TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 525
to resign itself to sanctioning a reperformance of this familiar tragedy.
Whenever, in the histories of other civilizations, a series of cycles of
warfare had eventually been brought to a close by the destruction of
all the contending Powers except one single survivor, this barbarous
remedy for a desperate malady had not availed either to save the sick
civilization's life or to rid a war-stricken world of war in perpetuity,
because the cost of arriving at a world order by this rough road had
been mortally heavy. In the past the forcible establishment of an oecu-
menical peace had been purchased by a war-stricken society only at the
prohibitive price of its inflicting wounds upon itself from which it found
itself unable to recover; and, if this had been the ultimate effect of
imposing universal peace by violence in a pre-atomic age, what were
the Western Civilization's prospects in the event of its falling into a third
world war in which a knock-out blow would be delivered with the
unprecedented violence that had now been imported into the conduct
of War by the invention of atomic weapons ?

If the Western Society took this traditional war-path now that it was
equipped with unprecedentedly potent armaments, would it not be con-
demning itself to purchase an ephemeral peace at a price that would be
prohibitive ? Would not the spiritual ravages of War, which had always
been much harder to repair than its physical ravages, be likely, this
time, to exceed all imaginable measure ? Would not the agonies inflicted
by atomic warfare make even a once humane and generous-hearted
victor turn savage ? These were considerations that might well deter the
most fanatical Russian mind from allowing itself to believe that a third
world war was the necessary price for completing the conversion of
Mankind to the Communist Faith, and, a fortiori, deter the most
sanguine American mind from allowing itself to believe that, the sooner
a third world war was fought and won, the sooner the American people
would be rid of the distracting anxieties of international politics and be
free once more to devote themselves to the normal pursuits of private
life. A sober-minded observer could foresee that after a third war
fought with atomic weapons there would no longer be any possibility
of life as it had previously been lived either in the United States or in
the Soviet Union.

In these perilous circumstances the best hope for the future of Man-
kind lay in the possibility that the governments and peoples of the
United States and the Soviet Union might have the imagination, wis-
dom, tolerance, self-restraint, patience, and fortitude to seek and ensue
the one alternative to a third world war that, at this stage, was practical
politics: that is to say, a pacific partition of the OikoumenS between these
two surviving Powers for an indefinite time to come. All the virtues
enumerated above would be required on both sides if this policy was
to have any chance of success, since it was evident that a society which
had tapped atomic energy could never rest easy until it had brought
under the control of some single oecumenical authority a newly released
titanic physical force which would be a menace to the existence of at
least half the Human Race, or, more probably, to the existence of the
whole of it, so long as two mutually independent and antagonistic