Speak Softly

Hardly were the negatives dry when the motion pictures of Test Baker at Bikini were rushed to Paris' Paramount Theater. But peace conferees were too busy to bother with the atom bomb. Some 150 delegates saw the film--but they were minor functionaries and military attaches.

In silence, peace's little men watched the instantaneous, incredible mushroom, the dark spurts of universal power, the shimmering bright column of the stem, the wall of ship-engulfing water. In silence, they left the theater.

Said Paris-Presse: "What human voice could speak in that titanic decor as the images flew! After the showing, the delegates returned to Luxembourg Palace, where fragile peace struggles to be born. . . ." The Paris-Matin: "We can't keep ourselves from, thinking of the Apocalypse. It is overwhelming. . . The delegates, despite their diplomatic lack of reaction, were overwhelmed."

At the U.S. State Department's request, the film had so far been sent only to Paris and Moscow. From Tito's Yugoslavia, the Paris showing brought charges of "atomic diplomacy." Cried Belgrade's Politika: a modern version of Theodore Roosevelt's well-remembered counsel, which might be paraphrased as "Speak softly but keep an atom bomb in your hand."

Moscow said nothing. But in San Francisco, Professor Simon Peter Alexandrov, one of the two official Soviet witnesses at Bikini, stepped ashore from the U.S.S. Panamint with startling news. Alexandrov (who works at the Moscow Central Institute of Research in Non-Ferrous Metals) said that his country was preparing to set off its own experimental atom bomb "some place in Russia where it would not be dangerous to people or wildlife (see below) . . . Siberia, in the mountainous area of Russia, in the Arctic or in the islands north of Canada. . . Very likely members of the United Nations will be invited--in the same proportion as to the Crossroads test." "How soon?" asked goggle-eyed reporters. Said the professor: "In the measurable future."

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