Now that Chad is partitioned and a fragile truce holds along an artificial line, it is worth taking stock of Chad and other Chad-like situations to see what lessons they may teach. For Chad's problems are not solved. Worse, there is nothing unique about its situation; it merely offers a particularly sharp example of what is taking place in a number of Third World nations.

Chad offers, first, a case of political collapse—an unusually complete case—not just of the overthrow of a government but of the total destruction of the state and its legitimate authority. Part of this has been the work of nature, part the work of the Chadians themselves. The basic fact of Chad is poverty.

Not long ago we were quite confident about how to go about thinking. If we wanted to think about some fundamental value—say, justice—we charted the course of our exploration over the broad and silent ocean of historical and philosophical knowledge accumulated in libraries. Within the last few decades, however, we have discovered, to our dismay, that knowledge has burst the boundaries of print to attack not only eyes, but ears, touch—the whole sensorium. Ease of travel and the wonders of electronics have launched us into an informational universe of too many dimensions. We can be almost anywhere. We can watch space lift-offs and half-an-hour later watch magnified human sperm travel into the womb and beyond. We can "see" the color-coded temperature of Jupiter and look back from beyond the Earth. We can see and hear war happen.

During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, Acting U.N. Secretary-General U Thant sent a letter to Soviet Premier Khrushchev asking that he halt the Soviet ships then headed for Cuba in defiance of a U.S. quarantine. U Thant's request gave Khrushchev a plausible—and honorable— explanation for preventing an impending clash, and he accepted it. As Richard Walton states in his Cold War and Counterrevolution: The Foreign Policy of John F. Kennedy: "The Acting Secretary General [was] responsible for the breathing space that avoided confrontation at sea—and possible escalation into nuclear war."