\ \ =5Ga A world accustomed to thinicing it horrible that wars should last four or five years is now appalled at the prospect that future wars may last only a few days. One of the results of such a change would be that a far greater proportion of human lives would be lost even in relation to the greater physical damage done. The problem of alerting the population of a great city and permitting resort to air raid shelters is one thing when the destruction of that city requires the concentrated efforts of a great enemy airforce; it is quite another when the job can be done by a few aircraft fying atiextreme altitudes. Moreover, the feasibility of building adeauate air raitshetters against the atomic bomb is more than dubious when one considers that the New Mexico bomb, which was detonated over 100 feet above the ground, caused powerful earth tremors 6 of an unprecedented type lasting over twenty seconds .°3 The problem merely of ventilating deep shelters, which would require the shutting out of dangerously ) , radioactive gases, is considered by some scientists to be practically insuperable. It would appear that the only way of safeguarding the lives of city dwellers is to evacuate them from their cities entirely in periods of crisis, But such a preject too entails some nearly insuperable problems. What do the facts presented in the preceding pages add up to for our military policy? Is it worti-while even to consider military policy as having any consequence at all in an age of atomic bombs? people think not. A good many intelligent The passionate and exclusive preoccupation of some scientists and laymen with proposals for "world government" and the like-—-in which the arguments are posed on an "or else" basis that permits no question of feasibility-——argues a profound conviction that the safeguards to security formerly provided by military might are no longer of anyuse. Indeed the postulates set forth and argued in the preceding chapter would ‘seem to admit of no other conclusion. If our cities can be wiped out in a day, 3: Time, January 28, 1946, p. 75. £3