Blake thanks BR for his letter, but cannot agree with him. He feels that "disaster is almost certain" and that there is little good anyone can do. Blake does say that there is a lot BR can do, because people listen to him and this can be seen in the Baruch Plan, which "owes more than a little to your article" that BR wrote while Blake stayed with him in Cambridge. He sees the only hope to avoid disaster is if Stalin dies before the Russians invent the atomic bomb. His final thought on the matter, which appears to be a response to BR: "1816 may have seemed equally hopeless, but you know as well as I do that no cause is as lost before an 1816 firing squad as it is before a 1946 atomic bomb."

Blake agrees with BR's aside that the Germans "are being driven into the arms of Stalin", because he sees it happening every day. He estimates two years at most for a Communist majority. The text of Viacheslav Molotov's speech in Paris is being circulated widely, and even those who wouldn't normally follow the Communists feel that they are the only ones saving them from starvation.

Source: Columbia University, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Peter Blake Papers, Fol 19:20-22.