Hindus who aren’t much better indoctrinated; God knows how many in the
Eurasian Union who believe in God knows what; the entire continent of
Africa only semicivilized; eighty million Japanese who really believe that
they are Heaven-ordained to rule; our Spanish-American friends who don’t
understand the Bill of Rights the way we think of it; a quarter of a
billion people of two dozen different nationalities in Europe, all with
revenge and black hatred in their hearts.
“No, it won’t wash. It’s preposterous—to talk about a world democracy for
many years to come. If you turn the secret of the dust over to such a body,
you will be arming the whole world to commit suicide.”
Larner answered at once. “I could resent some of your remarks, but I don’t.
To put it bluntly, I consider the source. The trouble with you, Colonel
Manning, is that you are a professional soldier and have no faith in
people. Soldiers may be necessary, but the worst of them are martinets and
the best are merely paternalistic.” There was quite a lot more of the same.
Manning stood it until his turn came again. “Maybe I am all those things,
but you haven’t met my argument. What are you going to do about the
hundreds of millions of people who have no experience in, nor love for,
democracy? Now, perhaps, I don’t have the same conception of democracy as
yourself, but I do know this: Out West there are a couple of hundred
thousand people who sent me to Congress; I am not going to stand quietly by
and let a course be followed which I think will result in their deaths or
utter ruin.
“Here is the probable future, as I see it, potential in the smashing of the
atom and the development of lethal artificial radioactives. Some power
makes a supply of the dust. They’ll hit us first to try to knock us out and
give them a free hand. New York and Washington overnight, then all of our
industrial areas while we are still politically and economically
disorganized. But our army would not be in those cities; we would have
planes and a supply of dust somewhere where the first dusting wouldn’t
touch them. Our boys would bravely and righteously proceed to poison their
big cities. Back and forth it would go until the organization of each
country had broken down so completely that they were no longer able to
maintain a sufficiently high level of industrialization to service planes
and manufacture dust. That presupposes starvation and plague in the
process. You can fill in the details.
“The other nations would get in the game. It would be silly and suicidal,
of course, but it doesn’t take brains to take a hand in this. All it takes
is a very small group, hungry for power, a few airplanes and a supply of
dust. It’s a vicious circle that cannot possibly be stopped until the
entire planet has dropped to a level of economy too low to support the
techniques necessary to maintain it. My best guess is that such a point
would be reached when approximately three-quarters of the world’s
population were dead of dust, disease, or hunger, and culture reduced to
the peasant-and-village type.
“Where is your Constitution and your Bill of Rights if you let that
happen?”
I’ve shortened it down, but that was the gist of it. I can’t hope to record
every word of an argument that went on for days.
The Secretary of the Navy took a crack at him next. “Aren’t you getting a
bit hysterical, Colonel? After all, the world has seen a lot of weapons
which were going to make war an impossibility too horrible to contemplate.
Poison gas, and tanks, and airplanes—even firearms, if I remember my
history.”
Manning smiled wryly. “You’ve made a point, Mr. Secretary. ‘And when the
wolf really came, the little boy shouted in vain.’ I imagine the Chamber of
Commerce in Pompeii presented the same reasonable argument to any arly
vulcanologist so timid as to fear Vesuvius. I’ll try to justify my fears.
The dust differs from every earlier weapon in its deadliness and ease of
use, but most importantly in that we have developed no defense against it.