Perilous Fission

That frail repository of hope, the United Nations Organization, had faded into the background while worry over the atomic bomb mounted.

Last week U.N.O. was dragged from its nursery and looked at in the glare of new responsibilities. It did not measure up; it never had. That conclusion left two unanswered questions: 1) could U.N.O. ever grow into a force strong enough to bring order to a lawless world? 2) if not, what substitute was feasible?

The Road to Dublin. An old contradiction, plain at San Francisco, became even more inescapable with every month that passed. People everywhere sincerely sought two objectives that were hard to reconcile. They wanted a world organization strong enough to keep peace; they also wanted their own nations to be really sovereign, i.e., strong enough to defend themselves against any "aggressor," including the world organization.

Fifty men & women who thought they knew how to bridge the perilous fission between these ideas met at Dublin, N.H. They were invited by four distinguished citizens: former Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts; Grenville Clark, a New York attorney who did much to sell conscription to the U.S. public before Pearl Harbor; Robert P. Bass, Governor of New Hampshire (1911-13) and Bull-Moose friend of Theodore Roosevelt, and Thomas H. Mahony, a locally prominent Boston lawyer and internationalist.

Almost immediately the peace planners found themselves divided, with some bitterness, into two unequal groups. The issue: Russia. The majority group, led by Clark, insisted that any world federation could not exclude the Soviet Union. A minority of five, led by Roberts and Clarence K. ("Union Now") Streit, wanted a "nuclear union with nations where individual liberty exists, as a step toward the projected world government."

Coffin Nail? The majority's plan had many points of agreement with one proposed by bridge& -peace expert Ely Culbertson.

It would drastically amend or replace the U.N.O. Charter by a constitution setting up a world state with "limited but definite" powers. The chief powers: control of the atomic bomb and all other heavy weapons; the right to inspect industrial and other installations in all member countries to insure that no nation was preparing for war.

For U.N.O.'s weak Assembly the Dublin planners would substitute a strong world legislature. To get around the reluctance of the larger powers to enter a legislature numerically dominated by small nations, the Dublin plan picked up one of Clark's pet ideas: weighted representation, under which voting power would be based on "natural and industrial resources and other relevant factors as well as population."

An executive body responsible to this legislature would take the place of U.N.O.'s veto-bound Security Council. Tribunals would render judgments under laws made by the legislature.

Member nations would run their own domestic affairs; the legislature would be permitted to operate only in the field of international order and security. But the Dublin debate made it clear that the line between domestic and world affairs would be hard to draw.

In Britain and elsewhere similar groups of high-minded, able men, with personal prestige but without much political following, pursued peace along the same paths. Their most telling argument was the atomic bomb. Yet the bomb, raising doubts about almost everything, had not yet broken down popular reliance on national defense. The world-state idea still had to be sold to the world's several, sovereign states.

At week's end there were no signs that the Dublin statement had tapped any deep springs of world statism in the U.S. About all the Dubliners had actually done was to drive one more nail in U.N.O.'s coffin.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.