The Arms Race and Command Economies since 1945 383Routine and ritual constitute the standard substitute for faith of the
incandescent, personal, and revolutionary kind. As such faiths—
Marxist or liberal-democratic, as the case may be—fade towards mere
shibboleth, ritual and routine alone remain.
In times past, routine and ritual prevailed in European and all other
armed forces. Technical upheavals were few and far between, however
important for the ebb and flow of peoples and the tides of victory and
defeat. Perhaps the extraordinary disturbance arising across the past
century and a half, ever since the industrialization of war got seriously
under way, will eventually be contained so that the world’s armed
forces can again sink back into the sustaining and restraining regime of
unchanging routine.
On the other hand, as long as rivalry between mutually suspicious
states continues, deliberate organized invention seems certain to per
sist, cost what it may. Absolute economic limits are scarcely in sight.
Every productive resource not needed for bodily life is, in principle,
available for defense; and the enhanced productivity of automated
machinery is so great that the practical limits on military expenditure
are limits on the efficiency of human organization for war rather than
anything else. Once again one comes up against the question of con
sensus and obedience. Material limits are comparatively trivial.
One might, perhaps, suppose that absolute physical limits to
weaponry were close at hand. After all, escape velocities for ballistic
missiles were attained as long ago as 1957. The next generation of
weaponry may act from space with the speed of light, as do control and
guidance systems already in use. But attainment of the physical
world’s absolute speed limit would not hinder rival research and de
velopment teams from seeking to improve control and precision of
aim, while developing methods of protection against interference
from without. Stabilization of weapons systems, if it ever comes,
seems unlikely to arise from exhaustion of the frontiers of scientific
research and engineering.
To halt the arms race, political change appears to be necessary. A
global sovereign power willing and able to enforce a monopoly of
atomic weaponry could afford to disband research teams and dis
mantle all but a token number of warheads. Nothing less radical than
this seems in the least likely to suffice. Even in such a world, the clash
of arms would not cease as long as human beings hate, love, and fear
one another and form into groups whose cohesion and survival is
expressed in and supported by mutual rivalry. But an empire of the
earth could be expected to limit violence by preventing other groups