Horror With Some Hope

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 321, 17 August 1945, Page 5

Horror With Some Hope

HE atomic bomb revelations will have sickened many people and given others a faint gleam of hope. We join the. band of hope. We join partly because it is necessary to have hope to live, and partly because there is now at length a chance that war has become too destructive to continue. The fact that wars are waged at all means that the human race is not wise enough or fine enough to live at peace for the best reasons. But most of us. have enough wit to get off the line when the train is coming. We are capable of considerable prudence if not, in general, of high intelligence, We make war because wars, so far, have proved relatively harmless. They have not yet blotted a single powerful nation from the face of the earth. The present war, for example, may have killed one per cent of the men and women who were alive six years ago; not more than that, and probably not so many. At its very worst points it may have killed or maimed 10 per cent in Russia, and a slightly higher proportion in Germany, In both cases our figures are almost certainly far too high, But to be horrifying enough to cease before it could start war would have to mean the speedy end of the belligerents as coherent nations-the death of the majority and the complete destruction of the way of life of all. This war has never meant in modern times, and because it has never meant this, and because such things have never been regarded as possibilities, wars go on. But the atomic bomb may mean something like that-at present no one knows with certainty--and if it does there is now for the first time a possibility, faint but appreciable, that we are witnessing the last world war. Therefore it is justifiable to hope as well as to shudder.