=Than "pre-atomic thinking." The idea which must be driven home above all else is ¢ { that a military establishment which is expected to fight on after the nation has, || undergone atomic bomb attack must be prepared to fight with the men already mobilized and with the equipment already in the arsenals. The cities will/be'vast, catastrophe areas, - and the normal channels of transportation and co able confusion. / e tree must be in caves in the wilderness, And those arsenals fcations “will be in unutter"94 The rural areas and the smaller towns, though perhaps not struck directly, will be in varying degrees of disorganization as a result of the collapse of the metropolitan centers with which their economies are intertirined. Naturally, the actual degree of disorganization in both the struck and nonstruck areas till depend on the degree to which we provide beforehand against the event. A good deal can be done in the way of decentralization and reorgani- zation of vital industries and services to avoid complete paralysis of the nation. More will be said on this subject later in the present chapter. But the idea that a nation which had undergone days or weeks of atomic bomb attack would be able to achieve a production for war purposes even remotcly comparable in character and magnitude to American production in World War II simply does not make sensc. The war of atomic bombs must be fought with stockpiles of arms in finished or semi-finished state. A superiority in raw matcrials Will be about as important as a superiority in gold resources was in World War II though it was not so long ago that gold was the cssential sinew of war. All that is being presumed here is the kind of destruction which Germany actually underwent in the last year of the Second ‘lorld Yar, only telescoped in time and considerably miltiplied in magnitude. If such a presumption is held to be unduly alarmist, the burden of proof must lie in the discovery of basic errors in the argument of the preceding chapter. The essence of that argument is simply that what Germany suffered because of her inferiority in the air may now well be suffered in greater degree and in far less time, so long as atomic bombs are nG@