BOMBS AT BIKINI

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 405, 28 March 1947, Page 19

BOMBS AT BIKINI

: {N the past month I have seen three films dealing with the atomic bomb, and particularly with the tests at Bikini. One of them is a 20-minute March of Time item which tries to explain in simple terms the scientific principles involved in atomic fission, gives some of the background to the discovery of the bomb, and dwells rather diffidently on its awful potentialities. There are interviews with a number of prominent scientists, including-after a _ terrific build-up which leads us to expect from him some portentous announcement-a meeting with Professor Einstein himself, But the wise old man, confronted with a document for his signature stressing the need for control of atomic energy, confines himself to the two words "I agree." The other two films, one an official U.S. Defence Services production in colour and the second a compilation of civilian black-and-white newsreels, were shown in Wellington by courtesy of the American Legation. Both comparatively straightforward records of the actual Bikini tests, they are impressive and terrifying enough in \all conscience. I see that a writer in the New Statesman has suggested that these atomic bomb films are the U.S. equivalent of the Nazis Baptism of Fire which was used to soften up recalcitrant countries, I think that is a little unfair. My complaint is that none of the three films I have seen has the intelligence, or the desire, to draw the conclusion that needs firmly to be drawn-a conclusion aptly summed up by the scientist who, in discussing in another place the atomic bomb and the allied menace of biological. warfare, said: "There may still be some debate as to what weapons will be used in the next war, but there is no question about the one after that--they will be stones and spears." 5 On the contrary, the official film from the U.S. Army and Navy Departments, whistling to keep their courage and their budgets up, ends by advocating the need for Americans to build better battleships to meet the challenge of the bomb. The civilian newsreel film is rather more realistic and concedes that though a few battleships survived at Bikini, all human beings aboard them would have perished. By implication it therefore suggests that the need is not to build better battleships but better men; and perhaps one may safely go on from there and wonder whether the future of the world (if it is to have any future) may not depend on much of the energy formerly expended on armament being now expended on education.