On Dead-Red

Over the course of this year, the centenary of William F. Buckley’s birth, we will republish an article by him weekly. This week’s column considers the famous anti-communist aphorism “Better dead than Red.”

Many arguments are nowadays posed, and opinions influenced, by gaudy references to the extent of the devastation that would ensue upon a thermonuclear exchange in a third world war. I have heard lecturer after lecturer describe in macrocosmic terms, almost as if they took pleasure in describing all that gore, the meaning for the United States of a thermonuclear attack on us by, say, 100 ten-megaton Russian missiles.