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sat outside for week after week and watched as the Nazis threw five divisions against the trapped Poles, finally crushing their heroic resistance after sixty-three days. The Soviet government even refused to allow the Western Allies the use of Soviet airfields to fly supplies to the beleaguered Poles until the uprising had been going on for seven full weeks. At the end of September the Soviet army marched west, bypassing Warsaw altogether. On October 3, cut off and abandoned, the resistance forces surrendered to the Germans. The cream of the Polish resistance movement had been eliminated; the city of Warsaw had been ravaged; the path for Soviet domination of Poland had been cleared. In March 1945 the Soviets followed this up by inviting the commander of the Polish Home Army and several other leaders of the underground resistance to Moscow for political talks. When they revealed themselves to the Soviet agents, however, they were arrested and imprisoned. All this while the war in Europe was still going on, while the Soviets and the Western Allies—and the Polish underground—were still supposedly fighting together to defeat the Nazis.
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    World War III has gone on now for a third of a century, since those closing days of World War II. At Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam, as the postwar pattern of Europe was being set, Stalin maneuvered his way toward the advantages that he soonabruptly seized. The Soviet armies that followed the retreating Germans into Eastern Europe stayed, and the Iron Curtain clanged down across the continent. Locked under communist rule were the people of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, East Germany, as well as those of the once-independent states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. It was a coldly calculated grab on Stalin’s part; as he later commented, “The reason why there is now no Communist government in Paris is because in the circumstances of 1945 the Soviet Army was not able to reach French soil.”
    World War III has proceeded from the Soviet seizure of Eastern Europe, through the communist conquest of China, the wars in Korea and Indochina, and the establishment of a western hemisphere outpost of Soviet power in Cuba, to the present thrusts by the Soviet Union and its allies into Africa, the Islamic crescent, and Central America. The expansionism has been accompanied by a prodigious military buildup that has brought the Soviet Union to the verge of decisive supremacy over the West.
    Korea and Vietnam were battles in that war, as were the coups that brought Soviet satellite regimes to power in places as remote as Afghanistan and South Yemen. So, too, have been the struggles to keep Communist parties from taking control in Italy and Portugal, and to contain Castro’s export of revolution in Latin America.
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    World War III is the first truly global war. No corner of the earth is beyond its reach. The United States and the Soviet Union have both become global powers, and whatever affects the balance between us anywhere affects that balance everywhere. The Soviets understand this. We too must understand it, and must learn to think in global terms.
    World War III is also the first truly total war: it is waged on all levels of life and society. Military power, economic power, willpower, the strength of a nation’s galvanizing ideas and the clarity of its sense of purpose—each of these is vital to the outcome. So, too, are other intangibles: whether the competitive spirit is honored or denigrated; whether the prevailing ethic is for the individual to do the least he can get away with or the best of which he is capable; whether the next generation are tobe builders and creators or television zombies. It is also the first total war because of the nature of our adversaries: because theirs is a totalitarian system, advancing under the banner of an ideology in which even the