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of the United Nations, with the backing of a majority of the nations, without the permission of Russia and China. When they refuse permission, as they did in Korea, the limited war our strategists fancy is still open to us turns into an unlimited humiliation, as the painful truce that continues in Korea should remind us, for every original issue remains unsettled. But if we challenge that veto, our only recourse is to our absolute weapons, now as fatal to ourselves and the rest of mankind as they would be to Russia and China. The dis- tinguished army combat generals who have pub- licly recognized this state of impotence have been forced out of the armed services. This situation should give us pause. While every scientific advance in nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles only widens to planetary dimensions the catastrophe we have been pre- paring, our leaders still concentrate the nation’s efforts on hastening these advances. Why, then, do we still listen to those mistaken counsels that committed us to the Cold War, though our own military plans have wiped out the possibility of war itself and replaced it by total annihilation as the only foreseeable terminus of the tensions we have done our full share to produce? By what standard of prudence do we trust our lives to political, military, and scientific advisers who have staked our national existence on a single set of weapons and have already lost that shortsighted gamble, even if they become desperate enough to use these weapons or remain blind enough to be- lieve that they can them? What was it that set in motion the chain re- action of errors, miscalculations, delusions, and compulsions that have pushed us into the im- possible situation we now occupy? Every day that we delay in facing our national mistakes adds to both the cumulative dangers that threaten us and the difficulty of undoing them. + conceal that lose by not using SONCCA! nat 2055 OY AU MSing Le first step toward framing a new policy is to trace our path back to the point where we adopted our fatal commitment to weapons of mass extermination. This moral debacle, it is important to remember, was not a response to any threat by Russia or by Communism; still less was it imposed by Russia’s possession of similar weapons. Actually, the acceptance of extermina-