To be effective, a strategy for peace must be capable of the widest possible application. As a result, it must set forth a moral framework that pertains both to public and to private life, that can be shared by religious and secular traditions alike, and that is applicable both within and between nations. Such a framework can offer guidance to all persons whose activities can have any effect, however small, on the atmosphere in which governments and peoples have to confront shared problems: to public officials, for instance, or international civil servants, business executives, teachers, reporters, and voters the world over.

      This purpose is best served, I suggest, by stressing the moral constraints indispensable for preserving or restoring an atmosphere of at least minimal trust in any society, and therefore seen as fundamental within most cultural traditions. A constraint such as that on taking innocent human life, for example, is sufficiently familiar to members of most societies as to require no elaborate explanation. The constraints emphasized in a moral framework meant to be international in scope must be few enough to set achievable standards and simple enough to be easily grasped, yet also sufficiently specific to offer more guidance than general injunctions to exhibit, say, kindness or justice.

      Failure to attend from the outset to such constraints has led to actions that are wrong from both a moral and a strategic point of view. Consider, for example, the decision by French government officials, in July I985, to sink the flagship of the environmental organization Green-peace, the Rainbow Warrior, as it lay at anchor in the harbor of Auckland, New Zealand. The crew was preparing to lead a flotilla toward the Moruroa atoll in the Pacific, in order to monitor France's upcoming nuclear tests there. To foil this plan, French secret agents had been sent to plant explosives on the vessel and to detonate them. The first blast came shortly before midnight on July 10. While all on board scrambled to leave, a Portuguese photographer, Fernando Pereira, returned to his cabin to fetch his equipment. A minute later, a second explosion killed him and sank the ship.

      At first, this incident may have seemed only a minor escapade in the eyes of French government officials--hardly a speck on the distant horizon by comparison to the large-scale brutalities that poison the international atmosphere. It was nevertheless to grow into a vast political scandal, rocking the government of President Franqois Mitterrand and forcing a shake-up in the French intelligence services. French public officials made every effort to ignore, conceal, and lie about the matter until it became impossible to do so anymore. Whatever benefit they may have hoped to achieve was far outweighed, even from the point of view of strict national interest, by the damage to France's reputation?

      The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior received so much criticism that such an action is not likely to recur in exactly the same form. But such actions are part and parcel of long-standing policies that are harder to change. Blackmail, kidnappings, sabotage, assassinations--these and other acts have many parallels among nations participating in cold and hot, wars throughout the world. Each policy may result from shortsighted--and often, as here, misconceived--concern for national priorities; together they not only brutalize participants and bring great suffering to victims and to their relatives, but also help to damage the climate for cooperative efforts to reduce the threat of war.