A fact to begin with (from the Birmingham Post of 31 May 1966) about the new British Polaris submarine, due to be launched in September: ‘Each submarine, with its 16 missiles, can unleash more destructive power, 2,800 miles from the target, than all the bombs dropped by all the air-forces of the last war. It is the most powerful weapon yet devised by man.’’ The crews know (adds the newspaper) that if ever they have to use this power ‘they will have failed in their task – the maintenance of world peace’. Voices of criticism and protest seem to fade away in weariness, as the shadow of world-suicide creeps nearer. Of the statesmen and prelates who favour peace by nuclear deterrence, a few do stir uneasily as one fresh country after another ‘proliferates’ nuclear weapons of its own, or gets them from America. As for mere ‘conventional’ armaments, our own Government announces with pride its arrangements for selling them to pretty well all comers and nobody lifts an eyebrow. It is difficult not to agree with Fr Thomas Merton’s sombre summing-up of our situation as a turning of man’s creativity away from God to make a temple to man’s own powers of destruction. ‘The ultimate extreme of this process of degeneration is reached when all man’s powers are directed to spoilage, rapine and destruction, and when his society is geared not only against God, but against the most fundamental natural interests of man himself.’ (The New Man, p. 42.)