weaponry has been a source of technological advance for mankind because it requires continually improved performance with ever smaller means. "As we went from the ships of the sea to the ships of the air, the performance per pound of the equipment and fuel became of even higher importance than on the sea." It is this trend toward more and more power with less and less hardware that is characteristic of the electric age of information. Fuller has estimated that in the first half century of the airplane the nations of the world have invested two and a half trillion dollars by subsidy of the airplane as a weapon. He added that this amounts to sixty-two times the value of all the gold in the world. His approach to these problems is more technological than the approach of historians, who have often tended to find that war produces nothing new in the way of invention. "This man will teach us how to beat him," Peter the Great is said to have remarked after his army had been beaten by Charles XII of Sweden. Today, the backward countries can learn from us how to beat us. In the new electric age of information, the backward countries enjoy some specific advantages over the highly literate and industrialized cultures. For backward countries have the habit and understanding of oral propaganda and persuasion that was eroded in industrial societies long ago. The Russians had only to adapt their traditions of Eastern icon and image-building to the new electric media in order to be aggressively effective in the modern world of information. The idea of the Image, that Madison Avenue has had to learn the hard way, was the only idea available to Russian propaganda The Russians have not shown imagination or resourcefulness in their propaganda. They have merely done that which their religious and cultural traditions taught them; namely, to build images. The city, itself, is traditionally a military weapon, and is a collective shield or plate armor, an extension of the castle of our very skins. Before the huddle of the city, there was the food-gathering phase of man the hunter, even as men have now in the