The Future Of The Bomb

With a single order from the commander in chief, the longest continuous alert in the history of warfare was called off last week. For 42 years-the entire lifetimes of two thirds of the U.S. population--the bombers of the Strategic Air Command have been on either airborne or "strip" alert: armed and fueled, with pilots standing by, so that the final act in the history of human idiocy could take place with the mechanical efficiency of a pit crew changing a tire. Finally the crews stood down, the bombs were unloaded from the bays and the big B-1s and B-52s were parked off the runways. And do the 250 million people who were under their protection feel any less safe for it?

No, of course not. They, like everyone else alive on earth this week, feel safer. We have come, perhaps, to a turning point in the history of conflict. For more than a century industrial technology has produced weapons so horrible that no one believed they would actually be used-until they were. The Gatling gun was supposed to make combat unthinkable. So was the airplane. Then came the Somme, Hitler's blitzkrieg and Hiroshima. It hardly seemed possible that the hydrogen bomb would prove an exception. Yet for nearly half a century the two superpowers have stood chained to each other at a precipice and somehow resisted the temptation to push. Now, suddenly and decisively, one has taken a step back.

Could it be that someday the mushroom clouds and classroom air-raid drills-and the dread of annihilation that's been with us for two generations--will seem like a brief, bad dream? Not so fast: this new world order will have unforeseen dangers of its own. But the hope in the president's words was not just that the bomb may have a limited future. It's that now we all may have a longer one.