What we want him to work for is world order and world peace. But we may not get it. The other nations may be fed up with our shilly-shallying and may not go along with us, particularly any who believe they are close to solving the problems of atomic weapons. We may have to go it alone. In such cases, is there anything we can do to preserve ourselves?
Yes, probably—but the price is high.
We can try for another Buck Rogers weapon with which to ward off atomic bomb 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 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?