1946

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 341, 4 January 1946, Page 5

1946

E said a fortnight ago that Christmas 1945 could be civilisation’s last but might be the most memorable since the first. Since we wrote that sentence the-Moscow Conference of foreign ministers has met and it is almost if not quite in the power of the men assembled there to say which half of our Christmas comment will prove true. Whateyer happens, many people will have entered 1946 in fear and trembling -fear not so much of the atomic bomb as of the failure of the united nations to overcome mutual suspicions. The bomb in itself is only potentially alarming; but it is alarming that there is enough scientific genius in the world to split atoms and not enough political genius to unite three cities. It

is of course no new thing that knowledge should have outpaced wisdom, but it is a new thing that the power of knowledge should suddenly have become great enough, with a little assistance from folly, to destroy civilisation ‘in a month or two. No such situation as that has ever faced mankind before, and we are dangerously complacent or dangerously dull

and stupid if we are entering 1946 in the belief that the perils of the last six years have all been safely surmounted. Some of them certainly have been; and we. are entitled to feel safe on one point — the destruction of the two powers that set out deliberately to destroy us. Without that victory there could have been no other for generations for the nations to whom the control of the world has now fallen, and we do well to rejoice in it. But we. know that even that victory was @ race against time; that our enemies might have mastered the atom before we did; and that to ‘secure our victory we must achieve international confidence and understanding faster than they have ever been achieved before. Unless 1946 brings that second victory nearer it would be better if time stood still.