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can anyone guess what purpose would be accom- plished by it, except a release by death from in- tolerable anxiety and fear. But this is to anticipate. What is important to bear in mind is that atomic weapons did not bring about this first decisive change; they mercly gave our already dc-moral- ized strategy a more cflective means of expression, Once extermination became acceptable, the confined tumor of + war, itself an atavistic pscudo- organ, turned into a cancer that would invade the blood strcam of civilization, Now the smallest sore of conflict or hostility might fatally spread through the whole organism, immune to all those protective moral and political restraints that a healthy body can mobilize for such occasions. By the time the atom bomb was invented our authorities needed no special justification for us- ing it. The humane pleas for withholding the weapon, made by the atomic scientists, suddeniy awakened to a moral crisis they had not foreseen while working on the bomb, were automatically disposed of by well-established precedent, already three years in operation, Still, the dramatic nature of the explosions at Hiroshima and Naga- saki threw a white light of horror and doubt over the whole process; for a moment a sense of moral guilt counteracted our exorbitant pride. This reaction proved as short-lived as it was be- lated. Yet it prompted Henry L. Stimson, a public servant whose admirable personal conduct ‘had never been open to question, to publish a magazine article defending the official decision to use the atom bomb. The argument Mr. Stimson advanced in favor of atomic genocide — a name invented later but studiously reserved for the acts of our cnemics — was that it shortened the war and saved perhaps morc than a million precious American lives, There is no need here to debate that highly de- batable point. But on those same practical, ‘hu- manitarian” grounds, systematic torture might be employed by an advancing army to deter guerrilla fighters and to blackmail the remaining popula- tion into accepting promptly the torturer’s terms. That only a handful of people ventured to make this criticism indicates the depth of moral apathy to which our countrymen had sunk in less than a dozen ycars. Those who used this illustration, however, were not surprised to find that the French, themselves the victims of Hitler’s carefully devised plans of torture and mass extermination, would authorize the use of military torture in