would wear itself out in good time;
meanwhile, they were thankful the effect of the atomicbomb had been no
worse. If anything the spirit of the country, despite the great setback,
was better after the dropping of the bomb than before.

I was so fascinated by the entire episode that I stayed by my radio
practically all my waking hours, much to the distress of Button Fles.
Every report, every scrap of news interested me. So it was that I caught
an item in a newscast, probably unheard by most, or smiled aside, if
heard. _Red Egg_, organ of the Russian Poultry Farmers, editorialized,
"a certain imperialist nation, unscrupulously pilfering the technical
advance of Soviet Science, is using atomic power, contrary to
international law. This is intolerable to a peace-loving people
embracing 1/6 of the earth's surface and the poultrymen of the
Collective, _Little Red Father_, have unanimously protested against such
capitalist aggression which can only be directed against the Soviet
Union."

The following day, _Red Star_ agreed; on the next, _Pravda_ reviewed the
"threatening situation." Two days later _Izvestia_ devoted a column to
"Blackmail, Peter the Great, Suvarov and Imperialist Slyness."
Twentyfour hours after, the Ministerial Council of the Union of Soviet
Republics declared a state of war existed--through no action of its
own--between the United States and the Soviet Union.

_39._ At first the people were incredulous. They could not believe the
radio reports were anything but a ghastly mistake, an accidental
garbling produced by atmospheric conditions. Historians had told them
from their schooldays of traditional Russian-American friendship. The
Russian Fleet came to the Atlantic coast in 1862 to escape revolutionary
infection, but the Americans innocently took it as a gesture of
solidarity in the Civil War. The Communist party had repeated with the
monotony of a popular hymntune at a revival that the Soviet Union asked
only to be let alone, that it had no belligerent designs, that it was,
as Lincoln said of the modest farmer, desirous only of the land that
"jines mine." At no point were the two nations' territories contiguous.

Agitators were promptly jailed for saying the Soviet Union wasnt--if it
ever had been--a socialist country; its imperialism stemming directly
from its rejection of the socialist idea. As a great imperialist power
bursting with natural resources it must inevitably conflict with the
other gre