Americans, for a substantial part of their history, have tried to come to terms with the moral problem by espousing one of two approaches. The first approach seeks to deal with the realities of world affairs with steady realism and tough-mindedness. It has its roots in historical experiences still fresh in the minds of many who were caught unprepared by the events of the period between World War I and II and who carry a sense of guilt for this failure. They alone for this guilt with strident affirmations about the facts of power. For the most part, power is seen as a comparatively simple phenomenon of which the military is overwhelmingly the most important part. Both of the recent American Secretaries of State have viewed power, not as the endlessly complicated relationship of two living organisms with goals and objectives both comparable and fundamentally unique, but as men might approach a problem in physics to be weighed on the simple scales of relative military preparedness and forces potentially in being.

The Soviet Union is a powerful military state today and it is continually growing stronger. Estimates vary widely as to whether it is one year, two years or five years ahead of the West in the development of the intercontinental missile, but there is almost general agreement that it is substantially ahead of us in a timetable in which the development from one stage to the next depends upon first achieving certain scientific and engineering break-throughs and then advancing from those. In other words, this is not the kind of developmental time lag which can be made up easily, if at all.