WRIGHT MORRIS
for three loved ones, plus a dog, but happen to be friendly with a
lot
of people--or even if you're
not
friendly-you better work on the moral
problem before you face the first alarm. You better work fast-and
maybe have a gun handy-since it won't help too much to have the law
on your side. Out of deference to the feelings of the audience, I'm sure,
all the talk was about getting
into
your shelter-not coming
out
of it.
It was all very hopeful and reassuring, and I can't explain the feeling I
came with away with-that Dr. Linus Pauling, the old spoilsport, was
the only man dealing with the
horrible
facts. The reassuring, hopeful
facts were something else. Available to any man who wanted to sift
them were facts that needed no scientist to interpret: facts that most
scientists, as men, found it difficult to face.
Although these "interpretations" were contradictory they had one
important fact in common. The scientists spoke the same language. A
language of percentages. Ninety percent incinerated, or ninety percent
salvaged, was a slight difference of opinion, but still ninety percent. They
had no semantic problems. Ninety percent
would,
or ninety percent
wouldn't,
a simple statement of the facts. Put in a somewhat more
hopeful, reassuring way,
only
ten percent might be destroyed. What?
Only
ten
percent? We have Dr. Edward Teller's word for it.
If
that
is
so, what in the world is the fuss all about?
Ten percent? Let's see what it figures. About seventeen million in
nice round numbers. It does sort of add up.
If
you translate that into
seventeen million single or married separate human beings, one of
whom might be
you,
some of whom might be
yours,
it seems a lot more
than ten percent. A lot more-but still a little hard to grasp.
How do we go about it? Well, they tell us there were some six
million Jews. Seventeen million Americans would be just about three
times that many. Does that facilitate things, as we say? Not much. No,
the problem seems to lie not in the slaughter but in the percentage.
Figures may not lie, but do they tell us the human truth? Ten, twenty,
forty, sixty, ninety
percent,
is not a disaster but a simple percentage. A
bloodless fact. Something the criminal and the prosecution can grasp.
The percentage-we realize with relief-is something calculable. The
slaughter-we realize with horror-is unimaginable. And so we come,
or at least I come, to what I find at the heart of the matter. We no
longer confront an imaginable threat, a conceivable horror, a com–
prehensible disaster. No, we are faced with one that
is
merely calculable.
It has been some time coming-this new world-but now it is here.
The lineaments of it began to appear in such innocent
guise
as the
