OXFORD 1933

There is no use of energy more important than defense: If this country were to be conquered, or even Finlandized, raw muscle power would be the only energy you could call your own. Conversely, this country's capability to deter aggression and, if necessary, to defend itself depends very much on the strength of its industrial base, which means above all its energy sources. It is not accidental that those who preach energy from sunshine and chicken manure are most often those who preach nuclear freeze and preemptive surrender.

With half a century's hindsight, who is to blame for some 35 or 40 million dead in World War II? Who is responsible for the millions who died in battle, for the British, Germans and Japanese slaughtered from the air, for the 6 million Jews and gypsies exterminated in concentration camps, for the 20 million Soviets who died in war the way Hitler and Stalin waged it?

You can shrug it off with "Hitler" or "The Nazis." But a snake will bite, and a totalitarian will kill; that is part of their nature. The blame is not the snake's, but whoever tried to humor it as it grew from a nuisance to a lethal threat.

There is plenty of blame to go round, but among the principal culprits we count the likes of the students of Cambridge, England, whose debating society in 1934 passed a resolution that "This House Will Not Fight For King and Country." They did not mean to burn people alive with flamethrowers or to exterminate the Jews; they just expressed what everybody wanted to hear.

Where are they now, the Cambridge warmongers? They are now pushing 70, if they did not leave this world, which even in 1934 had given them so much, and which they spat squarely in the face while wearing the pacifist halo. Unless they learned something in the meantime (mainly from the German bombs raining on their heads), they are probably members of the Labour Party and collecting signatures for a nuclear freeze.

Like others who will vote for a nuclear freeze, they do not want war, least of all nuclear war; they simply express what everybody wants to hear.

But history has a way of increasing the penalty for wishful thinking; and certainly this time the penalty would be unimaginably savage. True, contrary to the claims of the defeatists, nuclear war is survivable (apart from the technical reasons given in our May supplement, mankind now has so many more members to lose); but why should the Schells and the Caldicotts, the Kennedys and the Carters push us into nuclear slaughter in the first place? Why should they dupe us as the Cambridge students duped the cannon fodder of the forties?

Indeed, there is far less reason to trust the Soviets now than there was to trust Hitler in 1934. Recall how in 1968 they kept their word to their Czech friends and allies; how would they keep it to their American adversaries?

It is not enough to vote against the freeze fraud in the coming elections. To prevent nuclear war, people's eyes must be opened to the pacifist warmongers' work. They must be shown that truth is not what everybody wants to hear, but what is confirmed by experience. And the historical experience shows that war is prevented by two and only two things: the will to resist and the capacity to win.