Grandfather was seventy-one years old when he met King Faisal. Saudi Arabia was the first foreign land he ever lived in. It happened that when grandad came to visit us in Saudi Arabia eleven years ago, Faisal had just ousted his senile brother from the throne. Grandfather managed to have himself invited to a diplomatic function honoring the new king—and there he shook the Arab monarch's hand. A world apart, no two men could have been more different, yet in some basic manner both were bred in the old, less mechanized world. Both men, the crusty and pious desert king and the retired Oregon lumberjack, had fought a harsh and unyielding land, and both carried the visible scars of their hard lives.

At any international gathering these days the dominant theme is likely to be the obvious interdependence of all nations in a global environment that is now perceived to be sharply limited. There is, of course, nothing new in the twin concepts that the world is one and that it is not infinite. For some years prophets, statesmen, scholars, and humble citizens have been blowing on these two horns with increasing vigor. But it took the oil shock of the autumn of 1973 to transform these ideas from the realm of provocative theory to chilling reality. An interdependent, limited world was until quite recently an interesting, slightly worrisome concept, but hardly more immediately threatening than the theory of an ever expanding universe. Suddenly it seems more like the hypnotic eye of a striking cobra, inducing a mixture of terror and immobility.

Ten years ago, in an address to an audience of German students, Peter Lotar, author of Das Bild des Menschen, raised the question of how the years of the Third Reich's power and crimes shall be dealt with.

During the three decades since Hiroshima and Nagasaki the ethical discussion of nuclear weapons has been preoccupied with the morality of using, or threatening to use, arms of mass annihilation. There has been a relative neglect of the ethics of nuclear arms control and disarmament. Moreover, since the late 1960's widespread complacency about the presumed efficacy of mutual deterrence and the ostensible progress of detente have tended to dissipate the nuclear anxieties of ethicists, politicians, and other citizens who attend to world affairs.

Through constant repetition over the past siderable credence has been given to a very pessimistic outlook for world agriculture. The pessimists argue that recurrent and ever more serious food shortages will occur as a result of increasing population growth, rising affluence, and decreasing availability of cultivatable land. Based largely on world consumption of food and feed grains ranging between 1.1 and 1.2 billion tons per year, with a yearly growth in volume of some 25 million tons needed to meet increased demand, it has been asserted that the world has twenty-seven days worth of food reserves left and is living on a razor's edge with respect to famine. This assertion does not bear up under close examination.

The peddler assembled a pyramid of small, red envelopes on the grass at his feet. He was hawking a nostrum, which he declared would cure everything from impotence to corns to alcoholism. His curly black hair glistened in the milky Peruvian sun. His assistant, a young boy, was transfixed by an iguana, as the crowd was transfixed by the voluble huckster. Figuratively he held them in the palm of his hand while the boy literally held the iguana in his. He stared at it, as if waiting for it to change into something other than a lizard.

It was Saturday afternoon. In the center of town foreigners picked over Indian blankets and dickered inexpertly for ceramics, copper masks of Inca deities, and the handbags woven in bright colors that are all the rage these days in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires.