The Foreign Service Journal, June 2018

14 JUNE 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL T he 18-Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC) in Geneva is surely one of the more extraordinary phe- nomena of our time. Neither war nor crisis nor gloom of confrontation stays its couriers from their appointed rounds. The Vietnamwar may be rolling along; the Pentagon may be calling up reserves; the defense budget may be $80 billion and counting, but still the disarmament boys persist. Sometimes, like Peter Pan, they seem to be spreading their arms and crying: “I can fly! I can fly!”Curiously enough, they almost can. … A more open world is, after all, the real long-range objective of disarmament talks; any arms control that may be achieved will be a means to the end. Real security in the nuclear age can never be achieved merely by tinker- ing with the instruments men use to wage war. Every now and again the opposite thesis is thrust to the fore–that security consists in doing away with nuclear and, indeed, all weapons. Usually this idea comes from naïve and wishful citizens… It does not necessarily follow, however, that the United States Government was mistaken to profess an interest in general and complete disarmament (GCD) when Nikita Khrushchev…presented the idea to the UN General Assembly in 1959. (That was the year he kept his shoes on.) I was one of those who thought at the time that we ought to be candid and realistic, and say what we know to be true: namely, that techno- logical developments had made foolproof inspection of nuclear disarmament an impossibility, and therefore no nuclear power in its right mind—certainly not the Soviet Union—could seri- ously consider stripping itself of its deterrent power. This would not have been sound tactics. A government can never sell very much logic and realism in the disarmament field; it just is not salable. One has to deal largely in dreams, where declaratory policy is concerned. We wisely did so, climbing on Nikita’s bandwagon and trying to make “me too” sound original and persuasive. Had we taken the realistic line, pressing for partial measures only, the Kremlin would still today have been making propaganda hay with GCD, in all prob- ability talking of little else. —By William R. Frye, a journalist and author who was chief of The Christian Science Monitor ’s United Nations News Bureau, excerpted from his feature, “View of the 18-Nation Disarmament Committee: The Shape of Tomorrow’s World,” in the June 1968 Foreign Service Journal . 50 Years Ago The Shape of Tomorrow’sWorld FSJ Note on U.S. Vietnamese Refugee Policy Reverberates N ews outlets around the world picked up on a discussion in the April Foreign Service Journal , in which former ambassador to Vietnam and FSO (ret.) Ted Osius pointed to the Trump admin- istration’s decision to deport some 8,000 Vietnamese who had lived in the United States for decades. He could not go to the Hanoi govern- ment as instructed to ask for cooperation on that deportation policy, Osius stated in the Speaking Out column, “Respect, Trust and Partnership: Keeping Diplo- macy on Course in Troubling Times,” explaining why he resigned from his dream assignment as U.S. ambassador to Vietnam in October 2017. The majority “were war refugees who had sided with the United States, whose loyalty was to the flag of a nation that no longer exists,” Osius wrote. “These people don’t really have a country to come back to. I feared many would become human rights cases, and our government would be culpable.” The deportations were ordered even though in 2008 the United States and Vietnam had signed a repatriation memo- randum stating that Vietnamese citizens who arrived in the United States prior to July 12, 1995, are not subject to deporta- tion, according to The Mercury News and other media. The Guardian, The Mercury News, the Huffington Post, South China Morn- ing Post and the Catholic News Agency, among other outlets, picked up the story. It was also covered in the Human Rights Campaign blog. Reuters interviewed