"It has become impossible to give up the enterprise of disarmament without abandoning the whole great adventure of building up a collective peace system"

Arthur Henderson fuses two ideas that are often treated separately: reducing armaments and constructing a durable framework for shared security. He argues they are structurally inseparable. A peace system worthy of the name cannot stand on top of unchecked accumulation of weapons, because the very dynamics that fuel armament, mutual suspicion, coercive leverage, and readiness for unilateral action, corrode the trust, reciprocity, and restraint on which collective security relies. To relinquish disarmament is not to postpone an optional reform; it is to withdraw the keystone from an arch and then expect the arch to hold.

Calling disarmament an “enterprise” and the pursuit of collective peace a “great adventure” elevates them beyond technocratic box-checking. It signals a long, arduous, and cooperative undertaking, costly, imperfect, and contingent on steady political will. Disarmament is not merely the subtraction of weapons; it is the addition of transparency, verification, and habits of compliance that make common security plausible. The fewer the incentives and capacities to strike first, the easier it becomes to believe that others will honor their obligations tomorrow. Institutions can codify this logic, but they cannot substitute for it. Without material restraint to anchor promises, a peace system becomes a theater of declarations.

Skeptics insist that deterrent strength underwrites peace. Henderson’s warning is not a counsel of naiveté; it is a recognition of the security dilemma. When each side arms to feel safer, all feel less safe, and the resort to collective guarantees looks increasingly impractical. The responsible alternative is calibrated, reciprocal, and verifiable disarmament that lowers risks while distributing security. The lesson from the interwar years, and from later arms control successes, is that progress on peace and on disarmament moves together or not at all. Treating disarmament as optional policy garnish invites the collapse of the very project it is meant to serve.