Editorial
EDITORIAL The Generals Are Through Just a few days after two hydrogen bombs were exploded in the South Pacific, the circus opened in New York and spring was here. More than our usual optimism made...
...Ever since 1941, the military specialist has been unreservedly deferred to by almost the entire political community...
...This was to be expected...
...And so we chugged along behind the pied pipers of geo-strategico-logistico-thermonuclear doom, and forgot the old human questions: What do men and women want...
...Our own people will surely gain entirely new perspectives when and if they see the latest H-bomb films...
...How can we help them...
...What shall we do for our heirs...
...This, too, was to be expected...
...In the miasma of compromise, expediency and fear, we had lost our way...
...In both continents, political, social and economic action have been no more than the sales tax on the budget of war...
...Our hope now rests with statesmen and philosophers...
...lengthy accounts of atomic horror have been published for the first time in the Soviet press...
...The intense atomic consciousness of Britain and Japan is now evident...
...How can we correct our past mistakes...
...The generals are through, first and foremost, because the blind alley at the end of the arms race is becoming more and more apparent, in the Soviet bloc as well as in the free world...
...If this is so, however, wherein lies the policy of the United States in the global ideological struggle ? In Europe, military buildups now form practically the whole of our policy, while in Asia the military threat seems our chief stock-in-trade...
...Although official Washington is still talking atavistically about the threat of atomic retaliation (a good slogan for 1947, perhaps, but not for 1954), a former Secretary of State has declared plainly that "only a madman" would plunge us into "the unspeakable disaster of a world war...
...What all of this means is that the recent Pacific and Siberian hydrogen blasts have removed the Big Bomb as a major factor in world politics, just as previous developments eliminated the threat of poison gas and bacteriological war...
...As Lewis Mumford has stated, the people then "may well doubt the usefulness of instruments which, under the guise of deterring an aggressor or insuring a cheap victory, might incidentally destroy the whole fabric of civilization and threaten the very existence of the human race...
...The Siberian and Pacific H-bomb explosions now tell us that we were marching blindly, that there are no mechanical cures for the maladies which afflict human souls...
...After being cowed for so long by military cartographers, stockpile statisticians and target-date fixers, the man of ideas and ideals steps into the spotlight once again...
...Since 1950, the situation has deteriorated further...
...When a nation's mind shifts from the building of peace and the conservation of democracy to the contemplation of war strategy, the language of the intellect often gives way to the language of the barracks...
...Even Georgi Malenkov feels compelled to say that an atomic war would mean "the destruction of world civilization...
...More than our usual optimism made us sense that there was an intimate connection: Somehow, we feel, the searing Eniwetok explosions are the prelude to a renewal of man's creative energies, so long blighted by the specter of the Big Bomb...
...We think the horror of our latest H-bomb--coupled with the certain knowledge of similar Soviet weapons--spells the end of our limitless faith in machinery, foretells the decline of "strategic" ideology, and compels a new search for human and political approaches to world problems...
...In place of our earlier political programs, we now call names, issue ultimatums, quarrel openly with our friends, and consort with the dregs of world society...
...To put it bluntly, we think the generals are through...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 14
