"Let Us All Thank God"

The world's greatest orator addressed himself this week to the world's most pressing problem. Somehow, it seemed appropriate that Sir Winston Churchill--born in the age of lance-bearing cavalrymen, a captain of two world wars, the statesman who first recognized the A-bomb as the free world's chief deterrent to Communist aggression--should recite the perils and promises of the thermonuclear age.

The hydrogen bomb tests, he told the House of Commons, "increase the chances of world peace more than the chances of war." In one of his most moving performances, the soon-to-retire, old (79) Prime Minister stepped forward to dam a flood of justified concern and political alarm which had hit Britain in the wake of the U.S. thermonuclear experiments.

"We might, I think, reflect for one moment how we should feel ... if it was the Soviet government instead of the U.S. government which was carrying out this series ..." said he. "Before we come to anything else, let us all thank God for sparing us that!"

So long as the U.S. stays ahead of the Communists in the search for more powerful weapons, Churchill continued, the hydrogen bomb will be a deterrent to war. The U.S. advantage also gives "time, though not too much time, to consider the problems which now confront us . . . and to talk them over in their new proportions."

Panic & Delay. Long lines--some said the longest in memory--formed outside Commons hours before Sir Winston strode in, to answer a Laborite motion labeling the thermonuclear bomb a "grave threat to civilization" and seeking a Big Three meeting. Sensational left-wing papers fed the public outcry with near-hysterical headlines. Trying to stave off the panic, Churchill at first nourished it last week by admitting: "We have not got [the facts]." But then he contradicted himself ("I am in almost hourly correspondence with the Government of the U.S."), and solicited from Washington a stream of confidential cables providing all the thermonuclear information that the U.S. could release under the terms of the McMahon (atomic security) Act. Then, in Commons, Churchill used it with devastating effect.

Pale-faced Clement Attlee was first on his feet. "Once there is a war in the modern age, in the last resort, any weapon will be used," he said. "There is no guarantee that in some country, at some time, there may not arise to power a fanatic who hated the human race or believed that all civilization might be destroyed." Equality of Annihilation. The old, familiar figure stumped up to the dispatch box. With a twinkle in his eye, Sir Winston threw in his well-assembled rebuttal. "I cannot feel that this is a day of tribulation," he said. "We are all naturally concerned with the prodigious experiments in the Pacific, but ... we would rather have them carried out there than in Siberia."

"The hydrogen bomb," said he, "carries us into dimensions which have never confronted practical human thought and have been confined to the realms of fantasy and imagination . . . We do not know what the Soviets are doing inside their vast ocean of land, [but] it does not follow that the H-bomb is particularly favorable to them. Their enormous . . . territory, which seemed to limit the atom bomb ... is no longer likely to give the same immunity to the far wider effects of the hydrogen bomb and the clouds of radioactive dust and vapors to which it gives rise."

The result, said Churchill, is "a certain element of equality of annihilation. Strange as it may seem--and I beg you not to disdain it--it is to the universality of potential destruction that I feel we may have to look with hope, and even with confidence."

Secret Treaty. The Socialists laughed --for a moment. Then Churchill dropped a bomb of his own on the opposition. In 1943, Churchill said, he and President Roosevelt made a secret atomic agreement. Its most important clause: "We will not use [this agency] against third parties, without each other's consent."

The House of Commons reverberated. Churchill calmly dropped another bomb. The Labor government, he charged, had thrown away the advantages inherent in this deal when it took office.

Attlee exploded: "We did not abandon any of these agreements . . . We carried them out." But the old man rumbled on: "When I visited the U.S. two years ago, I showe this document to Senator Mc-Mahon ... He told me: 'If I had seen this agreement, there would have been no McMahon Act.' " The House rocked in amazement. "Resign!" shouted Laborites. Beefy Laborite M.P. Bessie Braddock bawled: "Why don't you get out?" But Sir Winston just plowed on through the fertile soil of logic.

Labor's request for a Big Three meeting was all right, he said, but only on the condition that "immediate" does not imply "action at an unsuitable time." But this time he retreated from his own earlier (May 1953) plea for a "parley at the summit." "It seems to me," he said, "with the Geneva Conference imminent . . . you could hardly pick a more illchosen moment ... for a meeting of heads of states. We must certainly see what happens there before attempting what is, after all, a very unusual reserve procedure."

Windup. Disappointed Laborites cried "shame" at this "concession" to U.S. views. But Sir Winston, undaunted, carried the fight to them. He chided the neutralists: "It is a delusion to suppose that a declaration of our neutrality would make us immune to danger from Russia." "

If the United States withdrew from Europe altogether--as well she might--with her three-quarter circle of hydrogen bases already spread around the globe, she would face Russia alone," said Sir Winston, "as she certainly could. I cannot doubt that war in those circumstances would be nearer than it is today, when the anxiety of the United States--to their abiding honor--is so largely centered on the freedom and safety of Western Europe and the British Isles."

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