To the Editor:
I would expect despair from a neighbor who is trapped by the neuroses of old age and sits all day on his porch, talking to himself about uncertainty and the atom bomb. I expect despair from a man who calmly told a friend that the moral responsibility of a parent is to smother his children in the event of a nuclear war, rather than permit them to die of radiation sickness. I expect despair from another man who is accumulating an arms cache so that he and his rural neighbors may shoot down refugees from contaminated urban areas. But I did not expect despair from Hans J. Morgenthau [“Death in the Nuclear Age,” September].
The minimum “radical transformation of thought and action” that Morgenthau believes to be necessary may have to begin from a withdrawal of consent to policies that can destroy civilization and history. After that, we can discuss alternate policies and alternate means of defense. But the prospect of meaningless life and death will remain with us so long as conscientious men acquiesce in policies based on a readiness to inflict mass murder in the name of freedom.
It is tragically useless to bemoan the nuclear malaise without considering the policies of national violence which produce it.
Arthur Springer
Cambridge, Massachusetts
To the Editor:
I want to express my appreciation of Hans J. Morgenthau’s very fine article.
I hope that this statement gets widely reprinted. . . .
Thomas H. Eliot
Dean
Washington University
St. Louis, Missouri
To the Editor:
This afternoon I read two of Mr. Morgenthau’s articles. The one which appears in the September COMMENTARY and a Yale Review article from 1957 in which he said: “When this historic moment comes [when nations have lost even the preventive capacity of psychological deterrence]—as it surely must if the present trend is not reversed—the nation-state will connote not life and civilization, but anarchy and universal destruction.”
After reading “Death in the Nuclear Age” I am moved to ask whether he thinks that moment has come. Since he is a more knowledgeable and experienced observer of the political scene than I can ever hope to be, I would greatly appreciate knowing his estimate of where we presently stand in the historic timetable that has apparently cancelled all future engagements for the political entity known as the nation-state. . . .
John Martinson
Berkeley, California
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