As an advance army in this war of ideas we already have a fifth column of millions waiting for our signal to march, the millions of the enslaved satellite countries—Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic countries, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania—as well as millions upon millions behind the Iron Curtain in Russia itself. The greatest mistake made by Hitler was his failure to utilize the readiness and eagerness of a large percentage of the Russian masses to turn against their oppressors. When the Nazi armies marched into the Ukraine, large numbers of Ukrainians, who had been longing for independence for centuries, greeted them as their liberators with the traditional bread and salt, symbol of welcome. Russian soldiers surrendered by the thousands and they, along with the men of the villages, volunteered in great numbers to fight against their enslavers. In the hearts of millions of Russians behind the front, the longing for liberty, never extinguished, was given its greatest stimulus since the days when they overthrew the Czarist regime. They, too, were waiting for the Germans to give them back the revolution the Communists had stolen from them with lies and deceit.
With the stupidity characteristic of all criminals, Hitler and Himmler proclaimed that the Russians were to be treated as an “inferior race.” Everywhere their armies went they burned and pillaged and raped. Instead of liberators they turned out to be most savage barbarians, who behaved even worse than the commissars. It was this inconceivable folly of Hitler, as well as our Lend-Lease, that played a major role in enabling the Kremlin to win the war.
The Russian masses and those of the enslaved satellite countries are still waiting for their liberators. The masters of the Kremlin know it, but they hope that, like the Nazis, we will be too stupid to take advantage of it. If a war ever breaks out, we shall have millions joining our ranks provided we do not destroy these millions, those not in uniform, with A- or H-bombs in the strategic bombing of their cities. But we should not wait until a war breaks out. We must begin mobilizing them right now for the war of ideas.
The so-called Iron Curtain is a fake, like the rest of the Communist set-up. It is made of tinsel and is full of thousands of holes, through which we can pass if we will. Those thousands of miles of border ringing the vast Russian Empire could be utilized as great thoroughfares of ideas, to be smuggled to the millions waiting for them. There isn’t a guard on those borders who couldn’t, with the proper approach and inducements, be enlisted in our army of ideas. In addition to flooding the air over Russia with tiny balloons, each carrying a message of freedom and hope, we could also smuggle into the country small radio receiving sets by the millions to bring the Voice of America to millions of Russian homes. We could attach to those balloons small loaves of bread, packages of cigarettes, little trinkets for babies, nylon stockings for women, on a scale that no police could cope with. Nor could the Kremlin risk forbidding it, as that would place it in the position of further depriving its starved and hungry people of things they badly need and want.
With these weapons on the battlefront in the war of ideas, and with the A- and H-bomb to give the Kremlin pause, we would be well on the way to win any war, cold or hot. Our justification for building the hydrogen bomb is thus not merely to prevent its use, but to prevent World War III, and to win it if it comes. We are not building it to bring Russia to her knees. We are building it to bring her to her senses. We must make the Kremlin realize with General Marshall that “tyranny inevitably must fall back before the tremendous moral strength of the gospel of freedom and self-respect for the individual.”
IV
KOREA CLEARED THE AIR
As this is being written, the Korean war is just one month old. By the time these lines appear in print we may know whether the naked Communist aggression on the Republic of South Korea was an episode, a prelude, or the first act of World War III. But whatever history records, the first flash of the Communist guns, supplied by the Kremlin, has revealed to the free world at last the face of the enemy in all its hideousness. It brought the first phase of the so-called cold war to a definite end. It aroused freedom-loving peoples everywhere and put them on the alert. It served as a powerful headlight in the night, revealing many dangerous curves on the road ahead. It has given the United Nations its first great opportunity to display its vitality for all the world to see.
Among other things, the flash of the North Korean guns has illumined for us more clearly than ever before the path we must follow in our policy on atomic weapons, both the A-bomb and the H-bomb. It has revealed the extreme danger lurking in any plan to outlaw production and use of atomic weapons in a world constantly threatened by a savage dictatorship, ready to pounce on it at the first sign of weakening in its armor.
The flash of the Red guns, in the first place, made it clear to free men everywhere that to renounce our right to the production of atomic weapons as potentially the greatest deterrents against the further spread of Communist aggression, and as the most powerful defenders of the spiritual and moral values without which our way of life would become meaningless, would allow the Red Army to overrun what remains of the free world. Such a move on our part, for the present and the foreseeable future, may herald the last appearance of free men on the stage of history. It would be, as the Goncourt brothers feared, “closing time, gentlemen!”
In addition to warning us what we must not do, the Red guns also gave warning of a more positive nature. They warned us to make all haste in the construction of the hydrogen bomb, to get it ready as soon as possible, against the eventuality that Russia may decide it would be to her advantage to precipitate World War III before our H-bomb is ready. Instead of the estimated pre-Korea time-table of three years, it now becomes a vital necessity for us to complete our H-bomb, and facilities for its production at a speedy rate, within a year. And if the history of our development of the A-bomb may serve as an example, it almost becomes a certainty that we shall do so. While we may not announce it to the world, we have good reason to expect that the first H-bomb will be ready for testing sometime in 1951, possibly in early summer.