WE HAVE come to the most desolate age in the long history of man on earth: Every externalevidence writes on the horizons of our time the one big vision of doom—and it gets bigger with each passing day. As the editors of United States News and World Report stated in the opening sentence of a piece in the September 11, 1954, issue, “Fear and despair fill theminds of men.”
During the past few decades, except for small adjustments, we have followed the life-as-usual thesis—obtaining an education, finding a job, getting married, building homes, seeking security, and looking forward to leisurely retirement. The destruction and the horror
of modern conflict have been things that during the past few wars the majority of Americans have for the most part looked upon from afar. We have seen other lands devastated, other cities leveled, other populations have felt the lash of scientific war—but our fields and homes have been spared.
Today we have entered a new dread time. The front lines for the next great battle are not in Africa or Europe. They are not along Alaskan borders. The front lines for World War III cross the back yard of your home and mine. I live in Atlanta, Georgia; my city is listed among the first two dozen priority targets in America for an enemy nation.
A few months ago our newspapers announced that several freight car loads of medicines and first-aid items had arrived here for stockpiling against D-Day. Every day our skies are etched with vapor trails left by giant intercontinental bombers of the type possessed by America and Russia and capable of carrying to any portion of the globe the fantastic atomic weapons that we have learned to know so well.
AN ATMOSPHERE OF SUSPICION, FEAR, AND DISTRUST WEIGHS
HEAVILY UPON HUMANITY, BUT AT THE BOTTOM OF IT
ALL, WOUNDED SOULS ARE CRYING FOR SALVATION AND PEACE
Our government is preparing for aggressors to strike at the heart of America, and it is full time that we started individually getting ready.
William L. Lawrence, science reporter for the New York Times, writing in that paper on April 7, 1954, said, “The cobalt bomb could be exploded from an unmanned barge in the middle of the ocean. Such a monster would yield as much as 250 pounds of free neutrons.These would produce 7 5/10 tons of radioactive cobalt equal to nearly 5,000,000 pounds of radium.” Further he says, quoting Prof. H. Brown, that “a cobalt bomb incorporating a ton of deuterium could be set on a north-south line in the Pacific about a thousand miles west of California. The radioactive dust would reach California in about a day and New York in four or five days, killing most life as it traverses the continent. Similarly . . . the western powers could explode hydrogen cobalt bombs on the north-south line about the longitudeof Prague that would destroy all life within a strip of 1,500 miles wide extending from Leningrad to Odessa and 3,000 miles deep from Prague to the Ural Mountains. Such an attack,” he says, “would produce a scorched earth unprecedented in history.”
IT IS NOT the purpose of this article to terrify or to frighten. But it should make one totally conscious that today ordinary living, ordinary preparation in the religious area, is not enough.
David Cone points out in the Saturday Review that “we are living in a night of total crisis. God is dethroned from His central place in the universe. Whole nations are dispossessed to walk directionless upon the cold crust of a cold earth. Two global wars have brought men not to their senses but to the brink of penultimate disaster. All parts of the world are simultaneously out of joint. We saw babel like never before seen on earth as we exploded alesser sun on Hiroshima. But among men there is neither peace nor prospect of peace. Revolution and revolt flame almost everywhere. The biggest business on earth is the armament business. Everywhere men stand at arms. Everywhere they peer into radar screens watching, watching, watching. The commonwealth of fear is universal.”
Writing in the book One World or None, Philip Morrison, professor of physics at Cornell University, said, “The bombs will never come again as in Japan, come in ones or twos, they will come in hundreds, even in thousands.
by NORMAN G. SIMONS