“Couldn’t anyone have stopped it?” “I don’t know. . . . Some kinds of silliness you just can’t stop,” he said. “I mean, if a couple of hundred million people all decide that their national honour requires them to drop cobalt bombs upon their neighbour, well, there’s not much that you or I can do about it. The only possible hope would have been to educate them out of their silliness.” “But how could you have done that, Peter? I mean, they’d all left school.” “Newspapers,” he said. “You could have done something with newspapers. We didn’t do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We
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