Pax Americana

The world crisis continued; but the first shock of U.S. realization had subsided. The U.S., remembering the danger signals before World War II, mulled over the deadly parallel. By last week, some cocktail-party pundits were beginning to mutter: "Why not drop the bomb on Russia now?"

Would that be a solution? It would be terrifyingly simple. The proponents of such a preventive war (another phrase for it was "anticipatory retaliation") even gave their argument a specious touch of idealism. If a world government is the only way to peace, the argument ran, then a final, coldly calculated war is the quickest way to achieve it.

Ex-Secretary of War Henry Stimson, analyzing that horrifying idea, wrote this week in the Ladies' Home Journal:

"It is worse than nonsense; it results from ... a cynical incomprehension of what the people of the world will tolerate from any nation. . . . We could not possibly take that opportunity without deserting our inheritance. Americans as conquerors would be tragically miscast."

The fact was, as most of the U.S. was beginning to realize, that there could be no dramatic shortcut to world peace. What the U.S. could and would have to do was well expressed by Hungarian-born Novelist Arthur Koestler, onetime Communist and now a crusader against Communism, arriving for his first visit to the U.S.

"This is not 'a fight of white against black," said Koestler. "Eastern totalitarianism is black. ... On the other hand, American democracy is far from perfect. It is grey rather than white. But for us Europeans, from Prague to Rome, your democracy, however grey, means the whole hope of survival and salvation.

"Never in history has such a responsibility been placed upon a civilization as now faces America--for inevitably the world will have either a Pax Americana or no peace at all."

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