this connection an insurance ad that featured Dad in an iron 
lung surrounded by a joyful family group did more to strike 
terror into the reader than all the warning wisdom in the world. 
It is a question that arises in connection with capital 
punishment. Is a severe penalty the best deterrent to serious 
crime? With regard to the bomb and the cold war, is the threat 
of massive retaliation the most effective means to peace? Is it 
not evident in every human situation that is pushed to a point 
of saturation that some precipitation occurs? When all the 
available resources and energies have been played up in an 
organism or in any structure there is some kind of reversal of 
pattern. The spectacle of brutality used as deterrent can 
brutalize. Brutality used in sports may humanize under some 
conditions, at least. But with regard to the bomb and 
retaliation as deterrent, it is obvious that numbness is the 
result of any prolonged terror, a fact that was discovered when