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{de | titty f i to secure justice for the Negro will also find themselves fighting to secttre a better way of life for ail; and, in turn, those who desire to improve the lot of all will find the civil rights organizations key allies. Increasingly the civil rights and anti-poverty drives lead us to consider the fact that the bulk of our federal funds are now spent not on human needs, but on arms. President Johnson, in his State of the Union Message of January 1964, linked his cut in the defense budget to the need for solving problems of education, health, manpower retrain- ing, and poverty in the Appalachians. If these problems are really to be solved, civil rights and anti-poverty forces will have to demand further cutbacks in military spending. While it is technically possible to spend both for military and public welfare purposes, this has so far not been politically possible. The very forces which are most strongly for military spending tend to be most opposed to government action on either social welfare or civil rights, As Senator George McGovern has rightly pointed out, “When a major percentage of the public resources of our society is devoted to the accumulation of devastating weapons of war, the spirit of democracy suffers.” The arms race has created an anti-human polit- ical climate in which real concern for human needs has not developed. Obviously, many individuals feel that if it comes to a choice be- tween military power and improving our standard of living, then we must “tighten our belts” and choose guns and missiles. The price of security, they say, is a bigger and bigger military force, for only . strength acts as a deterrent to Soviet expansion. They forget that nuclear weapons cannot provide security. Deterrence depends upon being willing to use the weapons. If we are willing to use them, the like- lihood is that they will eventually be used. As President Kennedy pointed out, even victory in a nuclear war would be ashes in our mouths. We now have enough weapons to destroy the U.S.S.R. many times ever. Professor Seymour Melman recently suggested that in view of eur present fantastic surplus of destructive power we can maintain whatever military “security” these weapons provide, and cut back on the military budget. We can use the savings to meet domestic needs, Sen- ator McGovern, in the light of this evidence, has raised these questions: “I ask what possible advantage there can be to the United States in appropriating additional billions of dollars to build more missiles when we already have excess capacity to destroy the potential enemy? How many times is it necessary to kill a man or kill a nation? ... one quick nuclear exchange would now leave 100 million Americans dead, an equal number of Russians, and nearly as many West Europeans, is that not enough to deter anyone other than a madman from setting off such a catastrophe? And if either side yields to madness or miscalculation, can any number of arms save us?” fxg ‘wu ce nme epee a ee mm ee eee ee eR oe i