◆ SpookStack

ae I er A er EE A = RRR en. a A A I Rs elena th pa AE LF AG NSS SAS ae ne ee ea } Algeria a decade Jater, Our own country had forecast that depravity by our national conduct. This conduct still remains without public examtina- tion or repentance, but, unfortunately, retribu- tion may not lic far away. Should it come, Civil Defense ¢siimaics have established that it will at once wipe out forty million American lives for the one million we once supposedly saved. Let us be clear about cause and effect. It was not our nuclear weapons that commitied us to the strategy of extermination; it was rather our de- cision to concentrate on the methods of extermi- nation that led to our one-sided, obsessive pre- occupation with nuclear weapons. Even before Russia had achieved a single nuclear weapon, we had so dismantled our military establishment that we lacked sufficient equipment and muni- lions to fight successfully such a minor action as that in Korea. Ti: total nature of our moral breakdown, accuratcly predicted a half century ago — along with the atom bomb-— by Henry Adams, can be gauged by a single fact: most Americans do not realize that this change has taken place or, worse, that it makes any difference. They have no consciousness of either the magnitude of their collective sin or the fact that, by their silence,- they have individually condoned it. It is precisely as if the Secretary of Agriculture had licensed the sale of human flesh as a wartime emergency measure and pcople had taken to cannibalism when the war was over as a clever dodge for Jowcring the cost of living — a mere extension of everyday butchery. Many of our professed re- ligious and moral leaders have steadily shrunk from touching this subject; or, if they have done so, they have naively equated mass extermination with war and have too often given their blessing io il, for rcasons just as specious as those our gov- ernment has used. ‘ It is in relation to this gigantic moral collapse that our present devotion to nuclear weapons and their equally dchumanizcd bacterial and chemical counterparts nust be gauged. When we abandoned the basic moral restraints we cniarged the destructive capacities of our nuclear weapons. What was almost as bad, our pride in this achievement expressed itself in an