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tion antedated the invention of the atom bomb. The principles upon which the strategy of ex- termination was based were first enunciated by fascist military theorists, notably Genera! Douhet, who believed, like our own Major Seversky, that a small air force could take the place of a large army by confining its efforts to mass attacks on civilians and undermining the national will to resist. This reversion to the vicious Bronze Age practice of total war was a natural extension of fascism’s readiness to reintroduce terrorism and torture as instruments of government. When these methods were first carricd into action, by Mussolini in Abyssinia, by Hitler in Warsaw and Rotterdam, they awakened horror in our still morally sensitive breasts. The creed that could justify such actions was, we thought correctly, not merely antidemocratic but antihuman. In the midst of World War II a moral reversal took place among the English-speaking Allies, such a transposition as happened by accident in the final ducl in Hamlet, when Hamlet picks up the weapon Laertcs had poisoned in advance in order to make sure of his encmy’s death, The fascist powers became the victims of their own strategy, for both the United States and Britain adopted what was politely called “obliteration bombing,” which had as its object the total de- struction of great cities and the terrorization and massacre of their inhabitants. By taking over this method as a cheap substi- tute for conventional warfare — cheap in soldicrs’ lives, costly in its expenditure of other human lives and in the irreplaceable historic accumulations of countless lifetimes — these democratic govern- ments sanctioned the dehumanized techniques of fascism. This was Nazidom’s firmest victory and democracy’s most servile surrender. That moral reversal undermined the eventual military triumph of the democracies, and it has poisoned our political and military policies ever since. Civilized warfare has always been an atrocity per se, even when practiced by gallant men fighting in a just cause. But in the course of five thousand years certain inhibitions and moral safeguards had been sect up. Thus, poisoning the water supply and slaying the unarmed inhabitants of a city were no longer within the modern soldier's codec, however gratifying they might once have been to an Ashurbanipal or a Genghis Khan, moral monsters whose names have become in-