50
HANS
J.
MORGENTHAU
sequences for the survivors. Neither Western values, nor the Western
standard of living, nor capitalism in its present form, nor faith in
God (I should think) would survive an exchange of hydrogen
bombs. When war becomes total, war aims-that is, objectives apart
from war itself-disappear.
If
we die, it will not be for freedom
but out of a kind of inert necessity, in a chain reaction of challenge–
and-response like the process of fission itself.
To say this is not to advocate surrender to Communism; that
is really a scholastic issue like What-would-you-do-if-a-Negro-wanted–
to-marry-your-sister? There is far more danger now of nuclear war
than there is of what is called a "Communist take-over."
It
is on
this issue-the issue of how to disarm-that we ought to try to re–
gain our freedom of thought and hence our freedom of political
action.
HANS
J.
MORGENTHAU
The cold war is being waged on two fronts: in Europe
where the issue is Germany, and in Asia, Mrica, and Latin America
where the issue is the political orientation of the underdeveloped na–
tions of the world.
In Europe, the cold war arose from the unsettled territorial
issues of the Second World War. At the end of that war, a line of
military demarcation was established between East and West which
placed the Red Army a hundred miles east of the Rhine. The Soviet
Union has consistently maintained that this line constitutes the defini–
tive western boundary of the Soviet bloc, while the West has as
consistently maintained that this line is only provisional and that the
definitive boundary would have to run farther to the east. The West
has successfully protected that line through the policy of containment.
Stalin and Khrushchev have attempted by all kinds of devices to
obtain from the West the formal recognition of the legitimacy of the
territorial status quo in Europe; the raising of the Berlin issue by
Khrushchev is but the latest of these attempts.
