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If such events shock us, they are also somehow expected, as if the world were at once in supreme command of itself and superstitious: "I knew that something like this would happen." Perhaps the fact that we are relatively new to the prospect of nuclear war gives us both solid and shaky ground. That fear of annihilation must seem preposterous to you, who either have neutralized it or live with weapons that make our missiles seem like Gatling guns, or both. Congratulations.
A sketch of international politics would show America and the Soviet Union each seeking to hold half the world in thrall, or to fend off each other. These two countries are called superpowers, but the name is illusory, since the power they have to level the earth and each other is self-restraining. While the U.S. and the Soviets must posture about war, less muscle-bound nations, such as Nicaragua, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, go at the real thing. So fierce are Lebanon's internal wars, one wonders if the country that grew the timber for Solomon's temple will exist in your time. Murderers pretending to be countries wage war continuously in tighter arenas, blowing the limbs off children in railway stations to make their cause appreciated. They are called terrorists, not superpowers, but the power they have, they use.
What powers America and the Soviets do have lie largely in influence, but that too is limited. The glorious clash of ideologies that characterized U.S.-Soviet relations in the 1950s, no matter how wistfully zealots recall it, has evolved into a prosaic contest on practical grounds: inventories of weapons, competitions for the hearts and minds of countries going broke. Yet our opposition to the Soviets remains serious and abiding. The Soviet view of the state and the people creates an institutionalized barbarism that Americans logically must oppose; and the Soviet leaders, if they are to hold on to what they've got, must oppose our opposition. Here we stand, then: two aging businessmen who have little sympathy for each other but who know each other too well, each learning to be content with day-to-day sales.
Of late the world's most nerve-racking explosions have come from the Middle East, fueled by the 40-year-old antipathy of the Arab states toward Israel. Conventional wisdom holds that a third world war is most likely to begin in that region, but political touts say that Eastern Europe is the horse to watch. The Soviets simply do not have the resources to woo Latin American and African countries and at the same time keep their grip on Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and East Germany. Britain, whose imperial eye took in much of the world a hundred years ago, now struggles with a crippled economy -- a chastening lesson here. Daunting to think that by the time you receive this, the geometry of wealth and power will have expanded to several planets. We have more than we can handle as it is.