JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Blanche Murray wrote this short pamphlet in 1947, the designer completing the cover in the Russian-spider/American-fly motif. Ms. Murray was trying to warn the U.S. that World War III was "happening now" and that Russia had crept into the U.S. on "cushioned paws".
The author was more or less correct in the WWIII part, though not so much in the creeping Commie part--my quick-browse didn't find any "Cold War" reference exactly, but that is what she was talking about there in 1947, two years before the Soviets had their own nuclear weapons (with the so-called Joe-1 shot) and three years before the Korean War began. Mr. Orwell called it in October 1945:
"For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors."--George Orwell, Tribune 19 October 1945 ("You and the Atomic Bomb") Here, via Project Gutenberg.
In any event I like the cover design, which is probably the best part of the pamphlet. Sometimes that is all you really need.
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