THE NEED FOR THIS INQUIRY 409

Thus in A.D. 1950 it was already far less open to doubt than it had
been in A.D. 1929 that, in a struggle for supremacy between two titanic
post-Christian Western idols—a Moloch Nationalism and a Juggernaut
Technology—the treads of Juggernaut's irresistibly high-powered bull-
dozer were going to trample over the antique plates of Moloch's brazen
furnace; and this lesson from the experience of twenty-one sinisterly
illuminating years had made experiments in prognostication less hazar-
dous by pinning the still patently open questions within a framework of
relatively sure prediction. On the ist December, 1950, it was still im-
possible to foresee whether the third round in the struggle was going to
be played out without another explosion of 'total war', and whether life
on the planet would survive if a Third World War did break out within
the bosom of an oecumenical human society that had now learnt how to
split the atom. It could, however, now be foreseen that, if a Western
Technology's victory over a Western Nationalism were to be consum-
mated without the annihilation of the Human Race, the story would end
hi the monopoly of the technical means of annihilation in the hands of
some single authority whose fiat would be virtually law, not merely in
one island, continent, or hemisphere, but throughout the Oikoumen&—in
whatever quarter of the globe this oecumenical authority's geographical
base of operations might be located, and whatever the constitutional
form in which its monopoly of world-power might be veiled or ad-
vertised. This concentration of political power might or might not be
achieved by the 'knock-out blow' that had brought into being a Pax
Romana and all the other 'universal states* so far known to History; the
parochial peritura regna might be ostensibly preserved instead of being
overtly liquidated; but, whatever course and shape the political unifica-
tion of a post-Modem Westernizing World might take, it seemed safe to
predict that the acquisition of atomic weapons would bring about the
political unification of the Oikoumen£ in one way or another—and this
sooner rather than later—considering that aPaxRomana had been forced
upon an Hellenic World, and a Pax Hamca upon a Sinic World, by the
intolerableness of the alternative choice of continuing to suffer the con-
sequences of wars between parochial states waged with unprecedented
atrocity by new-fangled 'methods of barbarism'. If this revolutionary
political effect could be produced by 'total war* fought with such com-
paratively humane and innocuous weapons as the spear, the bow, and the
horse, it must assuredly be produced by atomic warfare a fortiori.

Thus in A.D. 1950 an intellectual prospector could enter on a mental
exploration of the Western Civilization's future with rather more con-
fidence that he could have felt in A J5.1929; he need not feel now that he
was sentencing himself to undertake a Psyche's task; and the writer's
own distaste for his present subject ought therefore to have been appre-
ciably diminished by the intervening passage of two enlightening addi-

a more complex activity, requiring the coordination of larger numbers of specialists both
in and outside of the fighting forces. At the time of Germany's surrender in A.D. 1945
about So per cent, of Germany's industrial equipment -was still intact, in spite of the
bombing operations of the Allied Powers. This, however, does not mean that a. particular
battle-ground, such as Europe, could not be destroyed more or less completely by alien
fighting forces whose bases of supply were situated elsewhere.'