Page:Astounding Science Fiction (1950-01).djvu/4



The official announcement of the obviously inevitable having been made—some months back now; we are not a news magazine, of course—we are, in reality, operating in the world political situation that was clearly predictable. A divided world with atomic weapons. And the trouble is not with atoms, nor with the laws of the universe. Nature's not nationalistic; she'll answer any properly phrased question asked by any intelligent being anywhere in the universe. The trouble doesn't lie there.

The trouble is pushbutton warfare, and I do not mean the pushbuttons made of plastic and metal by which rockets are launched, or sub-critical masses combined to annihilation. I mean those far more deadly pushbuttons that already exist, all over the world—pushbuttons that have controlled the most deadly of all weapons for many, many years. They're man-made pushbuttons, too—but they're the pushbuttons that set off men's minds.

Oscar Hammerstein II has a fine, bitter verse in "South Pacific" in the song "Carefully Taught" that goes:

This is the way those man-made pushbuttons are made. The United States has the world's greatest industrial machine; we mass-produce automobiles for people to ride in, beds to sleep in, even houses to live in, and television sets to enjoy. More recently the United States has gone into mass-production, assembly-line techniques on atomic bombs. But the greatest mass-production

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