Thaw in the Cold War

Journal of the Quarter

Two months ago the largest atomic bomb yet tested in the Nevada desert brought sudden sunrise to cities 300 miles away. Only two miles from the center of the explosion a small town had been built with no purpose other than to test the bomb’s destructive effects. Its street sign, instead of reading Main Street, read Doomsday Drive.

Till very recently one might have taken this product of the macabre whimsicality of the military mind as an adequate symbol of the main drift in world affairs. With the increasing polarization of the world into two overwhelmingly powerful superblocs and with the development of means of destruction capable of annihilating a large part of the race, it seemed as if all mankind was engaged in a suicidal race along Doomsday Drive.

But now again, as so often in the past, the military mind seems to have lagged behind the realities of the hour. Just as the violet pillar of dust rose in the Nevada desert, one began to observe a number of indications that the frozen world of Doomsday Drive showed signs of breaking up, that a thaw had set in.

The Second World War had hardly ended when the peoples of the world began to accept the inevitability of a third and more horrible war. Europe, once the center of western culture, had become a Balkanized peninsula along the Euro-Asian rimland, a semi-colony, a population to be fought over and administered; Asia had likewise become a political vacuum between the power centers of Washington and Moscow. Men and nations were choosing one or the other of the two sides in the two-power world that was the heritage of their war. It was a forced choice, an acceptance of raw alternatives. There seemed to be no hope, and there was none so long as men’s minds were chained to the alternatives offered by Russian and American spokesmen.

Other wars had seemed punctuation points in a continuum of peace, now peace seemed identical with preparation for inevitable war. And as the conditions of living under a permanent war economy grew more normal, the possibilities of independent political action for nations as well as for classes and individuals were increasingly surrendered.

Confronted by the ideological and material power of America and Russia, the labor movement, as well as leading intellectual spokesmen all over the world, either capitulated to one of the two camps or advanced their own powerlessness as a reason for retreat from politics. As the polarization of the world proceeded and as the spectre of total war fought to total annihilation seemed ever more real, the combined pressures of anxiety and fear resulted in widening patterns of conformity within all the nations of the world. Any non-conformist action on the domestic scene was immediately accused of endangering national security in the face of overwhelming threat. The populations remained passive and ...