Salt Lake Tribune Apr 1st 49 Could Battered World Stand Another War? The second world war cost the lives of 40,000,000 people and 4 trillion (four thousand thousand million) dollars. Thus concludes C. Hartley Grattan, economist and writer, in a summary of economics of destruction in the Current Harpers. The report taxes human comprehension. Even if 4 trillion dollars could be clearly perceived in relation to economics, no tabulation of figures could tell the whole story. Still not included is the moral cost of what man so systematically and purposefully did to man. Such cold statistics, to be translated into everyday thinking, have to be related to something familiar. It may shock more people to be reminded that 20 out of every 100 residential buildings in Germany were destroyed, that every fifth Greek was left homeless, that 28,000 houses in Rotterdam were knocked down, that the British had 460,000 houses destroyed and the Japanese two and a quarter million. People were turned out of their homes and wandered about without hope or haven, or were herded like cattle into freight cars and taken to labor for the enemy as slaves, with thousands inevitably dying. Mr. Grattan says that no earthquake, no hurricane, no flood known to record has matched World War II in destructiveness. No previous war did anywhere near so much damage. Even World War I was only one seventh as destructive. The sardonic joke about the front line being the safest place in wartime became true. In no war in modern times have so many civilians suffered death in so many ways. Three civilian casualties were chalked up for every military one. The total deaths, says Mr. Grattan, is just about equivalent to all the children in the United States under 19 years old. As everybody knows, the third world war would be more destructive, perhaps spell the end to civilization, and even life. One bomb killed one and a half as many people in Hiroshima as died in air bombardments throughout the entire war in England. The atom bomb destruction in a third world war would advance not a mere seven times as from World War I to World War II, but on the order of seventy times. In the face of this information, how can cynics, even bolstered by the impressive record of failures, dare to conclude that the third world war is inevitable? Every possible avenue must be explored, every tiny spark of hope for peace must be assiduously fanned.