Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

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.

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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