Atomic Anarchy

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 364, 14 June 1946, Page 5

Atomic Anarchy

T was pointed out by someone the other day that although Greek, French, and Italian elections get the headlines, the atomic bomb is still the big news. If we don't talk about it, we brood over it, and we would talk about | it if we knew what to say. We don’t know what to say because we | don't know what the possessors of | bombs are going to do, but we

may know in a month or two. The full text of the American State Department's plan for the control of atomic energy has now been circulated, and the Manchester Guardian’s summary taises sore hopes. First it is encouraging that America has laid its cards on the table. The Guardian thinks it has done so because its scientists have laid theirs on the table too-con-fessed that atomic bombs are destructive beyond all possibility of defence and that no country has a chance of monopolising them..This may be the case, and if it is, it is encouraging, since it means that the breach between

science and politics has been narrowed. It may also have been a factor that atomic anarchy was seen as a bigger menace to a democracy than to a totalitarian state. But whatever brought the State Department to such a deci-. sion, it did two months ago propose that all "dangerous" atomic developments should be withdrawn from national control and placed under the authority of the United Nations. By what means this should be done, when a beginning should be made, and how fast national control should be surrendered, have not yet been seriously discussed, since the proposal comes very near to asking all nations for individual disarmament. In the meantime that is asking for the impossible, but the fact that it is the strongest nation in the world that has taken the initiative silences the cynics and the sneerers.