THE COLD WAR AND THE WEST
73
often in fact feel more insecure than those that don't-and this in–
security will grow as the totalist Chinese, the science-minded Israelis,
and the West German strong men such as Strauss get into the act.
The release of atomic energy that might have given man new con–
fidence in his powers to understand nature and to overcome poverty
has turned into a nightmare from which we can only awaken by
unrelenting efforts to overcome the sense of frustration that makes so
many Americans willing to consider nuclear war. (Since
Partisan
Review
does not circulate in the USSR I do not speak here to its
leaders and led.)
We learned the art of total war from the Nazis and bettered
them at it. Like your former editor, Dwight McDonald, I was op–
posed to the mass bombings of German and Japanese cities in the
Second World War. Today millions of Americans are so lacking in
compassion and good sense that they accept the policy which re–
quires that, after our country has been devastated, our missiles and
bombers will proceed to destroy the enemy's country (hopefully, in
the mad "capitalist" dream of the neutron bomb, leaving property
intact). Those who advocate so-called tactical nuclear weapons of a
counter-force sort avoid
this
savagery but impair the important line
that divides conventionally terrible war from genocide. Frequently
those who ask whether "the issues at stake in the cold war [are] so
decisive as to be worth a nuclear war" have made wholly insufficient
efforts to explore non-nuclear alternatives to strengthening the posi–
tion of democracy and freedom in the world. When some assume
that recovery from nuclear war will not be much more difficult than
Japanese recovery after World War II, such thinking fails to grasp
the tragic elements in that recovery or the extent to which it de–
pended on the undestroyed parts of Japan and help from America.
Even more, such thinking completely misses the immeasurable differ–
ences between even the mass bombings to which people became ac–
customed over a period of many months and the inconceivable
damage to civilized life among the shattered and scattered survivors of
the callousness and complacency that found no way out save nuclear
war. And it is one of the many ironies of the nuclear age that the very
effort to defend against its dangers through a program of building
fallout shelters may actually enhance those dangers, both by escalat–
ing the arms race in cooperation with the other side, and by falsely
