From Richard Rhodes, The Making Of The Atomic Bomb, published in 1986:
Change is possible. Americans who want the Soviet Union to change first, as Henry Stimson did, should realize that they can only pursue that cause peacefully; the Soviet Union controls a deterrent fully as dangerous as the United States’ deterrent. And patriots may need reminding that the national security state is not where holy democracy began. The American Revolution foresaw a future much like Bohr’s open world, in part because the framers of that revolution and the founders of the republic of science drew from a common body of Enlightenment ideas. That national security state that the United States has evolved toward since 1945 is significantly a denial of the American democratic vision: suspicious of diversity, secret, martial, exclusive, monolithic, paranoid. “Nationalism conquered both the American thesis and the Russian antithesis of the universalist faith,” writes Barbara Ward. “The two great federated experiments, based upon a revolutionary concept of the destiny of all mankind, have ended, in counterpoint, as the two most powerful nation-states in history.” But other nations have moderated their belligerence and tempered their ambitions without losing their souls. Sweden was once the scourge of Europe. It gave way; the empty fortress and Kungälv testifies to that. Now it abides honorably and peacefully among the nations.
Change is possible because the choice is bare: change is the only alternative to total death. The conditions have already been established, irrevocably, for the destruction of the human world or its modification into some more collegial commonality. The necessity now is to begin to dismantle the death machine. The energies rich and intelligent peoples have squandered on the elaboration of death need to be turned to the elaboration of life.
