524 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION

(III) ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE APPROACHES TO
WORLD ORDER

Our foregoing survey of the situation after the Second World War has
shown that, at the opening of the second half of the twentieth century
of the Christian Era, a Westernizing World found itself in a plight that
can be summarily described as follows. Three recent achievements of
Western technology—the coalescence and simultaneous shrinkage of the
Oikoumen£ and the invention of atomic weapons—had made it imperative
for Man in Process of Civilization to abolish War; War could not be
abolished unless the control of atomic energy employable for military
purposes could be concentrated in the hands of some single political
authority; this monopoly of the command of the master-weapon of the
age would enable, and, in enabling, compel, the authority controlling
atomic energy to assume the role of an oecumenical government; the
seat of this oecumenical government must be either Washington or
Moscow in the constellation of political forces that had emerged from
the overthrow of Germany and Japan in A.D. 1945; but in A.D. 1952
neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was prepared voluntarily
to place itself at the mercy of its sole surviving peer by submitting,
without fighting, to seeing this rival arrogate to itself the world-wide
political ascendency that would be conferred automatically on either
Power by a monopoly of the control of atomic energy for military
purposes.

What was to be the denouement of this political problem-play ? The
line of least psychological resistance would, no doubt, be a resort to
the old-fashioned expedient of ordeal by battle. Now that four centuries
and a half of recurrent warfare in a Western arena had left only two
gladiators still erect and aktionsfahig, a third world war might be
expected to elicit a knock-out blow that would leave only one Power
alive, with no competitor now remaining in the lists to dispute the sole
survivor's monopoly of a control of atomic energy that would carry
world-dominion with it. This catastrophic denouement was evidently
feasible, since a world war fought with atomic weapons would be likely
to have at least as conclusive an ending as the first and second world
wars, both of which had ended in the decisive defeat of one side, though
both these wars had been waged with relatively ineffective pre-atomic
armaments. It could therefore be predicted that a third world war
between the two remaining Powers would prove to be the final round
in a series of contests that, since A.D. 1914, had already reduced the
number of the Powers in this arena to two from eight. The outcome
of a third world war thus seemed likely to be the imposition of an
oecumenical peace of the Roman kind by a victor whose victory would
leave him with a monopoly of the control of atomic energy in his grasp.
This denouement was foreshadowed, not only by present facts, but
by historical precedents, since, in the histories of other civilizations,
a Time of Troubles had been apt to culminate in the delivery of a
knock-out blow resulting in the establishment of a universal state; but
the precedents also suggested that Mankind could not afford in A.D. 1952