THE PEOPLE: Unforgettable

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A New Jerseyite: "Any power can get ideas of world domination. For the sake of our own security, we shouldn't tell the other countries about the bomb, even though they can find out for themselves. We aren't too sure we can have peace. Things are too chaotic. . . . There are still places that are foreign to our way of life and may cause trouble. Which country? It's hard to say; I don't want to be specific. . . ."

Everyman. Listening tothe people talk, the pollsters found awe, fear, cynicism, confusion, hope—but mostly confused fear and hopeful confusion. They found a substantial minority expectation that atomic experiments will end the world some day, a vague majority confidence that somehow everything would work out and that man would somehow be better off in the long run.

Significantly, there was one thing that the pollsters did not find: any American who advocated, even in the privacy of an anonymous dialogue, that the U.S. use its secret bombs as a Hitler or a Tojo would certainly have used them. Americans, precariously holding the bomb's precarious secret, were more afraid of it than any have-not nation had reason to be.