A psychologist has observed that when a man gets lost in a dense forest, he tends to run faster and faster. It seems this is what all of mankind is doing in today's crisis-ridden world. In recent years we have witnessed a great many commissions and conferences along with a flood of reports and documents, all purporting to solve the grave problems of our times. Yet it would be no exaggeration to say, borrowing a phrase from Churchill, they have been "less luminous than voluminous."

You may remember the event. In October, 1977, German commandos rescuing hijacked hostages in Mogadishu. I watched the televised reports of the venture in somewhat idyllic circumstances: in the local tavern of a small Spanish village whose name means, in the regional dialect, "a forgotten nook away from the world," an atmosphere so innocent that one has to remind oneself, sometimes, that some of the most serious matters are really serious.

The moment in history is mid-January, 1945. The journalist from Time-Life is in the field with the Chinese army overlooking the junction of the historic road where Burma meets China. To take the last Japanese stronghold, 7,500 foot-high Mount Huilungsham, and reopen the Burma Road, American planes have dropped their tons of napalm, fragmentation, and heavy bombs, and the artillery has pounded away with eight-minute salvos every hour. Between salvos three divisions of American-trained Chinese troops, bayonets fixed, triumphantly storm the crest.

From his bed in a hospital near Peshawar, Pakistan, Chulam Hussein recalled the incident that robbed him of his thumb and the first two fingers of his right hand. As thirty-one-year-old Ghulam was nearing the Afghanistan- Pakistan border with a mini-caravan consisting of his own and four other Afghan refugee families, he spotted a metallic object a few paces from the wellworn path. A closer look revealed it to be a wristwatch. Chulam remembers a blinding flash and deafening explosion. Only after regaining his sight did Chulam realize that fingers were missing from his numbed hand. He had become the latest casualty of the Soviet antipersonnel devices sown along the paths used by refugees fleeing Afghanistan for Pakistan.

While the eyes of the West rivet upon Soviet expansionism in Southwest Asia, another drama moves to center stage in the Balkans.

There is considerable wishful thinking, particularly in Western Europe, about the Soviets' inability to engage their forces in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, maintain their defenses against China, and still cause difficulty in Eastern Europe after the death of Yugoslavia's president, Josip Tito. This is the same kind of rationalization that for two decades lulled the West into letting its defenses erode to a scandalous level.

Tropical rain forests have long been recognized as a rich repository of plant species, but it is only relatively recently that scientists have understood their crucial role in maintenance of the world's biotic diversity. Ecologists now estimate that the tropical rain forests harbor fully a fourth of the world's species of plantsmore than any other single ecosystem —and it is for this reason that concern is mounting over the recent devastation of tropical forests.

A representative comment by Henry Kissinger on the Vietnam experience captures the essence of what he means by moral judgment in The White House Years:

Since the proclamation of the State of Israel thirty-one years ago, the Middle East has been in permanent crisis, more or less violent, with one war following another. It is no exaggeration to say, however, that no crisis in the past was as menancing as the present one. Some of my Israeli friends know more about the details of the situation from the Israeli point of view than I—inflation going beyond 100 per cent, the growing abyss between a small, rich minority that is getting richer and the vast majority getting poorer, the growing polarization of the inner political scene and, internationally, the total isolation of Israel, supported only by the USA, primarily for internal political reasons, especially in view of the approaching presidential election.

The SALT II debate has revealed a growing acceptance among anti-SALT strategists that we must be prepared to fight a nuclear war. The "war fighters" advocate strategies and force levels that reflect the traditional belief that weapons exist to fight wars, not just deter them, and nuclear war is like any other in this respect. There is little recognition by this group that events leading up to a crossroads in human history— the firing of thousands of nuclear weapons— would be anything other than a neat, mechanical, step-by-step procession to confrontation, from which the two sides could easily disengage. Civil defense, programs are prescribed as an integral part of a credible war-fighting capability, and Protection in the Nuclear Age, the government's most recent public information film on the subject (produced for the Federal Emergency Management Agency), accepts this assumption.

In 1972 a conclave of distinguished American historians debated whether the United States was going the way of Germany's ill-fated Weimar Republic. (The colloquium proceedings were published in Social Re search, Summer, 1972.) They concluded that it was not, that the differences outweighed the similarities. But a few participants, such as Geoffrey Barraclough, were already worried, and today reappraisal seems overdue.

On May 22 the University of Chicago named Robert S. McNamara winner of the first Albert Pick, Jr., Award for International Understanding. Under the terms of the award the sum of $25,000 and a sculpture will be presented to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to international peace and understanding. The citation recognizes McNamara's contribution as president of the World Bank for the last decade and pointedly ignores his seven-year service as secretary of defense during the escalation of the Vietnam war. Implicit in the university's choice and its defense of that choice is the assumption that McNamara has paid his dues and made up for Vietnam.

The award matters because it is part of a groping for a national recollection of Vietnam. We congratulate ourselves on our ability to make movies like The Deer Hunter or novels like Dispatches. A reception by President Carter for veterans and Congress's belated passage of Vietnam Veterans’ Counseling legislation also contribute to our self-satisfied awakening.

Within days after Presidential Directive No. 59 was leaked to the New York Times (August 6, 1980) and reported as "a new strategy for nuclear war," it was under attack by dedicated arms controllers. Among these were Jeremy J. Stone of the Federation of American Scientists, Herbert Scoville of the Arms Control Association, and Bernard T. Feld of MIT. All three lamented the apparent shift away from making population centers the primary targets of nuclear weapons on both sides—the dogma of mutual assured destruction (MAD)—that had appeared to ensure stability by making nuclear war unthinkable.

For all the inspiration Henry Kissinger is supposed to have received from the tradition of "power politics" and "political realism," he does not, at least on the surface, employ the notion of morality in a way that is quite in keeping with that tradition. In White House Years, Kissinger displays little of the skepticism and embarrassment about mixing moral judgments and foreign policy decisions that is characteristic of political realists.

I must describe J. Patrick Dobel as a “fanatic.” I do not mean all the offensive overtones that word has in ordinary speech. By “fanatic” I mean only a person who is not open to any revision of former opinions he held, and held sincerely, and at that point held for what he believed were good reasons. It can then come to pass that such a person defensively protects the righteousness of his view by now allowing no forgiveness to anyone who at that earlier time judged and acted differently. In other words, to forgive—no longer to exclude Robert McNamara from our ongoing political community—would be to admit that the author in some measure was wrong, or might have been. Or it is to admit that he too contributed unknowingly to the tragic outcomes for which McNamara and others were also responsible.

What happens to a country's genetic/cultural pool when more than fifty million of its citizens—over a fifth of its present population—die unnatural deaths or emigrate over sixty years? What happens when many of these people are among the country's most talented individuals—entrepreneurs, army officers, party leaders, successful farmers, leading writers, and the intelligentsia? And what happens to a country's capacity for critical analysis when, in addition to physical disasters on the scale indicated, it has been sealed off from the rest of the world and severe limits have been placed on discussion within the country?