ABSTRACT
Ever since I first heard the story of Ajax in Nicholas Humphrey’s 1981 Bronowski Memorial Lecture, it’s stuck in my mind as the grimmest of allegories:
When I was a child we had an old pet tortoise called Ajax. One autumn, Ajax, looking for a winter home, crawled unnoticed into the pile of wood and bracken my father was making for Guy Fawkes Day. As days passed and more and more pieces of tinder were added to the pile, Ajax must have felt more and more secure; every day he was getting greater and greater protection from the frost and rain. On 5 November, bonfire and tortoise were reduced to ashes. Are there some of us who still believe that the piling up of weapon upon weapon adds to our security — that the dangers are nothing compared to the assurance they provide?
How can it possibly be that so many people today act like Ajax? Why are they still persuaded that the best way of ensuring security is to go on spending more and more on arms? How can politicians, of any party, allow their judgement to be so terminally impaired that most of them are still out there laying on the firewood? Even when all the dangers are acknowledged, people are still motivated by a fear that outweighs all their reason and awareness: the fear that the enemy is intent on outdoing us. That makes our weapons ‘good’, their weapons ‘bad’; our strategy ‘defensive’, theirs ‘aggressive’. Jim Garrison quotes the British physicist P. M. S. Blackett: ‘Once a nation bases its security on an absolute weapon, such as the atom bomb, it becomes psychologically necessary to believe in an absolute enemy.’ 1 And the Cold War warriors, with their snarls of paranoid hatred, ensure that we remain psychologically armed to the teeth.