rockets. It would need to be better than anything we have now or can foresee. To be
100% effective (with atom bombs, anything less is hardly good enough!) it should be
something which acts with much greater speed than guns or anti-aircraft rockets.
There is a bare possibility that science could cook up some sort of a devastatingly
powerful beam of energy, acting with the speed of light, which would be a real
anti-aircraft weapon, even against rockets. But the scientists don’t promise it.
We would need the best anti-aircraft devices possible, in the meantime. A
robot hook-up of target-seeking rockets, radar, and computing machines might give
considerable protection, if extensive enough, but there is a lot of research and
test and production ahead before any such plan is workable. Furthermore, it could
not be air tight and it would be very expensive- and very annoying, for it would end
civilian aviation. If we hooked the thing up to ignore civilian planes, we would
leave ourselves wide open to a Trojan Horse tactic in which the enemy would use
ordinary planes to deliver his atomic bombs.
Such a defense, although much more expensive and much more trouble than all
our pre-War military establishment, would be needed. If we are not willing to foot
the bill, we can at least save money by not buying flame throwers, tanks, or
battleships.
We can prepare to attack. We can be so bristlingly savage that other nations
may fear to attack us. If we are not to have a super-state and a world police, then
the United States needs the fastest and the most longrange rockets, the most
powerful atomic blasts, and every other dirty trick conceived in comic strip or
fantastic fiction. We must have space ships and we must have them first. We must
land on the Moon and take possession of it in order to forbid its use to other
nations as a base against us and in order to have it as a base against any enemy of
ours. We must set up, duplicate, and reduplicate rocket installations intended to
destroy almost automatically any spot on earth; we must let the world know that we
have them and that we are prepared to use them at the drop of a diplomat’s silk hat.
We must be prepared to tell uncooperative nations that there are men sitting in
front of switches, day and night, and that an attack on Washington would cause those
switches to be thrown.
And we must guard the secrets of the locations and natures of our weapons in
a fashion quite impossible for a normal democracy in peace time. More of that later.
Decentralization we would have to have. Not the picayune $250,000,000,000
job which has been proposed- (“Wait a minute! Why should we disperse our cities if
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we are going to have that Buck Rogers super-dooper death ray screen?”)
We haven’t got such a screen. Nor is it certain that we will ever have such
a screen, no matter how much
money we spend. Such a screen is simply the one remote possibility which modern
physics admits. It may turn out to be impossible to develop it; we simply don’t
know.
We must disperse thoroughly, so thoroughly that no single concentration of
population in the United States is an inviting target. Mr. Sumner Spaulding’s timid
proposal of a quarter of a trillion dollars was based on the pleasant assumption
that Los Angeles was an example of a properly dispersed city for the Atomic Age.
This is an incredible piece of optimism which is apparently based on the belief that
Hiroshima is the pattern for all future atomic attacks. Hiroshima was destroyed with
one bomb. Will the enemy grace the city of the Angels with only one bomb? Why not a
dozen?
The Hiroshima bomb was the gentlest, least destructive atomic bomb ever
likely to be loosed. Will the enemy favor us with a love tap such as that?
Within twenty miles of the city hall of Los Angeles lives half the
population of the enormous state of California. An atomic bomb dropped on that City
Hall would not only blast the swarming center of the city, it would set fire to the