OPINION: Poor Little Superman

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He goes on to the Air Force's heavily guarded experimental center, Edwards Air Force Base in California's Mojave Desert. There he finds an anonymous wife who confides of her superman: "A jet pilot needs a quiet wife who considers his nerves . . . Passionate romance, moods, worries about love, are things he cannot permit himself . . . Russ was looking for a girl that wouldn't excite him, see? It seems I filled the bill."

Jungk sums up for his fellow Europeans : "The Americans today are concerned with bigger things than land ownership . . . [They] do not aspire to the mastery of continents [but] to complete and absolute mastery of nature in all its aspects . . . The stake is the throne of God . . .

"The pillars of democracy, Christianity and personal ethics in the U.S. have begun to totter. Where formerly belief and conscience were the sole criterion, the names of the new judges are purpose and results."

Nightmare Visit. Through agriculture, industry and government, Journalist Jungk follows the trail of science and the machine. In Des Moines, he learns about artificial insemination and watches in horror as a prize bull is mated to an artificial cow ("Super Anxiety the 65th is restless," says the attendant. "I think we'd better give him service today"). In industry he finds "workers" spied upon by hidden microphones, interviewed with lie detectors and checked by stop watches, in the name of personnel relations. "Our factory has become a world without walls, without respect for individuality, without regard for private life," a Detroit "motor-parts executive" tells him. After a nightmarish visit to Thomas ("Think") Watson's International Business Machines plant in Endicott, N.Y., Jungk decides that U.S. office workers are "melancholy visions of pale, silent people standing submissively before exorbitantly active metal boxes . . ."

In Manhattan, he stands knee-deep in symbolism as he watches a wrecking crew tear down a midtown church to make way for an office building. "The organ pipes . . . fell on the naked rock of Manhattan . . . with dull growls or loud cries." Atop the Empire State Building, he notes: "It is not advisable to look too long and thoughtfully at the improbable panorama, because such starers may be suspected of contemplating suicide by the seven watchers stationed here."

For newspaper readers who recall the great political uproar in 1951 over Harry Truman's recall of General MacArthur, Jungk has news: The whole thing was brought about by the Bureau of Standards' electronic computer. The computer proved that the general's "aggressive action" would strain the economy, and "an outbreak of war . . . would be premature and might easily be unfavorable to us." Armed with the computer's facts, Truman was emboldened to side against MacArthur and his policy. Jungk's anonymous Washington guide confided that the computer was known as "The Oracle of Washington," and the hut in which it was housed, "The Little White House."