it need not have happened, but the English did not believe, as yet, that our extreme
precautions were necessary.
The Reich took about a week to fold up. It might have taken longer if the
new Fuehrer had not gone to Berlin the day after the raid to “prove” that the
British boasts had been hollow. There is no need to recount
the provisional governments that Germany had in t] following several months; the
only one we are co cerned with is the so-called restored monarchy whh used a cousin
of the old Kaiser as a symbol, the 01 that sued for peace.
Then the trouble started.
When the Prime Minister announced the terms the private agreement he had had
with our Presider he was met with a silence that was broken only I cries of “Shame!
Shame! Resign!” I suppose it was i evitable; the Commons reflected the spirit of a
peop who had been unmercifully punished for four yeai They were in a mood to enforce
a peace that wou have made the Versailles Treaty look like the Bea tudes.
The vote of no confidence left the Prime Minister no choice. Forty-eight
hours later the King made a speech from the throne that violated all constitutional
precedent, for it had not been written by a Prime Minister. In this greatest crisis
in his reign, his voice was clear and unlabored; it sold the idea to England and a
national coalition government was formed.
I don’t know whether we would have dusted Lond to enforce our terms or not; Manning
thinks we would have done so. I suppose it depended on the character of the
President of the United States, and there is is way of knowing about that since we
did not have to do it.
The United States, and in particular the President the United States, was
confronted by two inescapable problems. First, we had to consolidate our
position once, use our temporary advantage of an overwhelmingly powerful weapon to
insure that such a weapon would not be turned on us. Second, some means had to be
worked out to stabilize American foreign policy so that it could handle the
tremendous power we suddenly had thrust upon us.
The second was by far the most difficult and serious. If we were to
establish a reasonably permanent peace-say a century or so-through a monopoly on a
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weapon so powerful that no one dare fight us, it was imperative that the policy
under which we acted be more lasting than passing political administrations. But
more of that later-The first problem had to be attended to at once- time was the
heart of it. The emergency lay in the very simplicity of the weapon. It required
nothing but aircraft to scatter it and the dust itself, which was easily and quickly
made by anyone possessing the secret of the Karst-Obre process and having access to
a small supply of uranium-bearing ore.
But the Karst-Obre process was simple and might be independently developed
at any time. Manning reported to the President that it was Ridpath’s opinion,
concurred in by Manning, that the staff of any modern radiation laboratory should be
able to work out an equivalent technique in six weeks, working from the hint given
by the events in Berlin alone, and should then be able to produce enough dust to
cause major destruction in another six weeks.
Ninety days-ninety days provided they started from scratch and were not
already halfway to their goal. Less than ninety days-perhaps no time at all- By this
time Manning was an unofficial member of the Cabinet; “Secretary of Dust,” the
President called him in one of his rare jovial moods. As for me, well, I attended
Cabinet meetings, too. As the only layman who had seen the whole show from beginning
to end, the President wanted me there.
I am an ordinary sort of man who, by a concatenation of improbabilities,
found himself shoved into the councils of the rulers. But I found that the rulers
were ordinary men, too, and frequently as bewildered as I was.
But Manning was no ordinary man. In him ordinary hard sense had been raised
to the level of genius. Oh, yes, I know that it is popular to blame everything on