Tuesday, 8 November
Out with Kitty shopping at the Hotel de Ville Bazaar in the afternoon.
Explained to Zhongxiong the danger of giving up the restaurant and told him my plan for the future of the family. I made it quite plain that while I am not going to force them to accept my view, on the other hand, I am not going to allow myself be plunged into a desperate position which at my age and conditions I cannot find any way out. So, if they insist upon anything I shall agree but I’ll leave them and go back to Taipei. I advised him to consider carefully and take his time before making any decision.
The Alsops wrote a very interesting article on the modern problem of obsolescence. The march of science makes any weapon obsolescent before it enters full production within five years of going into service. Most aircraft types must be classified as absolutely obsolete. Because of the increasing destructiveness of the terrible absolute weapons, the importance of what the war planners called “force-in-being” is also increasing by rapid leaps and bounds. According to one expert estimate the value of force-in-being which is the force you have ready to fight on the outbreak of war has gone up by ten per cent per annum compounded since 1945. Meanwhile, the value of reserve power has declined proportionally. But how to maintain a strong force-in-being? Our system is to leave large parts of our armed forces with obsolete arms for very long periods, while sustaining a research and development program that at least provides models of truly modern arms. The Soviets, in contrast, have adopted the expensive answer. For instance, the Soviet force of fighter aircraft at the end of the war was of the inferior type – inferior to ours. But while United States was turning out F86s in hundreds, the Soviets were turning out their MiGs in thousands. Soviet output of MiGs reached the staggering total of fifteen thousand. In other words, the entire Soviet fighter force-in-being was equipped with MiGs with a great many left over for the Chinese and other satellites. Even today, a good many units of our fighter force are still equipped with types inferior to the F86. Among our allies, the position is still more serious. With the danger in the Formosa Strait rapidly increasing again, the Chinese-Nationalist air force, for instance, is more than half equipped with World War II aircraft types that will be utterly useless against the jet aircraft of the Chinese communists. Meanwhile, the Soviets have briskly put the MiG15 on the obsolete list. After making the gigantic investment needed to produce fifteen thousand of these planes, they have written them off for their own purposes. They are now making another, equally gigantic investment, to re-equip the Soviet Air Force and, after it, the satellite air forces, with their new “Farmer” day fighter and “Flashlight” light fighter, which are measurably superior to any comparable planes we have in quantity production. The MiGs, the tanks, and all the other weapons the Soviets are selling the Egyptians, Syrians and Saudi Arabians are nothing more or less than war surplus, created by the way the Soviets have handled the problem of obsolescence. But these Soviet arms that are junk in Russia are also good enough to turn the whole Middle-Eastern balance of power completely upside down.
Euch Ollenhauer told Dulles that as Russia will never agree to German reunification if it means all of Germany will belong to the Western military camp, so the Social Democrats maintain that the West will have to abandon sooner or later its hopes of harnessing a reunited Germany to the Western alliance. But that would mean a staggering revision of the US plans.