Robert A. Heinlein – The Last Days Of The United States

FOREWORD

After World War II I resumed writing with two objectives: first, to explain the meaning of atomic weapons through popular articles; second, to break out from the limitations and low rates of pulp science-fiction magazines into anything and everything: slicks, books, motion pictures, general fiction, specialized fiction not intended for SF magazines, and nonfiction.

My second objective I achieved in every respect, but in my first and much more important objective I fell flat on my face.

Unless you were already adult in August 1945 it is almost impossible for me to convey emotionally to you how people felt about the A-bomb, how many different ways they felt about it, how nearly totally ignorant 99.9% of our citizens were on the subject, including almost all of our military leaders and governmental officials.

And including editors!

(The general public is just as dangerously ignorant as to the significance of nuclear weapons today, 1979, as in 1 945—but in different ways. In 1945 we were smugly ignorant; in 1979 we have the Pollyannas, and the Ostriches, and the Jingoists who think we can “win” a nuclear war, and the group—a majority?—who regard World War III as of no importance compared with inflation, gasoline rationing, forced school-busing, or you name it. There is much excuse for the ignorance of 1945; the citizenry had been hit by ideas utterly new and strange. But there is no excuse forthe ignorance of1979. Ignorance today can be charged only to stupidity and laziness—both capital offences.)

I wrote nine articles intended to shed light on the postHiroshima age, and I have never worked harder on any writing, researched the background more thoroughly, tried harder to make the (grim and horrid) message entertaining and readable. I offered them to commercial markets, not to make money, but because the only propaganda

that stands any chance of influencing people is packaged so attractively that editors will buy it in the belief that the cash customers will be entertained by it.

Mine was not packaged that attractively.

I was up against some heavy tonnage:

General Groves, in charge of the Manhattan District (code name for A-bomb R&D), testified that it would take from twenty years to forever for another country to build an A-bomb. (USSR did it in 4 years.)

The Chief of Naval Operations testified that the “only” way to deliver the bomb to a target across an ocean was by ship.

A very senior Army Air Force general testified that “blockbuster” bombs were just as effective and cheaper.

The chairman of NACA (shortly to become NASA) testified (Science News Letter 25 May 1946) that intercontinental rockets were impossible.

Ad nauseum—the old sailors want wooden ships, the old soldiers want horse cavalry.

But I continued to write these articles until the U.S.S.R. rejected the United States’ proposals for controlling and outlawing atomic weapons through open skies and mutual on-the-ground inspection, i.e., every country in the world to surrender enough of its sovereignty to the United Nations that mass-weapons war would become impossible (and lesser war unnecessary).

The U.S.S.R. rejected inspection—and I stopped trying to peddle articles based on tying the Bomb down through international policing.

I wish that I could say that thirty-three years of “peace” (i.e., no A- or H- or C- orN- orX- bombs dropped) indicates that we really have nothing to fear from such weapons, because the human race has sense enough not to commit suicide. But I am sorry to say that the situation is even more dangerous, even less stable, than it was in 1946.

Here are three short articles, each from a different ap

proach, with which I tried (and failed) to beat the drum br world peace.

Was I really so naif that I thought that I could change the course of history this way? No, not really. But, damn it, I had to try!

“If you pray hard enough,

water will run uphill. How hard?

Why, hard enough to make water

run uphill, of course!”

—L. Long

THE LAST DAYS OF THE UNITED

STATES

“Here lie the bare bones of the United States of America, conceived in freedom, died in bondage. 1776—1986. Death came mercifully, in one stroke, during senility.