Page 2
University Daily Kansan
Monday, May 13, 1963
"First Let's Get Him Out Of That Black Box"
H-Bombs Not Enough
The threat of atomic war is something most prefer not to think about. It is an almost incomprehensible thing, and also something that many would rather not comprehend even if they could.
But there are those who have to think about such things. They are in the Pentagon, the White House, and offices scattered around the capital and the nation. They are the ones who are paid to worry by those who would rather not. And it is interesting to note what they seem to be worrying about now.
IT IS not just ICBM's, atomic submarines and guided missile launching cruisers that concern U.S. military planners today. The so-called missile gap, if there is one, has fallen into the background. The shift in emphasis has not been so spectacular as a new ICBM blasting off the pad at Cape Canaveral before the television eyes of millions of Americans from coast to coast. It has been a relatively quiet change, mainly within the ranks of the armed forces. This new emphasis is on diversification. Missiles still are considered essential, but so is the foot soldier.
The foot soldier was to be replaced by the button-pusher, or so some self-styled military experts have claimed. These forecasters of totally mechanized warfare will not find much support in the Pentagon today.
The elite in today's armed forces are not the technicians, the sophisticated button-pushers. These would be the elite in the science fiction war of buttons, but the war of buttons has become just that, a fiction, so far as the current day-to-day battle is concerned.
TODAY'S ELITE soldier comes from the ranks of the foot soldiers. He may be a Ranger,
a paratrooper, a Special Forces man, a member of any of a number of such groups. He does sit at a computer console under 15 feet of concrete and steel waiting for a certain light to blink on, signaling him to push the button. Instead, he crouches like a jungle cat waiting for his prey.
The death he deals is not 5,000 miles away on another continent consumed in nuclear holocaust. The death he deals is a few hundred yards away when a booby trap explodes, or a few feet away when a bullet rips into an enemy soldier. Or perhaps it is a few inches away as he grabs an enemy sentry from behind and pushes the double-edged knife into his throat, riping through the vocal chords before there is time for a scream.
There is no blinding flash followed by a leveling shock wave and then deadly nuclear fallout. There is not even the sound of a rifle or a lifeless body falling to the ground, for the expert foot soldier has been trained to catch the body and equipment and ease it silently to the ground.
THIS IS the kind of war with which we now have to contend. The market for a pile of radioactive rubble is none too lucrative. This leaves East and West in a tense nuclear stalemate.
Where do we go from here? To Laos, to Viet-Nam, to wherever the next "brush-fire" war breaks out. These are wars fought by foot soldiers with rifles and knives and piano wire and bare hands and booby traps.
Perhaps there is less likelihood of total nuclear destruction. But somehow being garroted with a piece of piano wire hardly seems to have much advantage over being vaporized in a nuclear explosion. The progress that has been made, if it can be called progress, is not very consoling.
— Dennis Branstiter
CD Shelter System Is Farce; Deterring War Is Only Hope
By Terry Murphy
Americans have been acutely aware since 1957 that a realistic view of possible tomorrowrs must include the prospect of death in a nuclear hell.
The orbiting of a sputnik in 1957 proved that Russia has the means to deliver nuclear weapons to the United States. The destructiveness of existing nuclear weapons defies imagination for lack of a parallel. But the comparatively minor holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki tell us that a war would be total and savage.
THE BLAST force and attendant fire storms would leave cities the size of New York and Los Angeles incinerated heaps bearing no similarity to the centers of civilization they now are. Those who would, by chance of geography, escape immediate death would face radiation sickness.
A majority of the citizens of the United States know this. In times of crisis, such as during the Cuban scare last October, people showed concern about the threat of nuclear war. Although not widespread, many people rushed to lay in stores of canned goods. They did this with the idea of preparing to survive nuclear attack.
In light of what nuclear attack demands for minimal survival preparations, these trips to the supermarket are pathetic. Yet that is about the extent of national preparedness in the United States.
DailuTransan
111 Flint Hall
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912 Telephone Viking 3-2700
Extension 371, news room
Extension 376, business office
Member Inland Daily Press Association, Associated Collegiate Press Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York 22 N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays, and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Fred Zimmerman ... Managing Editor.
Ben Ashbull, Bill Sheldon, Mike Miller,
Miller, Margaret Callcott. ^
Assistant Managing Editors
Assistant Managing Editors
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Dennis Branstiter ... Editorial Editor
Terry Murphy ... Assistant Editorial Editor
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Jack Cannon, Business Manager; Jim Stevens, Assist. Business Mgr.; Mike Carson, Advertising Moan; Joanne Zabornik, Circulation Mgr.; Brooks Harrison, Classified Mgr.; Bob Brooks, National Adv. Mgr.; Charles Hayward, Promotion Mgr.; Bill Finley, Merchandising Mgr.
