Russia And The Atom

The Russian proposal for international control of atomic energy is profoundly disheartening. There is revealed in it neither the smallest understanding of the real imperatives which the atom imposes upon the contemporary world not any disposition to accept the limitations of sovereignty which are indispensable to the establishment of any effective world system for peaceful atomic development. It is an obsolete and sterile formula, often tried and invariable found ineffectual, for the outlawing of ordinary weapons from the crossbow to poison gas, and wholly unsuited to the "outlawing" of so catastrophic a weapon as the atomic bomb, which has metamorphosed warfare into a form of mass suicide. All that Mr. Gromyko can be said to have done by introducing this proposal to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission is to open us a tragic visit of procrastination in which debate may go on interminably while mankind prepares its own immolations. It is an interesting paradox that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics should have set before the commission a proposal envisaging rigid retention of private and national property rights in atomic resources, while the capitalist United States should have proposed a far-reaching international socialization not only of all fissionable materials but of atomic productions as well. In this, we think, lies the fundamental deficiency of the the Soviet plan. For the plain fact is that a fatal atomic armaments race can be avoided only by vesting in some supranational body (whether the American -proposed atomic development authority or some other) absolute ownership of all the sources and production facilities of atomic energy and power to license private or national use of atomic materials for specified non dangerous purposes. If there is private or national ownership of sources and production facilities, no nation will be able to live in security and every nation will be impelled to come as close as possible to evasion of international agreements. There will be no way of knowing that a plant ostensibly built to produce peaceful power is not secretly intended for the manufacture of weapons. There will be no way to tell whether uranium is being mined for beneficent or for bellicose purposes. Effective inspection will be a practical impossibility because it will necessarily be concerned with intent more than with actuality. If ownership of the uranium itself is vested in a world authority, no such dilemma will arise, for the mere mining of uranium by a national operator, regardless of intent, will be illegal. As the noted atomic physicist, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, has put it, "things like the building of power plants, which make fissionable materials, things like the separation of isotopes to get explosive materials, these are jobs which are too easily diverted, too trigger-happy to be left in national hands." In place of the security which could come from socialization of all the means of atomic production, Mr. Gromyko has suggested the feeble protection of a system of sanctions, not very different presumably from the "condign punishments" recommended by Mr. Baruch. The inescapable fact about such penalties is that they can be invoked only by turning to the very recourse they are designed to avoid - atomic war. Safety can be found not in pious renunciation of the use of atomic weapons but only in preventing production and possession of them. Once produced and put into national hands, they are inevitably explosive. That the Russians should have resented the chary provisions of the Baruch plan respecting retention of our store of atomic bombs is understandable enough. we have no quarrel with their insistence that the manufacture of bombs be stopped and that all existing bombs be destroyed after an agreement has been signed. But to advance these proposals without the suggestion of anything constructive is the emptiest sort of shadow boxing. The United Nations Commission will get nowhere if its members confine themselves to submitting proposals patently unacceptable to their fellow members. Perhaps it is to the small nations that we must now look for a realistic approach to the atomic problem. The magnitude of atomic energy demands magnitude of imagination and invention in channeling it for the benefit of mankind. New devices consonant with the atomic age, not antiquated conventions, must be contrived to contain a force so imperiously dynamic.