During the last twenty-odd years we have been outmaneuvered endlessly. Today it’s
the Backfire bomber (a B-i with a Russian accent); tomorrow it is an international
(U.N.) treaty to socialize all aspects of space and thereby kill such enterprise as
the L-5 Society, Sabre, Otrag (already killed), Robert Truax’s Do-It-Yourself
projects. The treaty will permit a KGB agent (“A rose by any other name-“) to
inspect in detail anything of ours, private or public, on the ground or in the sky,
if it is in any way connected with space-or the KGB man claims to suspect that it
might be.
(But if you think that gives us a free ticket into every
building, every room, at the Byakonur space complex, you don’t know how the USSR
does~business.)
The President has already announced that he will sign it. 10 to 1 he will, 7
to 2 the Senate will pass it-and 100 to 1 we will regret it.
This declaration is more timely than ever; I am proud to reprint it-and
deeply sorry that it was ever needed.
Any rational person may well disagree with me on details of this broadside.
Page 162
But on the moral principles expressed here, a free man says: “Give me liberty, or
give me death!” No quibbling, no stopping to “think it over.” He means it.
Fools and poltroons do not.
WHO ARE THE HEIRS OF
PATRICK HENRY?
STAND UP AND BE COUNTED!
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of
chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take,
but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!!”
-Patrick Henry
Last Saturday in this city appeared a full-page ad intended to scare us into
demanding that the President stop our testing of nuclear weapons. This manifesto was
a curious mixture of truth, half-truth, distortion, exaggeration, untruth, and
Communistline goals concealed in idealistic-sounding nonsense.
The instigators were seventy-odd local people and sixty-odd national names
styling themselves “The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.” It may well
be that none of the persons whose names are used as the “National” committee are
Communists and we have no reason to suppose that any of the local people are
Communists-possibly all of them are loyal and merely misguided. But this manifesto
is the rankest sort of Communist propaganda.
A tree is known by its fruit. The purpose of their manifesto is to entice or
frighten you into signing a
letter to President Eisenhower, one which demands that he take three actions. The
first demand is the old, old Communist-line gimmick that nuclear weapons and their
vehicles should be “considered apart” in disarmament talks. It has had a slight
restyling for the post-Sputnik era and now reads: “That nuclear test explosions,
missiles, and outer-space satellites be considered apart from other disarmament
problems.”
This proposal sounds reasonable but is boobytrapped with outright surrender
of the free world to the Communist dictators. Mr. Truman knew it, Mr. Eisenhower
knows it; both have refused it repeatedly. The gimmick is this: if nuclear weapons
and their vehicles are outlawed while conventional weapons (tanks and planes and
bayonets and rifles) are not, then-but you figure it out. 170,000,000 of us against
900,000,000 of them. Who wins?
Even if you count our allies (on the assumption that every last one of them
will stick by us no matter how bone-headed our behavior), the ratio is still
two-to-one against us when it comes to slugging it out with infantry divisions, Yalu
River style.
Oh yes! Khrushchev would like very much to have nuclear weapons “considered
apart” from infantry divisions. And he is delighted when soft-headed Americans agree
with him.
“The ~’Iice Voted to Bell the Cat.” -Aesop
Their second proposal has been part of the Communist line for twelve long
years. It reads: “That all nuclear test explosions be stopped immediately and that
the U.N. then proceed with the mechanics necessary for monitoring this cessation.”
This is the straight Communist gospel direct from the Kremlin. This was and is today
their phony counter-proposal to the Baruch Proposals of 1946-banning first, policing
the ban if, when, and maybe .. . and subject to the veto of the U.S.S.R. It would