Winner Takes Nothing

The report of the President's Commission on Universal Military Training is going to stir up quite a controversy. In Congress, on the radio, in newspapers and periodicals the pros and cons will be argued and reargued; and the most meaningful, the most frightening part of the report is likely to be forgotten in the midst of the melee. Perhaps UMT may save the United States from defeat in the next war, or it may prove an ineffective and costly gesture. The important fact is that no nation is going to win the next war.

The horrors of atomic and bacteriological warfare have largely faded from the public mind in recent months. People were completely fed up with atomic terrors in the months that followed Hiroshima. The affairs of the world move too swiftly for even such a sensation as the atom bomb to be more than a super seven days' wonder. But the members of the Universal Military Training Commission made it their business to learn everything they could about the possibilities of atomic war. Their statement, together with those secured from General Eisenhower and other army officers, put a new meaning into old hackneyed phrases like "total war" and "complete annihilation."

Scores of cities will be blotted out in the first few hours of any future war, and the victory gained or lost in a matter of days. Under conditions like these the best that can be hoped for is a Pyrrhic victory. Though the purchase of peace at any price would be both cowardly and foolish, the goal of world peace becomes the paramount aim to which effort and time must be directed. In this drive for peace the contribution of the United States is twofold. It must preserve a strong and healthy home economy and do all it can to support and reconstruct the economic and industrial systems of other nations who fared less well than this country in the course of the war, and it must support the United Nations to the hilt. The U.N. has not lived up to the high expectations with which it was founded; sometimes it resembles nothing more than a glorified debating society; its prestige is small and its power smaller. But is remains the noblest of all experiments, the one hope for a peaceful future. In the United Nations alone the world powers have the opportunity for peaceful discussion and cooperation on all phases of their activities. Though the U.N. is weak, it wields as much power as the great nations could be expected to grant it in the present state of mutual distrust and misunderstanding. And in it are contained the seeds of an honest-to-God world government which can be realized as knowledge and tolerance increase.