\ ~37-\ bomb will depend on a number of variables-—-the ratio of the number of bombs available to the number of cities which might be hit, the wastage of bombs in respect to each target, the number of bombs which the larger cities can absorb before ceasing to be profitable targets, and, of course, the precise characteristics and relative accessibility of the individual city, Most important of all is the place of the particular city in the nation's economy, We can see at once that it does not require the obliteration of all its towns to make a nation wholly incapable of defending itself in the traditional fashion, Thus, the mumbéer of critical targets is quite Limited, and the number of hits necessary to win a strategic . decision~-always excepting the matter of retaliation—-is correspondingly limited. That does not mean that additional hits would be useless but simply that diminshing returns would set in early; and after the cities of say 100,000 population the returns from additionalbombs expended would decline drasti- cally. fe ah lo. were eliminated “A We have seen that one has to allow\forpastage of missiles in warfare, and the more missiles one has the larger the degree of wastage which is acceptable. Lioreover, the number of bombs available to a victim of attack will always bear to an important degree on his ability to retaliate, though it will not itself determine that ability. But, making due allowance for these considerations, it appears that for any conflict a specific number of bombs will be useful to the Side using it, and anything beyond that will be luxury. What that specific number would be for any given situation it is wholly impossible to determine. But we Can say that if 2,000 bombs in the hands of either party is enough to destroy entirely the economy of the other, the fact that one side has 6,000 and the other 2,000 will be of relatively small significance. We cannot, of course, assume that if a race in atomic bombs develops each nation will be content to limit its production after it reaches what it assumes to be the critical level. That would in fact be poor strategy, because the actual critical level could never be precisely determined in advance and all