THE HYDROGEN BOMB

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 888, 10 August 1956, Page 5

THE HYDROGEN BOMB

Sir,-Mr. Murray’s- proposal that the East-West tension should be eliminated by complete disarmament may be interesting in itself; but it is not an answer to what I said. I suggested that for thousands of years we (and surely even Mr. Murray can understand that in this context "we" means mankind, all of us in East and West alike) have equated ‘weapons with security, and that for this reason we cannot simply toss them aside until we first find some other proposition which ordinary people on both sides of the garden fence can accept’ with confidence and a feeling of advance. I suggest that our present position is clearly untenable: if we depend on armaments for our sense of security and actually use them we risk extinction; that is, for the lucky ones a wipe-out and for the rest a long slow irrevocable agony of decline in which babies born dead or deformed will gradually, through generations, become more and more the rule and less and less the exception. But on the other hand, if we rely on the supposed security of armaments well knowing that we cannot actually use them in major war, then we risk social unreason on the grand scale, If Mr. Murray has no better suggestion for leading us beyond this impasse than that someone else should do the leading, on a proposition which both sides are obviously too dependent on the false security of armaments to undertake, then he would be better mannered if he refrained from ridiculing the suggestions of others. "Simplicity" is hardly the word to apply to the job of advancing and integrating the beliefs of the East and the West; and "delicious" is not likely to refer to anything more than the perverted feelings of those-there will be many of them-who enjoy jeering from the sidelines. I certainly don’t want to suggest that this job will be easy or pleasant. It will not. Those who want to help with this work must be prepared for ridicule, contempt, even active hatred; and not all its problems can be foreseen in advance. But if there is no other workable way forward out of the quite untenable situation in which we now find ourselves, then, regardless of what "the Russians" or the leaders of the West or anyone else may or may not have done in the past, this is the job which-somehow-will have to -be carried _ through.

DICK

SOULHON

(Auckland).

(This correspondence is now closed.--Ed.)