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DENNIS H. WRONG
tionist creed. The response of the West to this total conjunction of
circumstances has hardly been adequate. Yet is it so obvious that
the "advance of Communism" has been the central fact of the past
decade? All through the fifties we were assured by the well-informed
that first one and then another Middle Eastern country was about
to fall under Communist control and even that the whole area would
be incorporated into the Soviet bloc within a few years. In the last
few years Communist influence has clearly declined rather than
increased at
the
same time that Western power has retreated and
several old-fashioned oligarchies have crumbled. India, Burma and
Ceylon have never been less susceptible to Communist infiltration
since they achieved independence than they are today. Indonesia
and several smaller Southeastern Asian nations hang on in the face
of direct Russian and Chinese pressures in the area. The new Mrican
nations are at the same stage of vulnerability to Communist influence
as the Asian nations were a decade ago. Their more acute racial
sensitivities undoubtedly leave the West less margin for retrievable
error. And
this
is
even truer of Latin America where the United
States
is
directly involved and where the symbols of political inde–
pendence were won long ago, making the content of nationalism an
issue open to exploitation by Castro-like movements. Yet much that
has happened throughout the underdeveloped world might have hap–
pened anyway .and I am not convinced that the Communists have
been able to turn it so greatly to their advantage.
If
a lesser sense of urgency about the underdeveloped world is
desirable, we need-at least in the United States-a far greater sense
of urgency about the prospect of nuclear war. I do not think that
the issues at stake in the cold war are worth a nuclear war. Nor were
any of the issues in past conflicts, except from the possible standpoint
of a general belief in extra-terrestrial immortality that today no longer
exists. There have been occasions in the past when the willingness
of a people to fight to the death for their tribe, nation or civilization
was itself a positive moral quality to be weighed in any final assess–
ment of the value of their culture and institutions. But when readi–
ness to consider war means acceptance of the certainty of mass death,
a certainty that
is
purely technological, and the possibility that there
may be no survivors as well as the total destruction of the material
fabric of civilization, such an evaluation loses all meaning. A slogan