He holds that since nuclear war is too horrible to consider, people tuck the contemplation of such a disaster into a dark corner of the mind where it will not disturb them — at least not consciously.
WITH KNOWLEDGE of what nuclear war would mean — and an awareness that it is a very real possibility — why has nothing more been done? A psychologist who studied the question says the unpreparedness and apparent lack of concern are, possibly, the result of avoidance processes in the mind.
But the present condition of total vulnerability to nuclear attack can't be explained simply in terms of psychological avoidance machinations. As recently as last summer, huge buildings were stocked with survival gear. But these preparations too are woefully short of what should be needed to protect even half the 180 million population of the United States.
WHAT WOULD it cost to build shelter systems which would offer maximum protection? Estimates vary, but $90 billion is a figure discussed in Congress.
At this point it is possible to begin to understand why nothing has been done to provide adequate shelters. Shelters would be costly; a 10-year program would ignore the immediacy of the threat.
Obviously, Congress has not seen fit to spend the money necessary for such a program, which incidentally, would be
(Continued on page 3)
PARK HERBLOCK
THE VANVILLE POST
THE PRISONER OF ZENDA, by Anthony Hope (Doubleday Dolphin, 95 cents)—There are few persons who read books or go to the movies who do not know, at least remotely, the story of "The Prisoner of Zenda." Its setting is the mythical kingdom of Ruritania, and its hero is Rudolf Rassendyll, who attends a coronation and finds that he is a dead ringer for the king. It's obvious what happens—Rudolf masquerades as the king and falls in love with a lovely girl. He also finds himself up against that knave called Rupert of Hentzau. Here is enjoyable, vastly unimportant (yet somehow lasting) fiction.
THE SCIENCE OF LIFE, by Lois and Louis Darling (Bantam Pathfinder, 50 cents); FRONTIERS OF THE SEA, by Robert C. Cowen (Bantam Pathfinder, 60 cents)—two excellent new volumes in a new Bantam line. "The Science of Life" considers such matters as energy, materials, cells, organisms, digestion, reproduction, inheritance, classification, environment and so on. "Frontiers of the Sea" describes the developing science of oceanography, and this is a fascinating volume about the flora and fauna, the ocean currents and undersea mountain ranges.
* *
CALLING DR. JANE, by Adeline McElfresh (Bantam, 40 cents); DR.JANE'S MISSION,by Adeline McElfresh (Bantam,40 cents); DR.JANE COMES HOME,by Adeline McElfresh (Bantam, 40 cents); DOCTOR JANE,by Adeline McElfresh (Bantam, 40 cents); DR.JEFFREY'S AWAKENING,by Dorothy Worley (Bantam, 40 cents)a new, yet old, direction in book publishing, doubtless inspired by Casey and Kildare. These books are a notch beyond the pulses of yesteryear.
* *
MY PLACE IN THE BAZAAR, by Alec Waugh (Bantam, 50 cents) another exotic tale by the author of "Fuel for the Flame" and "Island in the Sun." Waugh has such characters this time as an English lord accused of assaulting a young girl, a marooned and beautiful blonde, an ex-secret service man, an executive who has left his wife—in short, the ingredients for trouble in paradise.
$$
* * *
$$
* *
SISTER CARRIE, by Theodore Dreiser (Bantam Classics, 60 cents) a reprint of the celebrated and once-shocking naturalistic novel by Dreiser, Sister Carrie is a girl from the country who claws her way upward after a long and tragic attempt to make a go of it in the big city. The novel's frankness made it a turn-of-the-century cause celebre.
* *
BORN IN WEDLOCK, by Margaret Echard (Bantam, 40 cents)—a turn-of-the-century tale as told by a naughty 9-year-old. This little brat had a mother who was in the Gayety chorus, who met father when she was playing the piano in a sporting house. And little girl spends most of her time spying on mother after father dies.
$$
---
$$
WITCHES, WARLOCKS AND WEREWOLVES, by Rod Sterling (Bantam, 40 cents)-12 horrifying tales collected by the famous television writer whose "Twilight Zone" has such a wide following. Sterling has collected stories by Hawthorne, Kipling and other not-so-well-known writers.
$$
\* \* \*
$$
THE WAX BOOM, by George Mandel (Bantam, 75 cents)—a story of men in war. Critics have hailed it as one of the best war novels of the decade. Here is a raw, sometimes funny, often profane novel.