This book is an account of the great continuing conflict of the twentieth century, the struggle which will determine whether our civilization is to disappear in the nuclear flames of a final war of annihilation or find essential unity in one family of organized nations.

The record here attempted was begun in 1947, when it seemed more than probable that we would go on into a third world war within one lifetime. It is the writer’s effort to try to forestall what he has never doubted would be the end of both the American dream and Western civilization. It would have been published much sooner if many developments, some of them international, had not intervened. For example, there was no suitable terminal point while the Korean War lasted, and that was a long time.

As a university student in 1914 I was aware that a big war was likely to break out in Europe at any time, but I was as isolationist as my Mid-Western countrymen until the deepening of the struggle convinced me that our neutrality in World War I could not be maintained.

After 1918 i found it difficult to believe that the opportunity to lead a beginning in world organization, against the return of ever more suicidal and destructive wars, was to be lost in the fires of partisan and personal controversy in Washington.

When the incredible happened, and a far worse world war developed, I again did what I could to work for national survival and to gain a second chance for enough world organization to enable humanity to continue and to develop.

It was poignantly evident that such abysmal destructions of human life, values and property could not continue, and that they were the source of the vast expansion of communism in the world. Nothing could be clearer than that.

It is my profound belief that nothing is so revolutionary as these world wars and that there is no rational alternative to relying chiefly on the irresistible force of evolution to modify communism, and all other systems, to bring them into closer harmony with the universal aspirations for a good life which all men share. I have never doubted that we can compete successfully with communism, if we place our main reliance on non-military methods.

However, after World War II our leaders quickly swung all the way over from our isolationist refusal to accept any responsibility in the world and came close to assuming military responsibility for everything everywhere. We heavily and positively over-compensated for our negative failure after 1918.

We do not seem able to learn the lesson of each succeeding world crisis until it is too late. During World War II we repented of our tragic failure to lead the League of Nations and we took our place at the head of a new league.

The lesson of World War I, that we cannot resign from the world, was learned at a sadly late date but once again the mandate of a world war was disregarded. The lesson of World War II was that the losing side must not plunge the world into another world war in order to restore or improve its position. We had just permitted Germany to do that, with calamitous consequences.

Nevertheless, after 1945 we ourselves at once assumed the position of a loser. Though we were the mightiest nation which had ever stood upon this planet, and though our undamaged strength had increased prodigiously as a result of World War II, we said that we had “lost” East Europe and China, and we rebelled against these two main consequences of the war.

Knowing that world wars can grow out of great myths like this, I was appalled to see the United States move promptly into a new balance of power conflict, while the embers of the last one were still hot, certain that the terribly wounded Soviet Union was out to take over the world.

This was done, also, in the light of the deadly flashes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which revealed clearly and with finality that another world war would complete the lethal progression of our time toward mutual extermination.

Since August 6, 1945, this process has advanced with relentless speed. Our decision that the Soviets should never possess an A-bomb if international control could prevent it; their prompt acquisition of the weapon; our drive for the H-bomb, with Russian success almost simultaneous; their plunge to leadership in intercontinental jet bombers and global guided missiles—these and other miracles of destruction tumbling on each other’s heels leave us little time to make peace.

Yet for fifteen years after 1945 peace was not made and we proceeded doggedly along the same old cycle of international rivalry, crisis after crisis, and ever mounting arms burdens—just as if the most destructive weapon of war was still the machine-gun, and as if we were still in the springtime of 1914, ignorant of the enormous steps toward destroying civilization soon to be made in the two world wars.

Of course we say to ourselves that because it would be so horrible and so senseless it will not happen. Our Civil Defense Administrator has told us that in a surprise attack the Soviets could kill above 40,000,000 Americans, merely with bombers, and if the best possible shelters had been constructed. Yet soon thousands of ICBM’s must be expected to stand triggered in the northern forests on both sides. It has been estimated, too, that we could mount a surprise thermonuclear attack on the Soviet Union which would cause deaths in the order of several hundred millions, depending on which way the winds blew.

