英文解釈教室の出典を探る(2)

Chapter 1 主語と動詞

1.1 例題（2）

「大戦争が短期間に続いて起こることはない」って本当？

Burnham's View of the Contemporary World Struggle

One fallacy left over from the nineteenth century and still influencing our thoughts is the notion that two major wars cannot happen within a few years of one another. The American civil war and the Franco Prussian war, it is true, occurred almost simultaneously, but they were fought in different continents and by different people. Otherwise the rule seemed to hold good that you can only get people to fight when everyone who remembers what the last war was like is beyond military age. Even the gap between the two world wars—twenty-one years—was large enough to ensure that very few men took part in both of them as common soldiers. Hence the widespread vague belief, or hope, that a third world war could not break out before about 1970, by which time, it is hopefully argued, "all sorts of things may have happened".

As James Burnham points out, the atomic bomb has altered all that. His book is, in effect, a product of atomic weapons: it is a revision, almost an abandonment of his earlier world-picture, in the light of the fact that the great nations are now in a position actually to annihilate one another. When weapons have reached this level of deadliness, one cannot take the risk of letting the enemy get his blow in first, so that as soon as two hostile nations possess atomic bombs, the explosion will follow almost immediately. In Burnham's opinion, we have perhaps ten years, but more probably only five, before the third world war, which has been raging unofficially ever since 1944, enters its open phase.

出典：Orwell, George. "Burnham's View of the Contemporary World Struggle." *New Leader* (New York), 29 March 1947.
（伊藤和夫著『英文解釈教室』第1章 1.1 例題(2)に加筆・修正）https://ekladata.com/Ww-3aE5B9Jke74sYGefgiC34fu4/Orwell-Burnhams-view.pdf

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