TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 535
advantage of these opportunities that were being offered to them of
sampling the Western way of life at first hand for themselves; and,
while they read in the Soviet Government's opposition to their pro-
posals for intercourse a lack of confidence in the spiritual power of
Communism to hold its own against the contemporary Western way
of life in the judgement of Soviet citizens, if these were once given
a chance of making a comparative personal trial of the two dispensations,
this reading of the motives inspiring the Soviet Government's policy of
seclusion was no comfort for those Westerners who saw no salvation
for the World except in the achievement of a detente between the
Western Society and its Russian neighbour. If the Politburo's belief in
the hold of Communism upon the hearts and minds of Soviet citizens
were ever to become robust enough to outweigh the Soviet Govern-
ment's fear of allowing their subjects to see the Western World for
themselves, then (so it would appear to Western minds) a positive
approach would have been made towards the healing of a spiritual
schism that was a menace to the prospects, not merely of the Western
Civilization, but of Mankind itself, not excluding the garrison of a
Communist camp.

In circumstances that were so plainly precarious but in other respects
so enigmatically obscure, a dogmatic optimism was as unwarrantable
as a dogmatic pessimism, and the living generation of Mankind had no
choice but to reconcile itself as best it could to the disturbing knowledge
that it was facing issues in which its very existence might be at stake,
and that it was at the same time impossible at this stage to guess what
the event would be,

In A.D. 1952 these perennial waifs on board Noah's Ark were hi
the situation in which Thor Heyerdahl and his five fellow vikings on
board a balsa-log raft found themselves on the morning of the yth
August, 1947. On that fateful morning a westward-flowing current that
had borne the raft Kon-Tiki 4,300 nautical miles across the breadth of
the Pacific Ocean was now carrying her towards the Raroia Reef.
Beyond the line of surf breaking over this barrier the approaching
seafarers could descry the feathery tops of palm trees, and they knew
that these palms bedecked idyllic isles set in a still lagoon; but between
them and this haven where they would be1 ran the foaming and thunder-
ing reef 'in one line from horizon to horizon',2 and the set of the current
and the wind gave the voyagers no chance of circumnavigation. They
were heading perforce towards an inevitable ordeal; and, though they
might know what were the alternatives awaiting any voyagers in this
plight, they could not guess which of these alternatives was to be the
ending of their own saga.

If the raft were to be broken up by the breakers, the crew would be
torn to pieces by the knife-edged coral if they were not saved by speedy
drowning from that more painful death. If the raft were to hold together,
and if its crew were to succeed in holding on to it, until the breakers
had defeated their own malice by washing the raft up on to the reef

1 Psalm cvii. 30.

2 Heyerdahl, Thor: Ken-Tiki (Chicago 1950, Rand McNally), p. 243.