Constitutional Dictatorship in the Atomic Age
- 1 October 1949
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in The Review of Politics
- Vol. 11 (4), 395-418
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034670500043783
Abstract
How shall we be governed in an atomic war? Who will make the decisions for defense and survival, and what compulsions will support their peremptory execution? What will be the measure of our cherished liberties? In all the vast literature of atomic energy and the atomic bomb there appear no clear answers to these distressing questions.Several authorities have meditated wisely upon the particular problems of domestic government in the atomic age. Robert E. Cushman has pictured the challenge of atomic energy to our traditional concepts of civil liberty; Arthur Bromage has admonished state and local public administrators to decentralize or die, and Senator Wiley has done the same for the national government; Bernard Brodie and Hanson Baldwin have warned of the inadequacy for atomic warfare of our present defense and mobilization plans. Yet no one seems to have outlined the over-all pattern that the American government would assume in the event of atomic war or indicated the workable adjustments that we might undertake now to prepare our constitutional system for this dreadful contingency. This neglect may well be just another symptom of our apparent decision (arrived at through indecision) to ignore the bomb and, like Mr. Lincoln, “confess plainly” that events control us. Since we refuse to contemplate the horrors of atomic war, we likewise refuse to imagine the sort of government that such a war would force us to adopt.Keywords
This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit:
- Public Administration in the Atomic AgeAmerican Political Science Review, 1947
- Civil Liberties in the Atomic AgeThe Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1947