astronaut is offered to the West as a little Valentine—or heart 
throb—suited to our sentimentality. In fact, the war of the 
icons, or the eroding of the collective countenance of one’s 
rivals, has long been under way. Ink and photo are supplanting 
soldiery and tanks. The pen daily becomes mightier than the 
sword.

     The French phrase Òguerre des nerfs ” of twenty-five years 
ago has since come to be referred to as “the cold war.” It is 
really an electric battle of information and of images that goes 
far deeper and is more obsessional than the old hot wars of 
industrial hardware.

     The “hot” wars of the past used weapons that knocked 
off the enemy, one by one. Even ideological warfare in the 
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries proceeded by persuading