All this has been so evident for more than two years that it is remarkable that the Russians have failed so far to take advantage of our potential embarrassment and thus win one of their greatest victories on the propaganda front. In fact, their failure to do so, with the sure knowledge that they would risk nothing by accepting a plan that would most certainly be rejected by our own people, not only reveals lack of subtlety on their part, but appears on the surface as crass stupidity, the same type of stupidity displayed by Hitler, which appears to be an inevitable trait of all monolithic dictatorships that must lead to their ultimate undoing. The time has come for us to stop talking about giving away our greatest weapons, the only ones, as President Truman and Winston Churchill have told us, that have kept the Red Army hordes from overrunning the free world. It is time for us to face reality and place the blame where it belongs. The evil does not lie in weapons per se. It lies in war itself. It is no evil to build and possess the most powerful weapons at our command with which to defend ourselves against a ruthless aggressor. On the contrary, it would be an evil thing to throw away the principal weapon standing between us and possible defeat. It is no evil to use a weapon to destroy your enemy just because your weapon happens to be the most powerful in existence. It is no greater evil to destroy thousands of your enemy in one great flash than to destroy them by goring them with bayonets. The real evildoer is the nation that starts an aggressive war. Those attacked have the right and duty to defend themselves by all means at their command. Our confusion has been the result of our first use of the A-bomb to destroy a city with thousands of its civilian population. Let us admit that the mass bombing of large populated cities (which, by the way, was started by the Nazis) is wholly inexcusable with any kind of weapons, and that we should never resort to such strategic bombing again. That does not mean that we should renounce our right to use A-bombs to destroy an enemy’s armies, navies, and airfields, his transportation facilities and his oil wells—in a word, his capacity to make war against us. And as long as we use the A-bomb and the H-bomb only as weapons of tremendous power to destroy by blast and by fire, they are no different from ordinary blockbusters or incendiaries except that they concentrate their power in a small package. Is there any difference, morally speaking, between the use of thousands of blockbusters and tens of thousands of incendiaries and a weapon that concentrates all their power in one?