A Tract For Our Times

THE PEACE RACE, by Seymour Melman. Ballantine. 152 pp. 1961.

In his eloquent address at the United Nations, President Kennedy warned that if a peace race did not supersede the arms race, our globe might be turned into a flaming funeral pyre. He indicated that the events and the decisions of “the next ten months” could determine the fate of mankind for the next 10,000 years. That was some months ago. Since then (at this writing) we have already made preparations for further atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, and Russia has announced an increase in military expenditures—bringing them up to one sixth of the Soviet budget. Every month counts and every year carries us closer to a point where not even Herman Kahn can find statistical consolation in the whimpering remnants of life that might survive an atomic holocaust.

There is an immediate need for action, for pacification, for international agreement to avert race suicide. And such action as we get drives us faster to our graves, now fashionably designated as “fall-out shelters”—the mere mention of which has so demented our people that many of them have receded from the national consciousness which used to disfigure their imagination ...