Heads Up!

Last week a heartening number and variety of people dared to look directly at the atom's horrid glare. Rose-tinted goggles were still preferred, but at least the world was no longer hiding its head in the atomized dirt of New Mexico and Hiroshima.

Mumbling Through. Russia's haughty silence on the bomb was broken by A. Sokolov of Moscow's New Times. He took a crack at "atom democracy." meaning those in the U.S. who thought a monopoly on atomic bomb production would further the U.S. conception of democracy.

Canada's soldier-scientist. General Andrew G. McNaughton, chairman of the Joint Canadian-U.S. Defense Board, said cheerily that defenses against the atom bomb were "already clearly in sight." At the London conference U.S. diplomats had been reluctant to talk about the bomb. When the subject came up in private conversation, they would say something like: "Of course, the world knows that the U.S. would never. . . ." Such sentences usually trailed off into inaudible mumbles.

Also in London, Edward R. Stettinius chirped that subcommittees of the United Nations Organization Preparatory Commission were "making good progress" in discussions of atomic-bomb control. At best, these discussions were necessarily academic.

Plain Talk. This chitchatty approach to reality had some appalling aspects. It was time somebody got down to cases. President Harry S. Truman finally did. In a careful message to Congress:

P: He called for a national policy, not only on the bomb but on all phases of atomic energy, to be laid down by Congress and administered by a presidential commission.

P: He opened the door to private enterprise in the controlled development and use of atomic energy under U.S. license.

P: He proposed immediate, formal negotiations for international control, significantly added that preliminary international talk was already going on.

A fourth Truman point was most important: "Scientific opinion appears to be practically unanimous that the essential theoretical knowledge upon which the discovery is based is already widely known. There is also substantial agreement that foreign research can come abreast of our own present theoretical knowledge in time."

That paragraph changed everything. It meant that the President of the U.S. had taken the whole atomic-bomb discussion out of the unreal context of "Shall we share the secret of the bomb with the Russians, or shall we keep it?" The secret about the secret was that there was no lasting secret.

Remember Galileo! Truman's stand coincided with a gathering revolt of U.S. scientists. An important array of them feared that a U.S. policy based on illusions of secrecy might destroy the kind of free research which had made atomic fission possible. Even the sort of control recommended by the President would inevitably touch fields of research far beyond the military uses of the atom. Atomic development could not be totally controlled, nationally or internationally, without also controlling a large part of normal, peacetime scientific effort.

Still bound by Army security rules, a group of savants who had worked on the bomb, calling themselves "The Atomic Scientists of Chicago," issued a statement:

"The greatest secret in connection with the atomic bomb was the fact that it was possible to develop it successfully. The Smyth [War Department] report has made public much information and revealed the most essential secret by describing along what road the development has to move. . . . Once this is known, a staff of technically trained men can follow any one of the roads indicated by the Smyth report and will then, step by step, discover what we have discovered. . . . It took us . . . three years to achieve the transfer from the laboratory to the battlefield. Other countries should be able to produce atomic bombs in two to five years."

This attitude was not confined to U.S. scientists. Wrote the science editor of London's News Chronicle: "The cataclysm of Hiroshima has shocked the scientists into revolt. . . . Atomic energy [is] being used now as a pawn of power politics. They [the scientists] do not disclaim responsibility; they insist upon taking it. . . . They want a positive voice in public affairs."

Dr. Niels Bohr, famed Danish scientist who helped develop the bomb, gave ample proof that "the secret" was a fleeting asset. He told the world that current U.S. production of the essential element was 6.6 pounds of uranium 235 per day.

Once the secret of actual manufacture was out, the sole remaining U.S. advantage would be the exclusive possession of the vast and costly facilities, and of the engineering know-how.

The Time Factor. Scientific opinion notwithstanding, U.S. public opinion was stridently against any real surrender of the U.S. edge in bomb production. Yet no one believed that the U.S. could obtain enforceable agreements without putting its atomic cards on the world table.

Walter Lippmann argued that the more quickly and thoroughly the information was disseminated, the easier it would be to keep track of other nations' progress. Ely Culbertson, the bridge expert turned international prophet, had a daring plan. The nub: give a beefed-up international organization (not U.N.O.) surveillance over atomic and heavy-weapon production, plus enough atomic and other armed force to quell any potential aggressor.

Whatever the finally chosen course, the U.S. advantage would probably not last more than two or three years. With every month that passed without a binding agreement, U.S. bargaining power decreased.

"We Must . . ." So long as Big Three relations were in their current state, nobody could put much faith in effective international control of the atomic or any other danger. Yet the hope persisted, if only because there was no other hope.

Said Professor Henry deW. Smyth, who had written the War Department's principal report on the bomb: "If men, working together, can solve the mysteries of the universe, they can also solve the problem of human relations on this planet. Not only in science, but now in all human relations, we must work together with free minds."*

*For other news on the atomic bomb, see Religion.

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