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nations can be solved by some authority other than national governments. This delusion is a form of radiation sickness. If you look directly at an atomic blast you may go blind; apparently intellectual blindness can result from contemplating the nuclear weapons issue for too long.
    Nuclear weapons will always exist. We must learn to live with what we know rather than wasting our energies in thepretense of not knowing it. But while we cannot eliminate nuclear weapons, we can do a great deal to prevent them from being used. It is only by learning to live in peace with our adversaries that we will learn to live with nuclear weapons.
    The World Government Myth . After the cataclysm of World War II, in which 55 million people died, those who had served and survived returned home to the happy news of the United Nations conference in San Francisco. Everyone was hopeful that through this new organization we would debate about our disagreements rather than fight about them.
    But as was the case with the League of Nations after World War I, the promise of the UN was illusory. The League of Nations and the UN were both noble but unavailing attempts to turn man’s most idealistic impulses about peace into reality. Envisioned as the peacekeeper of the postwar world, the UN has been unable in most cases either to forestall war or to end a war once it was begun. One expert has concluded that of 93 separate conflicts between 1946 and 1977, the UN held limited debate on 40, did not debate at all about 53, and did not significantly contribute to the resolution of any.
    Many nations are ably represented in the UN by dedicated, highly intelligent delegates, and the organization as a whole does important work in such areas as health and hunger relief. At its best the United Nations serves as a forum for the views and complaints of smaller nations that otherwise might be ignored in a world dominated by the superpowers. But at its worst it is more often than not a propaganda arm of the Soviet Union and its satellites and shills, a hall of distorting mirrors where peace-loving Russian armies are “invited in” by their victims, where the aiding and abetting of terrorism is actually “supporting wars of national liberation”—where, as in the world of George Orwell’s 1984, “war is peace” and “freedom is slavery.” The UN has exacerbated many conflicts either by cavalierly blaming the U.S. or by ignoring the involvement of the Soviet Union. While 160 flags fly at the UN, the one that flies the highest is the double standard.
    No major power will submit an issue affecting its basic interests to a forum in which it can be overruled by smaller powers. The UN’s failure shows that international problems must be solved by negotiations between autonomous governments or they will not be solved.
    The Myth of Peace Through Trade . Optimism, like hope, springs eternal, and from each generation of leaders spring the eternal optimists who say that trade between aggressive adversaries softens their belligerence. Five years after the Russian Revolution David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, said that trade with the Soviets would “bring an end to the ferocity, the rapine, and the crudity of Bolshevism surer than any other method.” Many in the West, eager for what they called “peaceful coexistence” with the new communist government, agreed. Western businessmen scrambled for access to what they hoped would be rich new Soviet markets, and the Russians obligingly granted over 300 “concessions” to Western companies. Eventually all these manufacturing firms were expelled, but not before Soviet engineers had studied and copied Western industrial technology and methods and put them to work during Stalin’s massive industrial buildup in the 1930s.
    That first round of economic cooperation in the 1920s did not bring the West and the Soviets closer together. It did help turn the