal, is cabinet minister in charge of church affairs and disarmament since 1967.
She was born in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1902. She studied in Stockholm, London, Leipzig and Geneva. From 1949 to 1950, Mrs. Myrdal was principal director of the department of social sciences at UNESCO. Since 1962 she has been Swedish chief delegate to the disarmament conference in Geneva. From 1962 to 1970 she was member of the upper house of the Swedish Parliament.
Aside from publishing a number of books written together with Gunnar Myrdal, Mrs. Myrdal wrote Nation and Family (1941), Postwar Planning (1944), Our Responsibilities for the Poor Peoples (1961) and Disarmament - Reality or Utopia? (1965).

As a delegate to the disarmament conference in Geneva, you warned that in eighteen months the globe had to support once more sixty atomic tests; three in China, five in France, sixteen in the United States and several dozen in the Soviet Union.¹

1 July, 1972.

[p. 240]

That's just one development that has to stop. There are only five powers who really are the sinners. I don't think that the hazard is too great. However, they are conducting these weapons tests in order to improve their nuclear weapons to an ever higher capacity of killing. This means of course that they are competitive. They are also monopolizing the tremendous resources of their own countries. Thus a great part of the world's resources are being used up for this purpose of perfecting instruments of death. Even if there's not a nuclear war, and even if the nuclear test explosions are not dangerous to human health, the very course one is forced to take is one that is detrimental to the interests of mankind, of the rest of the world and even to the people in their own countries.

As Ivan Illich has written, modern weapons can only defend civilization and so-called freedom by annihilating man.² Do you agree that, for instance, SALT³ does not prevent a further increase in atomic warheads in rockets? There is a SALT agreement, but SIPRI⁴ has used the term ‘cosmetic agreement’ for it. Is man not faced with a very serious situation?

Yes, he is. The SALT agreements are good from the point of view that they show that two parties can agree upon something. But even for the defensive strategic weapons it means that they increase their ABM's in order to get there. Then for the offensive strategic weapons there is no limit even on a quantitative basis as they can put more bombs in each missile. They can make qualitative development; there is no end to their so-called improvement.

Secondly, there is no limit at all to the quantitative increase. The field remains open for competition. The additions are so high in the Soviet Union and in the United States that it certainly cannot but encourage China to try to go ahead also. At least these three world powers are not showing any signs of stopping this competitive course towards destruction.

In other words, they are now moving from quantity into quality, and actually the mad race goes right on.

Yes. They have been improving quality all the time. The only aspect on which they are trying to put some limitation is the quantitative one. That is not the worst. The qualitative one is much worse, because if you produce new quantities of nuclear weapons, you dispose or you use

2 Deschooling Society, Harper & Row (New York, 1970), p. 158.

3 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks.

4 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

[p. 241]

resources, plants, iron, electronics and so on. But if you are racing towards qualitative improvements, you take and utilize the human brain to a much higher degree, because it involves research and development. I believe that brainpower is much more scarce in this world than, let's say, electricity. What the poor countries need more than anything else is, of course, to get all these hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers to work on their problems, on constructive problems and not on destructive problems.

What did the Khrushchev-Kennedy agreement to stop atmospheric testing actually mean? Underground testing went right on, endangering the planet and human life. Now there is a so-called SALT agreement?

The Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement on the nuclear test ban has not meant anything, least of all, to reduce the armaments race. Not a single thing. They are going on just as they did before. I see really no end to it if the military people don't change their attitude, I do think the scientists are in the course of changing theirs. There is much more discomfort on the part of scientists to work, for instance, with chemical weapons. They really are criticizing what is being done. We always have had the great heroes among even the atomic scientists, who have been wondering whether they did right or not, like Oppenheimer.⁵

Yes, Andrei D. Sakharov in the Soviet Union -

Yes, Sakharov and several others in the Soviet Union. They came to a congress in Sweden. They have said recently that all scientists should agree at least to stop work on biological weapons. I have greater hopes about the scientists revolting against the present situation. Scientists will lead public opinion to revolt against this, and that will influence the politicians. Then I hope the politicians and statesmen will in turn exercise power over the military.

In other words, the scientists should move the people to stir the politicians to do what is needed.

Yes, exactly. The people themselves have not got that source of energy. Because they are also dumbfounded by the mass media or by television. They believe much more in slogans like ‘superiority,’ ‘national honor’ and ‘we must be the greatest,’ et cetera - which is just

5 J. Rober Oppenheimer, US nuclear physicist.

[p. 242]

nonsense. Every nation cannot be the greatest, anyway. It is better that we band together and try to make the best of the planet.

The Forrester team at MIT has now tried for the first time to create a global model in order to study what should be done for survival and what interactions of damaging factors to all life in reality are.

Yes, if you stress the word ‘beginning,’ I think it's very good. It opens up a field of interest to many people, but it certainly could not be considered as a model on which one should start to work for an implementation, but rather to start with critical studies of alternative futures of different kinds. We have been very much interested in Sweden in this field. As a small country we are of course afraid of the huge nations, the superpowers, especially of their planning from a military point of view. The multinational firms - big business and so on - will plan the future of the world according to their interests. They are actually also planning for our future. We want to have an influence on it. We are very eager to set up some units in Sweden to follow the thinking in the planning field which is going on and to contribute in certain sectors, where we have resources enough for doing it.

I have just been chairman of an official committee. We have deliberated in our report on how the future should be studied in Sweden. We must remember the interests of the common man, of the municipality, of the provinces, of the various groups and we must see to it that the thinking of the future, which should be combining their interests, will be balanced, but that it should take into consideration also the interests of future generations. We should not decide too much. We should not tie the future too much for them. We should leave a number of decisions open to them. That is a very difficult proposition in everything that has to do with planning.

The New York Times warned in a speech by Professor Mason Willridge of the University of Virginia that gangsters or evil people some day will be able to threaten humanity by making an amateurish nuclear bomb.

That is possible. Assassins and bandits have much greater potentialities than we realize - even with regard to chemical weapons, for instance, lethal gases and so on. You see examples of that kind of explosives, which they send in little letters to various persons in different countries. That might not bring real havoc to great numbers of people, but I think

[p. 243]

the possibilities for implementing plans of brutality by individuals or by gangs is something we must take into consideration much much more than before. SIPRI is just now producing a massive and harassing study on all kinds of chemical weapons, for instance. You are no doubt familiar with the 900-page study the institute recently published on ‘The Arms Trade with the Third World’?

Yes, I went to see Dr. Frank Barnaby [director] and have written about this most important study in the press. But are you hopeful that scientists will be able to arouse sufficiently mankind and in time before we are really into disaster?

No, I could not say I am hopeful. But we do not need to be hopeful in order to try to forestall evil until it happens. I do believe that everybody who understands at least something of these problems has the duty to speak up. I would say that particularly we in the smaller and neutral countries - who are not bound by considerations towards one block or another - we have an extra responsibility to tell the truth as we see it, hoping that that in the long run will influence the world. There is nothing to believe in anymore if you don't continue to believe in reason.