The Equation

Last week the stars, the sun, the moon behaved according to law. On Earth's surface, which, from a few miles up, might have seemed uninhabited, mankind's performances continued to unroll. Here & there, as usual, bits of the action and dialogue were recorded by journalists who were, as usual, uneasily aware that their jottings were inadequate.

But among thousands of apparently unrelated bits of "news" last week were two items as closely related as the horns of a dilemma. One was that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission is going to establish a testing ground for atomic weapons somewhere in the Pacific. The other was a sentence spoken by a Republican presidential candidate, Harold Stassen: "The greatest basic competition of all history [Russia v. the U.S.] cannot really be decided by war."

Everyone who heard these two items knew that they added up to a dilemma. Some day, as Stassen said, the dilemma would have to be resolved "in the minds and hearts of men, with the grace of God." But at that point it began to sound like wishful thinking, and what could wishful thinking do against Communist fanaticism?

Americans were still sure that it is better to win a war than lose it. They were sure that, if it came to war again, they would win again. But Americans, like all the rest of mankind, had also begun to suspect that if war's weapons grew much more powerful, victory and defeat might be equated. What would the victor do in a blasted or half-blasted world?

For hundreds of thousands in Europe and Asia, defeat and victory were already indistinguishable. Perhaps only those who had survived defeat knew what victory really looked like. They might not be able to describe it exactly, but they could draw pictures of it (see cut). And the pictures were like palindromes.*

Stassen's words, which everyone accepted, and the AEC's plan to develop bigger & better weapons, which everybody accepted too, was the kind of dilemma that ringed the U.S. these days, from every direction. The dilemma could only be solved by a paradox, by a miracle, by finding the moral equivalent of the atomic bomb.

*A sentence that reads the same, forward or backward. Famed example: "Able was I ere I saw Elba" (apocryphally attributed to Napoleon).

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