THE HYDROGEN BOMB

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 871, 13 April 1956, Page 5

THE HYDROGEN BOMB

Sir,-If I heard him correctly before his interesting talk on the hydrogen bomb faded out altogether, Mr. T.. A. Rafter stated that the explosion of one of the latest super-bombs could mean either sudden or lingering death, or else the probability of generations of deformed progeny for every man, woman and child in a circle about four hundred miles in diameter; and that the alternatives before us are either to bow to an awful dictatorship or else to be prepared to inflict these sare horrors on other ordinary men, women and children who happen to live in another part of the world from ourselyes-un-less, of course, the Soviet leaders choose to come to heel like good little doggies and believe what we would like them to believe. If these are the only visible «lternatives, how bankrupt is leadership! Other alternatives there are, of course, though less comforting to our smug attitude that we are the goodies and they are the baddies. We must dig deeper foundations than this is if we want real peace. We like to think that "democracy" is the whole answer; that our ideological equipment is necessarily superior to that of the Communist East; that because we have freedom of opinion, therefore our thinking, our ideas, our beliefs, will necessarily progress. Actually, none of! these assumptions is justified. Ultimately, the beliefs which we are prepared to "defend" by such horrible means are an unresolved contradiction. As nation-groups, to which most of us feel emotionally attached, we accept as precious the religious attitude which believes wholeheartedly and unquestionably; and we accept also as precious the scientific attitude which-in its own field-would regard such uncritical belief as heresy. Champions of these two opposed attitudes fought a great battle in past centuries-and simply agreed to differ. If it were part of our fundamental beliefs that out of such an opposition there must emerge some new concept in which both elements can be carried forward to a higher level, then we should have at least some firm principle to support us during the transition from

the old faiths to the new. Lacking such a principle we cling to our two opposed faiths but shrink from the contradiction with which they present us. We in the West have looked askance at the restrictions on freedom in the U.S.S.R.; yet, if all the hardship and sacrifice and restrictions-material, intellectual, and spiritual-that have accompanied the development of the U.S.S.R. have done nothing more than to raise the concept of the dialectic to the status and. force of a great world power they will haye been worth while; because we in the West need the dialectic, and we shall get no further forward without it. I’m not suggesting that the Communists on their side are likely to get much further with it, being too much in love with their theory of dialectical growth to allow it itself to grow dialectically; but I do suggest that when we begin digging the aeeper foundations of real peace between the Communist East and the West we shall have to start by reconciling first the duality in our own beliefs, and that this job starts of necessity from the proposition that "they have what we need." In such a spirit of intellectual humility we may hope to get something done.

DICK SOUTHON

(Auckland).