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“n I a ca ce Re EER PO EP erent Se oe eee ee i ee eee ) The fact that Russia now has equal or better weapons of extermination and has joined us in these same insane preparations doubles our dan- ger but does not halve our original guilt. Neither does it nullify our willful stupidity in now clinging to an obsolete, discredited strategy, based on a negation of morality and a defiance of common sense. The only possible justification of our continued reliance upon weapons of total extermination would be that they do no present harm and would never be used by cither side under any extremity of provocation. Can any mature mind comfort itself with either hope? Even our experimental explosion of nuclear bombs, at a rate of more than sun Pan Desanintes mee hae elena a mae Lan htnn? MEGA LV BE ANUSSId OIL, bid> poisoned GUr DADDIES milk, upset the delicate ecological balance of Nature, and, still worse, defiled our genetic heri- tage. As for the possibility that nuclear weapons will never be used, our children in school know better than this every time they are put through the sadistic mummery of an air-raid drill and learn to “play disaster.” Such baths of fear and hostility are gratuitous assaults against the young, whose psychological damage is already incalcul- able; their only service is to bar more tightly the exits that would permit a real escape. There are people who would defend these plans on the grounds that it is better to die nobly, defending democracy and freedom, than to sur- vive under Communist oppression, Such apolo- gists perhaps exaggerate the differences that now exist between our two systems, but they err even more seriously in applying to mass extermination a moral standard that was defensible only as long as this death was a symbolic one confined to a restricted number of people on a small portion of the earth, Such a disaster, as in the bitter-end resistance of the Southern Confederacy, was still relatively minor and retrievable; if the original resolve to die were in fact an erroneous onc, in a few generations it could be corrected. Nuclear damage, in contrast, is cumulative and irretriev- able; it admits no belated confession of error, no canentanses and aheolution POP Cante aaa aoe, Under what canon of sanity, then, can any government, or any generation, with its limited perspectives, its fallible judgment, its obvious proneness to self-deception, delusion, and error, make a decision for all future ages about the very existence of even a single country? Still more, how can any onc nation treat as a purely private