In December 1959, New Yorkers were met with the curious scene of Soviet soldiers on 47th Street and a new landmark in Turtle Bay. There, they saw a 13-foot-tall figure heaving downwards, striking a sword into a plow. The bronze sculpture, “Let Us Beat Swords Into Ploughshares” by Evgeniy Vuchetich, was a gift from the Soviet Union to the United Nations. It has since become an icon of pacifism and a prominent piece in the U.N. art collection.
But anyone familiar with the work of Vuchetich will find the statue strange. His most prolific work, the 279-foot-tall “The Motherland Calls,” is a monument celebrating the victory of the Red Army in Stalingrad, with his other significant works almost exclusively including monuments to Soviet commanders and military victories.
So why was it that the Soviet government commissioned Vuchetich for the installation on the U.N. North Lawn?
This choice may seem particularly contradictory, until the sculpture is understood as an allegory for disarmament, not peace.
Disarmament and peace are not always interchangeable. The reduction of arms is a means often applied to the effort of peace, but arms reductions can be short term and used to gain hegemony. At the time of the sculpture’s unveiling, the Soviets under Khrushchev were pursuing peaceful coexistence and entered into a period of detente with the Western bloc, believing they could leverage temporary arms reductions for long-term economic and military dominance.
So if peace can be separated from arms reductions, then durable peace may be achieved through changing the character of arms in armaments, rather than cutting them altogether.
In the 1970s, Finnish President Urho Kekkonen famously argued that arms reductions alone were insufficient for lasting peace. He instead maintained that it was the creation of shared security interests that created lasting peace, an ideology that many consider responsible for the relative stability in Europe until the 2014 invasion of Crimea. This means that long-term peace can be achieved without disarmament. Moreover, transitions to arms that support shared security interests may more effectively create stability than short-term disarmament. However, only recently have we gained access to weapons which can create the conditions for a shared security architecture.
For the vast majority of human history, the best weapons have generally been those with the most destructive capability. Which caveman can punch harder? Which catapult can hurl a larger stone? Which nuclear bomb produces the largest yield?
Because weapons development has followed this pattern in humanity’s 300,000 years of conflict, people eventually realized that there might be some benefit in attacking the vulnerable (i.e., civilians) to force capitulation, rather than attacking the heavily defended military targets that have an annoying tendency of shooting back.
Only two generations ago, in the Second World War, did American planes famously bomb German cities during the day while the British attacked at night. Night raids held the advantage of making the Allied bombers more difficult to spot and, therefore, more difficult to shoot down. Yet, the Americans opted for day raids because the same darkness that obscured Allied planes also hid the Nazi targets below (this didn’t matter to the British, who indiscriminately carpet-bombed vast districts). As the war went on, however, and American bomber losses mounted, the U.S. eventually adopted British-style nighttime carpet-bombing, making little attempt at specific targeting.
Weapons that are inaccurate but rely on the raw saturation of destructive force are cheap and easily claim civilian lives by accident. What’s more, there is actually an incentive to target civilians because hitting a specific target is less assured, and militaries are offered the built-in excuse of collateral damage.
With the advent of computerized guidance, there has been a fundamentally old, but suddenly very practical, factor that can be improved upon: accuracy. And accuracy changes everything.
In the 14th century, Sir John Doe could spend decades practicing his craft in archery, but even so, he could not control where the arrow went once it left his bowstring. By comparison, it is relatively easy for a newly-minted weapons officer to fire a missile at a chair-sized target a few continents away. This fundamentally shifts the incentives of how one should conduct war. It’s now exceedingly clear who a given military force is trying to kill, because there is no longer the “effectiveness excuse” for attacking anyone other than the people you intend to. When the IDF drops laser-guided bombs on civilian targets in the Gaza Strip, no one is under the impression it was trying to hit anything else. Tel Aviv must instead justify strikes by claiming legitimate targets exist among civilians — a justification increasingly few are convinced by globally.
We must accept that there are paths to peace easier and more probable than the elimination of all arms. If the end objective isn’t disarmament — if the broader purpose of all of these statutes and treaties is to create peace — then the answer isn’t fewer weapons, but rather ones more conducive towards stability. Precision guidance must be made accessible.
A peace built on shared security interests requires one precondition above all: those interests must be visible to every actor, so restraint can be verified and reciprocated. Precision-guided munitions (PGMs) create such visibility by making military intent legible.
When PGMs are used against legitimate military objectives, the signal is clear and credibly supports a shared security equilibrium (each side can see the other’s priorities and calibrate restraint in kind). And when PGMs are used on illegitimate targets — or on dual-use sites in ways that belie stated priorities — the same clarity still serves the Kantian logic: precision collapses plausible deniability, exposes the divergence between words and deeds, and lowers the transaction costs for enforcement. The transparency created by precision tightens the link between intent and outcome, which is exactly the information environment a shared-interest peace needs to form and endure.
But if these arms are made accessible as tools for stable peace abroad, it’s worth considering these arms as tools for subjugation at home. Wouldn’t weapons more capable in war translate to arms more effective in subjugation and terror? Don’t we risk making instruments of political violence available by making precision guidance technology accessible? The reality is that weapons made effective through precision do not translate to more effective tools of terror. And it is perhaps in Türkiye where that reality has been made most apparent.
In July 2016, Türkiye’s armed forces staged a coup. In Ankara, in Istanbul, and in Marmaris — Turks were met with the disconcerting scenes of tanks on the Bosphorus Bridge and guided bombs raining on civilian centers. And as is typical of coups, there was a sudden and violent consolidation of power following the putsch.
But curiously, it wasn’t the people with the tanks and missiles who were jailing journalists and detaining protesters. In fact, the coup failed. In reality, it was the elected government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan purging the public sector of disloyalty or opposition.
When pitted against guided bombs and homing missiles, it was Erdoğan’s livestreamed FaceTime call that served as a more effective tool in controlling the population. The armament through the availability of precise weapons will not give regimes more capable tools of repression. The reality is they are about as effective as imprecise arms, which is why increasing the accessibility of PGM technology will not result in empowered violence. Accuracy does not matter in a terror campaign, and as such, the sophisticated laser-guided bombs dropped on civilians in Türkiye are not any more effective in cowing protestors than a bomb manufactured in World War One. In fact, modern precision weapons may actually be less effective in this regard.
During the Syrian civil war, Bashar al-Assad’s government forces conducted airborne bombing campaigns to disperse and terrorize civilians. But interestingly, al-Assad’s forces made the conscious decision to use makeshift bombs made of oil barrels — despite having access to Iranian and even Russian precision-guided munitions — simply because they were cheaper and left more ambiguity in exactly who the regime was targeting. The same clarity afforded in international exchanges applies to domestic ones. Yes, precise weapons retain the potential to be instruments of political violence, but this potential remains at least equivalent to imprecise arms.
Precise weapons are a better guarantor of peace among states, and making them available will not increase the efficacy of weapons in political violence. So it is not disarmament, but rather the right kind of armaments that will make a stable, equal peace.
The name of Evgeniy Vuchetich’s statue in New York comes from a prophecy in the Bible. It speaks of a time in which the nations of the world “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks,” and forever keep from violence.
It’s a prophecy that has yet to materialize. We find ourselves forever failing to bend the sword into plows and the spear into hooks. The times in which we have tried, have seen us uncurling the plow into yet another sword.
So if every state must wield the sword, let it be sharpened to cut only its intended mark.
Featured Image Source: UN Photo Archive
