f course, been educated in a time of change. As a child she
had attended compulsory civilian survival classes, as had nearly every
person in the vast complex of the Soviet Union. She had learned about
atomic weapons; and that other peoples for unknown reasons as far as
she could determine, might declare her very safety and life forfeit to
causes she did not understand.

Later, as she had made her way westward seeking reasons and causes for
these possible disasters, and more knowledge in general, her country
had undergone what amounted to a revolutionary change. Not only her
country, but the entire world had moved during her lifetime from an
armed camp or set of camps with divided interests and the ability for
total annihilation, towards a seeking of common goals--towards a
seeking of common understandings.

The catastrophe that had threatened to engulf the entire world and
claim the final conquest had occurred while she was a very junior
student in Moscow, when the two major nations that were leaders--or
had thought themselves to be leaders, so far as atomic weaponry and
such were concerned--had stood almost side by side in horror, and
attempted to halt the conflagration that had been sparked by a single
bomb landed on the mainland of China by Formosa.

While Russia and the United States had stood forth in the U.N. and
renounced any use of atomic weapons, the short and bitter struggle
which reached its termination in a mere five days had brought the
world staggering to the ultimate brink of atomic war, as the Formosan
Chinese made their final bid for control of mainland China.

The flare of atomic conflict had been brief and horrible. Where the
bombs had come from had been the subject of acrimonious accusations on
the floor of the U.N. The United States had forsworn knowledge, and
for a time no one had been able to say from whence they had come.
Later, shipping records had proven their source in the Belgian Congo
as raw material, secretly prepared and assembled on Formosa itself,
and it became obvious to the entire world that an atomic weapon was
not something that could be hidden in secrecy from the desires of
desperate men.

* * * * *

The Chinese mainland had responded with nuclear weapons of its own;
weapons they, too, had not been known to possess, but had possessed.

That the rest of the world had not been sucked into the holocaust was
a credit to the statesmen of both sides.