Overkill and Understatement

Within five years, the United States will have hardened into a vast thermonuclear missile base. While an underformed citizenry goes about its usual business, the military establishment has developed, and plans to continue developing, a strategic atomic force, the dimensions of which are beyond the arithmetical reckoning of the daily market place. This will be accomplished by using only a fraction of our armament production capacity; nor is the end in sight. Should the present trend continue, we shall, before the decade passes, have turned ourselves into a social dinosaur— grotesque, useless and stupid in our defensive posture.

This arsenal has been conceived without the consent, and without the knowledge, of the American people;...