Science: Plastic Ball

At the Manhattan convention of the American Chemical Society (18,000 chemists), Dr. James Bryant Conant, chemist and president of Harvard, looked into his crystal ball (a plastic one, he explained, in deference to modern chemistry). It told him what the world would be like after the next 50 years. ¶Atomic war has been averted, though by "the narrowest of margins." At the end of the century, "Paris, Berlin, London, New York, Moscow still stand physically undamaged by any enemy action since World War II." Communist regimes still hold much of the world, but both Marxism and its opponents have been...

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