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DAVID RIESMAN
spirit; and resourcefulness might be forthcoming to achieve full em–
ployment free of the combined spur and soporific of the permanent
war economy. Thus both domestic and international prospects could
become less oppressive, and America might once more seek to be
a hope for the world, not only a defender but a discoverer.
I can even imagine a world in which the United States and the
Soviet Union, as two great powers with much to save, would seek to
cooperate in the industrialization of Red China-though I find it
much harder still to imagine Red China's compliance with any such
plan. Even now, however, in the U.N. and elsewhere, the United
States and the Soviet Union have sometimes tacitly cooperated toward
the stability, brittle as it is, of the status quo.
7. There are a great many Americans who are so completely de–
void of imagination, or in some few cases so vindictive, that they say
"let's drop a few bombs and get it over with;" and if one then asks,
suppose they drop bombs on us, the answer is either that our bombs
are better than theirs, or a still jaunty, "well, let's get it over with
anyway." Among more reflective people I've heard it said many
times that nuclear war is only different in degree from earlier forms
of war, and that freedom must be defended by readiness to use all
available weapons in the tradition of resistance stretching back to
Thermopylae. For the first time in history, the male animal, whether
one regards him as heroic or fanatical, has the power not only to
destroy himself but also the female of the species; this is one of those
cases where quantity turns into quality, and a megaton is not simply
a thousand kilotons.
The steps toward disarmament that one might take obviously
involve political as well as technical problems, and I am myself un–
sure as to the best road. I am sympathetic with all roads which
might overcome present inertia and would like to see both a test
ban and experimental zones of disengagement; I am even prepared
to accept the argument of those who say that we should begin dis–
arming with conventional weapons, holding on to nuclear ones as a
kind of insurance until the very last moment when some kind of world
law and order take over. I say this despite my realization that nuclear
weapons (and the other less talked-of weapons of total war, including
the bacteriological and the chemical) seem to me
in
their very nature
suicidal and self-defeating. The countries that possess such weapons