It is an easy retreat from reality to say that no ruler of a great power would ever be mad or frightened enough to give the order, and no small nation turbulent or rebellious enough to touch off catastrophe. But humane men reasoned in the same way in early 1914, as well as in 1938, and no man can be safe until peace is made, and until some curbs are put upon the power of governments to assert their sovereign wills against each other once too often.

Yet we Americans are currently trying hard to devise new rules for victory, or at least stalemate, in “limited” nuclear wars, without using the city and nation killers. We strive assiduously to produce “clean” H-bombs and whole families of little ones, in an attempt to restore some shadow of rational possibility to the institution of war, and to the threat of its use as an instrument of diplomacy. These efforts may ease us into the final nuclear holocaust, but they can never take us back into the ages when major wars could be survived. The only way of escape lies forward; toward the elimination of great power wars. The inexorable procession of “ultimate” weapons leaves us no choice but to master them before they destroy us.

It was under the shadow of this infinite and constantly darkening peril that this book was written. That is why I have sought at every stage to present the other side, how it looks to “the enemy”, in the belief that this is essential to the avoidance of the final grand smash.

Of course this has been a difficult undertaking in a time when nearly all of the great organs of public opinion management have been massed to stress the iniquity and wickedness of our opponents. Yet it is only by striving constantly to see the other side that we can hope to survive, in the age of push-button ICBM’s and beyond.

I have tried to set down the facts about each crisis in these forty-three years as I believe them to have been true, knowing well that my work must stand the scrutiny of future decades, if there are to be any. I think it is fair to say that my previous books about the aftermath of World War I have met this test.

In any event, the validity of this study does not depend primarily upon the author’s interpretation of acts and events. A great many people have spoken in these pages, and it is upon the combined weight of their judgments that its impact will depend.

Many of the voices recorded have been bellicose. It is my belief that most of our belligerence has been unnecessary and dangerous, and that a great deal of it has been based upon false premises and information.

I have also told in various places the story of our anti-Red and anti-liberal hysterias, and of the incalculable damage they have done both to our reputation abroad and to our heritage of freedom of thought and expression at home.

The book seeks at many points to analyze the issues, to come to conclusions and to suggest solutions. It gives reasons for our loss of the Cold War. It was written in the belief that no nation can survive in a time of runaway military technologies unless a contemporary hearing can be gained for dissenting views and alternative policies. If the Cold War goes on into a third world war, there will be no leisurely processes of history thereafter to explain how the catastrophe could have been averted.

If another world war breaks out, there is not a government in the world which can perform its primary, basic function of protecting its citizens against foreign attack. The most powerful government on the globe will be pitifully and futilely impotent. In this situation ancient, traditional ways of thinking and acting toward other peoples cannot be effective. New thinking, new attitudes and new policies are required, as President Eisenhower explained so impressively during his 1959 tour. During the last half of that year he changed the whole international climate in the direction to which this book points. Of course it is my hope that its readers will help to keep the direction changed toward cooperation and “co-survival,” to use Secretary of State Herter’s expressive term, in spite of the backset at the abortive summit conference in Paris.

No intelligent citizen can escape his share of the responsibility for making competitive co-existence succeed. This is much too important a matter to be left to governments. In his memorable address to the Parliament of India on December 10, 1959, President Eisenhower urged all men everywhere to work against the mistrusts, fixations and tensions of our time. He added that, “All these are the creations of Governments, cherished and nourished by Governments. Nations would never feel them if they were given freedom from propaganda and pressure.”

In the years since 1945 all the things which divide us from other great peoples have been magnified fully and too long. Suspicion, hate and fear have ruled our minds. Now it is time to study and emphasize the things which unite us with the other peoples.

We are obliged to learn, for example, that the needs of the vast and dynamic peoples of the Soviet Union and China are as clamant as our fears are. These great nations are now highly organized and marching swiftly into modernity.

Either we have to learn to live in reasonable amity with them, or we shall all be atomized together.

During the period covered by this narrative, fighting man has at last reached the end of the road. Hereafter, he will learn to cooperate or he will cease to exist.

Nor will understanding between the nations be enough. It is imperative that we build rapidly both the feeling for the world community and the instrumentalities for its work which alone can give us security against nuclear destruction.