THE HYDROGEN BOMB

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 884, 13 July 1956, Page 5

THE HYDROGEN BOMB

Sir.-Mr,. Murray asks what it is that the Communists have which we in the West need. Our world has developed beyond the limits of our present ideological equipment. We live today in a world in which we cannot fight a war with atomic weapans lest we poison the earth for everyone; we cannot begin a major war with "conventional"? weapons because it would not end with conventional weapons; and we cannot safely wage even a minor war less it develop into a maior one. As between the East and the West, war is out if we want to survive. Armaments, however, are not out. They are part of ourselves, For thousands of years men have equated weapons with security, and we cannot simnly toss them asice. Herein lies a double danger. As between East and West, if we put our trust in armaments and actually use them we risk extinction; but if we trust in armaments well knowing that we cannot actually use them, then we-are relying for our sense of security’ on what we know to be ‘an illusion. This is not a stable situation. It cannot continue: We shall either use our reason to reach a new basis for the sense of security we need, or else we shall gradually abandon reason through an increasing tendency to attach to ideas and groups that are emotionally satisfying though not ration-

ally sound. Social unreason erupted in Germany as a political movement; but we cannot assume that any further outbreaks will necessarily be political in form or centred on any one nation. In short, our world has developed to a stage where even the static dream of peaceful co-existence is no longer a teal answer to the problem of East and West. To survive in a sane world, the East-West tension cannot be merely endured; it must be eliminated. In so far as it arises through attachment to differing ideologies these differences must be reconciled, And if the common ground between the beliefs of the Communist East and the West-as they stand at present-is not enough to feel happy about, then we must seek out and develop the internal contradictions in both of these sets of ideas until we do arrive at something that will give acceptable firm support to both sides equally. This process of advancing ideas through developing their inner contradictions is included in Hegel’s term "dialectical growth." For Mr. Murray’s comfort we may note that Hegel was not a Communist and that some of the bitterest opponents of Communism have been inspired by his work. But Karl Marx and his followers have found the concept so useful to their own purposes that we tend to forget that it is, after all, only a tool to help us to understand how things grow, and that if it’s the tool we need for the job in hand there’s no reason why we shouldn’t use it as much as anyone else,

DICK

SOUTHON

(Auckland).