The Issue Should Be Decided Now

Abstract

assured. The prophetic visibility is admittedly low; few of us would pretend we can see very far into the fog of uncertainty that is even the immediate future. We badly need some intellectual counterpart of radar. Even so, certain concrete facts can be made out, not all of them pleasant. One is that our old security, the security that came in part from our two broad oceans, has been repealed by science. Whereas we have been used to thinking of ourselves as out of range and almost impossible to reach, we now realize that our old ally, geography, has taken some bad blows. We accept the sobering truth that this country can be the target of a surprise attack, and is not impossible of invasion. Whatever else may be true of the postwar world, we know that much is so.