papers were merciless in their criticism at the failure to anticipate and
force an evacuation of all the major cities.
If Manning anticipated trouble, why did he not ask for evacuation?
Well, as I see it, for this reason:
A big city will not, never has, evacuated in response to rational argument.
London never was evacuated on any major scale and we failed utterly in our
attempt to force the evacuation of Berlin. The people of New York City had
considered the danger of air raids since 1940 and were long since hardened
to the thought.
But the fear of a nonexistent epidemic of plague caused the most nearly
complete evacuation of a major city ever seen.
And don’t forget what we did to Vladivostok and Irkutsk and Moscow—those
were innocent people, too. War isn’t pretty.
I said luck played a part. It was bad navigation that caused one of our
ships to dust Ryazan instead of Moscow, but that mistake knocked out the
laboratory and plant which produced the only supply of military
radio-actives in the Erasian Union. Suppose the mistake had been the other
way around—suppose that one of the E. U. ships in attacking Washington,
D.C., by mistake, had included Ridpath’s shop forty-five miles away in
Maryland?
Congress reconvened at the temporary capital in St. Louis, and the American
Pacification Expedition started the job of pulling the fangs of the
Eurasian Union. It was not a military occupation in the usual sense; there
were two simple objectives: to search out and dust all aircraft, aircraft
plants, and fields, and to locate and dust radiation laboratories, uranium
supplies, find lodes of carnotite and pitchblende. No attempt was made to
interfere with, or to replace, civil government.
We used a two-year dust, which gave a breathing spell in which to
consolidate our position. Liberal rewards were offered to informers, a
technique which worked remarkably well not only in the E. U., but in most
parts of the world.
The “weasel,” an instrument to smell out radiation based on the
electroscope-discharge principle and refined by Ridpath’s staff, greatly
facilitated the work of locating uranium and uranium ores. A grid of
weasels, properly spaced over a suspect area, could locate any important
mass of uranium almost as handily as a direction-finder can spot a radio
station.
But, notwithstanding the excellent work of General Bulfinch and the
Pacification Expedition as a whole, it was the original mistake of dusting
Ryazan that made the job possible of accomplishment.
Anyone interested in the details of the pacification work done in l945-6
should see the “Proceedings of the American Foundation for Social Research”
for a paper entitled, A Study of the Execution of the American Peace Policy
from February, 1945. The de facto solution of the problem of policing the
world against war left the United States with the much greater problem of
perfecting a policy that would insure that the deadly power of the dust
would never fall into unfit hands.
The problem is as easy to state as the problem of squaring the circle and
almost as impossible of accomplishment. Both Manning and the President
believed that the United States must of necessity keep the power for the
time being until some permanent institution could be developed fit to
retain it. The hazard was this: Foreign policy is lodged jointly in the
hands of the President and the Congress. We were fortunate at the time in
having a good President and an adequate Congress, but that was no guarantee
for the future. We have had unfit Presidents and power-hungry
Congresses—oh, yes! Read the history of the Mexican War.
We were about to hand over to future governments of the United States the
power to turn the entire globe into an empire, our empire, and it was the
sober opinion of the President that our characteristic and beloved
democratic culture would not stand up under the temptation. Imperialism
degrades both oppressor and oppressed.
The President was determined that our sudden power should be used for the
absolute minimum of maintaining peace in the world—the simple purpose of
outlawing war and nothing else. It must not be used to protect American
investments abroad, to coerce trade agreements, for any purpose but the