World Peace or World Suicide?

Never before our time have men had the means for literally ruining the whole earth. Consider:

The United States has forty-one nuclear missile submarines. Each one carries more explosive power than all the bombs used by both sides in World War II​—the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan included! Russia is developing forty-two such submarines. France began testing its nuclear missile submarine in July.

The Russians have about 300 huge SS-9 hydrogen bombs, each with a capacity of twenty-five megatons. That is the equivalent of twenty-five million tons of TNT each. Just one of these bombs would make a hideous shambles of any great city on earth.

Right now, at this minute, besides its submarine missiles, the United States has 1,000 land-based Minuteman missiles, equipped with one- or two-megaton warheads, aimed at the Soviet Union and China. The Soviet Union has about 1,300 equally powerful missiles aimed at the United States aside from its SS-9’s.

One push of buttons by the opposing nations and an estimated three hundred million people would perish in less than an hour.

Yet the superpowers have kept on stockpiling more and more warheads. Thus physicist Ralph E. Lapp some time ago pointed out that the United States has stockpiled “enough nuclear explosives to overkill the Soviet Union at least 25 times.”

[Picture on page 10]

On both sides, the United States and Russia, there are over 1,000 land-based missiles aimed and ready to be fired at the push of a button

One of these missiles can race through space at 15,000 miles per hour and rain nuclear death on an entire city within a half hour from the time the signal is flashed