Who's in Grand Shape?

Americans have long been comforted and invigorated by a belief that seemed as solid as the Rockies and as ever-renewable as the Mississippi: that, counting up its armor, its resources and its allies, the U.S. was as strong as any potential enemy.

Last week, the U.S. could not feel so sure. Its supposed monopoly of A-bombs was gone. The hydrogen bomb, when & if it is developed, made the nation's own shoreline for the first time in 135 years a perilous frontier. Even if both Russia and the U.S. began working on the H-bomb simultaneously, Russia would have a lead. It would have a lead because in the kind of war that might wipe out entire cities and whole armies at one surprise stroke, the U.S. would strike only if struck first. The element of surprise would always be Russia's monopoly. The tempting nakedness of America's great cities and the vulnerable concentration of her industrial plants also made the U.S. a more profitable target than Russia.

In more than four years of trying to negotiate with the Communists, the U.S. had found in them no good faith and no apparent desire for peace--only the cold, calculating opportunism that the Communists call realism. If the U.S. could only negotiate from strength--as Secretary of State Dean Acheson said last week --the U.S. had to look to its defenses. It could:

P: Plunge into all-out military preparation, with the mass standing armies, the fabulous expenditures, the back-breaking taxes, the governmental controls and the infringements of liberty, the dangers of arming too sopn with weapons that would become outmoded. No responsible public figure ventured to suggest it.

P: Announce complacently, as Defense Secretary Louis Johnson did only last week, that the country already was "in grand shape."

P: Recognize the nation's weakening military position for what it was and speedily redress it. It was a problem the nation's Joint Chiefs of Staff, freshly returned from an inspection of U.S. bases in the Far East, had to face up to energetically. The nation needed defenses at home (e.g., radar screens and other precautions against surprise attacks by planes, submarines or even tramp steamers carrying H-bombs). The armed services, dangerously weakened by the Administration's foolish economy policies in national defense, still had to be built into a force capable of surviving the first blow and retaliating swiftly and strongly--even if it meant spending less money on social services that normally would be considered necessary and worthy, and less money on such politicians' luxuries as surplus potatoes and dried eggs. The U.S. had to make its allies stronger, and to make new friends in the sectors of the world still balanced between Communism and democracy.

This was the best way to prepare for a possible war; more important, it was the best way to prevent one.

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