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famous in history. Overnight, as it were, our own countrymen became such moral monsters. In principle, the extermination camps where the Nazis incinerated over six million helpless Jews were no different from the urban erematoriums our air force improvised in its attacks by napalm bombs on Tokyo. By these means, in a single night, we roasted alive more people than were killed by atom bombs in either Hiroshima or Nagacali OMir aime were different hat our avegGasani, WML ASAE ORR RERAAR hy RK Se methods were those of mankind’s worst enemy. Up to this point, war had been an operation conducted by military forces against military tar- gets. By long-established convention, a token part, the army, stood for the greater whole, the na- tion. Even when an army was totally defeated and wiped out, the nation it represented lived to tell the tale; neither unarmed prisoners nor civil- jans were killed to seal a defeat or celebrate a victory. Even our air force, the chief shaper of our present policy, once prided itself on its pin-point bombing, done in daylight to ensure that only military targets would be hit. As late as the spring of 1942, as I know by personal observation, a memorandum was cir- culated among military advisers in Washington propounding this dilemma: If by fighting the war against Japan by orthodox methods it might veouire Aue ar ten veare to connuer the anemy SRPMS SAV WR BREE PR SAF RAReA ge RAE Dalal yy while with incendiary air attacks on Japanese citics Japan’s resistance might be broken in a year or two, would it be morally justifiable to use the sccond means? Now it is hard to say which is more astonishing, that the morality of total exter- mination was then seriously debated in military circles or that today its morality is taken for granted, as outside debate, even among a large part of the clergy. More than any other event that has taken place in modern times this sudden radical change-over from war to collective extermination reversed the whole course of human history. Plainly, the acceptance of mass extermination as a normal outcome of war undermined all the moral inhibitions that have kept man’s murderous fantasies from active expression. War, however bruta) and devastating, had a formal beginning and rola cane to an end by came forma! ALrACLtC Mees UA eek Lee A gee a Sy otras suas pt Vatss of compromise or surrender. But no one has the faintest notion how nuclear extermination, once begun, could be brought to an end. Still Icss