Approximately half of the variation in wellbeing measures overlaps with variation in personality traits. Studies of non-human primate pedigrees and human twins suggest that this is due to common genetic influences. We tested whether personality polygenic scores for the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) domains and for item response theory (IRT) derived extraversion and neuroticism scores predict variance in wellbeing measures. Polygenic scores were based on published genome-wide association (GWA) results in over 17,000 individuals for the NEO-FFI and in over 63,000 for the IRT extraversion and neuroticism traits. The NEO-FFI polygenic scores were used to predict life satisfaction in 7 cohorts, positive affect in 12 cohorts, and general wellbeing in 1 cohort (maximal N = 46,508). Meta-analysis of these results showed no significant association between NEO-FFI personality polygenic scores and the wellbeing measures. IRT extraversion and neuroticism polygenic scores were used to predict life satisfaction and positive affect in almost 37,000 individuals from UK Biobank. Significant positive associations (effect sizes <0.05%) were observed between the extraversion polygenic score and wellbeing measures, and a negative association was observed between the polygenic neuroticism score and life satisfaction. Furthermore, using GWA data, genetic correlations of -0.49 and -0.55 were estimated between neuroticism with life satisfaction and positive affect, respectively. The moderate genetic correlation between neuroticism and wellbeing is in line with twin research showing that genetic influences on wellbeing are also shared with other independent personality domains.

How the Soviet citizen views the world, and how he will view it five or ten years from now, is a crucial question. It may determine whether we, and all people, can live in relative peace on this planet, or whether mankind will end up making our globe more or less uninhabitable. The new weapons which science and technology have provided make it all the more urgent to understand the thoughts and purposes of a people and its leaders who wield such great power.

THE “third world” of the developing and, for the most part, newly independent nations is, for Communists of all brands and allegiances, both a crucial arena of political competition against the “imperialists” and the center of their hopes for new victories. Yet there are important differences in the way Moscow and Peking view these opportunities. The Soviet leadership believes that the many poor and ambitious countries will, later if not sooner, decide that Communism offers them the best prospects for raising their status in the world. Chinese Communist propaganda, on the other hand, calls for an ever more militant struggle of “national liberation” to expel the “imperialists” from Asia, Africa, and Latin America and to unite the developing countries under Peking's leadership. Thus, in addition to being a principal focus of Communist hopes and efforts, the question of the “correct” policy toward the third world has unleashed deep-set rivalries and antagonisms between and within ruling and nonruling Communist parties alike.

When the attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into its second world war, the immediate concern of political leaders and public opinion alike was to train its manpower and to mobilize its industrial resources as the fisrst step in the long up-hill climb from initial defeat to decisive victory, first against Germany, then against Japan. Its prime political aim was to forge and maintain an effective working alliance with its major allies, Britain and the Soviet Union. If either faltered or failed in the joint effort, the road to victory and postwar security would stretch out beyond the horizon. After almost two decades of selfimposed isolation, American power was now to be concerned intimately with decisions, taken or not taken, which would in turn affect all parts of the world. Neither possessing the British tradition of continuity in its diplomacy nor possessed by the ruthless Soviet drive for expansion, impsrovised American policy-making toward many areas, including East Central Europe, sometimes mistook sympathy for policy, hope for action.

It was typical of Waldemar Gurian that, rich in philosophical thought and human understanding, he in turn enriched each field of studies which he touched, not least the field of Russian studies. Just because we, his colleagues and friends, have long grown accustomed to tum to him for creative and discriminating initiative and for the benefit of his wise judgment, and because he never failed with modesty and insight to meet these constant demands, it is difficult, now that he is gone from our midst, to measure precisely the manifold and essential contributions which he made to the strengthening of this important and difficult field of investigation. Yet it has clearly grown in strength and in usefulness to a free society because of his strength of mind and spirit.

From its founding the United Nations has been a frequent source of puzzlement and embarrassment to Soviet policy makers. Given the reticence of Soviet statesmen, past and present, and the inaccessibility of Soviet diplomatic archives, we can only speculate about the expectations which were in the minds of Premier Joseph Stalin and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov when they gave their approval to the Moscow Four-Nation Declaration on General Security of October 1943, the first great-power commitment to the establishment of a new international organization. For United States policy makers, certainly, this unprecedented commitment, buttressed by the Vandenberg Resolution, marked an important change in their nation's perspective and purpose. It represented a new determination, even if a vaguely defined one, to cooperate with other nations in establishing and maintaining a better foundation for international peace and order. For the Soviet leaders, who were celebrating the grim liberation of Kiev in the midst of the Moscow Conference, there was probably little time, and certainly no leisure, to speculate about the possible congruence or incongruence of Soviet ambitions with the stabilizing and even static assumptions that underlay a revived and expanded peacekeeping league of states.

The Soviet Union is a powerful military state today and it is continually growing stronger. Estimates vary widely as to whether it is one year, two years or five years ahead of the West in the development of the intercontinental missile, but there is almost general agreement that it is substantially ahead of us in a timetable in which the development from one stage to the next depends upon first achieving certain scientific and engineering break-throughs and then advancing from those. In other words, this is not the kind of developmental time lag which can be made up easily, if at all.

By the Moscow Declaration of 1943 the Soviet, British and United States governments pledged their efforts to reestablish a “free and independent Austria” after the the defeat of Germany. In the spring of 1950, five years after the liberation of Austria from German forces and Nazi rule, this pledge, like many other war-time declarations of aims, remained unfulfilled and the Austrians were still asking, as a Viennese witticism put it, when they would be “liberated from their liberators.”