he is credited with coining the term ‘cold war’, in a paragraph that deserves quotation. On 19 October 1945, in an essay entitled ‘You and the Atom Bomb’, he drew attention to both the military and the political dangers inherent in a weapon that, not merely unprecedentedly destructive of the innocent, could also only be wielded by an elite: 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
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