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l 4 ~! policies and appropriate decisions would quickly suggest themselves. This would do more to e'eet an immediate improvement in the relations be- tween the two powers now committed to prepar- ing for mutual extermination than endless parleys between their heads of government. A moral about-iace.does not demand, as those whose minds are congealed by the Cold War suppose, either a surrender to Russian Commu- nism or a series of futile appeasements; neither does it mean any increase in the dangers under which we now live: just the contrary. Those who see no other alternatives are still living in the pre-nuclear world; they do not understand that our greatest enemy is not Russia but our treacher- ous weapons, and that our commitment to these weapons is what has prevented us from con- ceiving and proposing the necessary means for extending the area of effective freedom and, above all, for safeguarding mankind from mean- ingless mutilation and massacre. No dangers we might face once we abandoned the very possibility of using mass extermination would be as great as those under which we now live; yet this is not to say that a bold change of policy would be immediately successful, or that before it had time to register its full effects in other countries it might not tempt Russia to risk measures to extend over other areas its own mon- olithic System of minority single-party government. But need I emphasize that these possible penalties could hardly be worse than those our government meekly accepted in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Korea, at a time when we still hugged the illu- sion of wielding absolute power through our monopoly of nuclear weapons? While sober judg- ment nced not minimize these transitional diffi- culties and possible losses, one must not under- estimate, cithcr, the impact of a new policy, wholly concerned to re-establish the moral con- trols and political cooperations necessary to enable mankind to halt the threatening misuse of the ex- traordinary powers that it now commands. Even in a purely military sense, this changed orientation might produce the greatest dilliculties for those Communist governments who misunder- stood its intention and sought to turn it to their private national advantage. Russia would no more be able to escape the impact of our huma nc plans and moralizcd proposals than it was able to avoid the impact and challenge of our nuclear