\ -15- \ all of which, incidentally, reflect in their behavior the will of the popular majority. Governments are of course ruled by considerations not wholly different from those which affect even enlightened individuals, That the atomic bomb is a weapon of incalculable horror will no doubt impress most of them deeply. But they have never yet responded to the horrific implications of war in a uniform way. Even those governments which feel impelled to the most drastic self~ denying proposals will have to grapple not merely with the suspicions of other govermments but with the indisputable fact that great nations have very recently been ruled by men who were supremely indifferent to horror, especially horror inflicted by them on people other than their ow. Statesmen have hitherto felt themselves obliged the assumption that the situation might again arise where to one or more great powers war looked less dangerous or less undesirable than the prevailing conditions of peace, assumption. They will want to know how the atomic bomb affects that They must realize at the outset that a weapon so terrible cannot but influence the degree of probability of war for any given period in the future. But the degree of that influence or the direction in which it operates is by no means obvious, It has, for example, been stated over and over again that the atomic bomb is par excellence the weapon of aggression, that it weights the scales overwhelmingly in favor of surprise attack, That if true would indicate that world peace is even more precarious than it was before, despite the greater horrors of war. But is it inevitably true? If not, then the effort to make the reverse true would deserve a high priority among the measures to be pursued. Thus, a series of questions present themselves. in a world which contains atomic bombs? Is war more or less likely If the latter, is it sufficiently un- likely-—-sufficiently, that is, to give society the opportunity it desperately needs to adjust its politics to its physics? What are the procedures for effect— ing that adjustment within the limits of our opportunities? And how can we