Where is the indignation about the fact that the United States and Soviet Union have accumulated thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?

Cousins is condemning public complacency in the face of Cold War nuclear stockpiling. By translating abstract megatonnage into a per‑person measure—“thirty thousand pounds” of destructive power for every human being—he forces readers to confront the grotesque disproportionality between human needs and the resources devoted to annihilation. The rhetorical question (“Where is the indignation…?”) implies a moral failure: outrage is misdirected or exhausted, while the most existential danger is normalized. The line fits Cousins’s broader humanist activism, urging citizens to reclaim ethical judgment and political pressure rather than accepting the arms race as inevitable.