"The popular, and one may say naive, idea is that peace can be secured by disarmament and that disarmament must therefore precede the attainment of absolute security and lasting peace"
About this Quote
There is a cool, clinical impatience in Quidde's phrasing: "popular" doubles as an indictment, and "naive" sharpens it into a diagnosis. He is not merely disagreeing with disarmament-as-first-step; he is puncturing a comforting civic fairytale, the kind that thrives when publics want moral clarity more than strategic clarity. By setting "peace" and "disarmament" into a tidy causal chain, the "popular" view offers an almost hygienic solution to geopolitical fear: remove the weapons, remove the danger. Quidde's intent is to sever that illusion.
The subtext is that arms are not the disease but the symptom. Disarmament without "absolute security" is framed as premature vulnerability, a bet that rivals will reciprocate, that verification will hold, that old grudges will politely retire. His syntax does work here: the repetition of "that... and that..". mimics the slippery logic he wants to expose, as if one assumption quietly smuggles in the next until the conclusion feels inevitable.
Context matters. Quidde, a German pacifist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, lived through Europe’s arms races, the collapse of empires, and the way idealistic diplomacy can be eaten alive by bad-faith actors. His critique comes from inside the peace project, not against it: he is warning that disarmament, sold as a moral prelude to peace, can become a trap if it ignores power, enforcement, and incentives. The line reads like a rebuttal to salon pacifism and parliamentary wish-casting alike: peace is not produced by subtraction alone; it is built, negotiated, guaranteed, and only then made safer by taking weapons off the table.
The subtext is that arms are not the disease but the symptom. Disarmament without "absolute security" is framed as premature vulnerability, a bet that rivals will reciprocate, that verification will hold, that old grudges will politely retire. His syntax does work here: the repetition of "that... and that..". mimics the slippery logic he wants to expose, as if one assumption quietly smuggles in the next until the conclusion feels inevitable.
Context matters. Quidde, a German pacifist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, lived through Europe’s arms races, the collapse of empires, and the way idealistic diplomacy can be eaten alive by bad-faith actors. His critique comes from inside the peace project, not against it: he is warning that disarmament, sold as a moral prelude to peace, can become a trap if it ignores power, enforcement, and incentives. The line reads like a rebuttal to salon pacifism and parliamentary wish-casting alike: peace is not produced by subtraction alone; it is built, negotiated, guaranteed, and only then made safer by taking weapons off the table.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
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